SFTB 6.3: “The Bubbles” (“Les Bulles”) by Julia Verlanger (Eliane Grimaître)

“Les Bulles,” was first published in 1956 in the French SF magazine, Fiction #35.

One of our favorite categories for the Stories from the Borderland project is the early—often first-published—Weird Tale by an author who went on to become best known for more conventional science fiction. Since our return this September, we have presented such stellar examples as Julian May’s “Dune Roller” and “Greenface” by James H. Schmitz. With this installment of SFTB, our 29th since we began a little over nine years ago, we offer a particularly colorful specimen of this type, a story that kicked off a prestigious career in speculative literature. Moreover, although “Les Bulles” is nearly 70 years old, it not only remains fresh—it reads as if it were written as a commentary on the events of our own time. A terrible, terrifying commentary. And yet, even for those few readers who are already familiar with “The Bubbles,” it will almost certainly be the only work by Julia Verlanger they have read: even though she died almost 40 years ago, it remains the sole example of her work translated into English.

As some readers are likely aware, I have spent over a decade working to translate the major fiction of Jean Ray, the so-called Belgian Poe. Thus far, I have translated, edited, and annotated four story collections and one novel. I also edited and annotated the first US edition of the late Iain White’s excellent translation of Malpertuis, Ray’s justly celebrated first novel, regarded by many as the masterpiece of his oeuvre. Wakefield Press has published these, and I have completed a sixth translation, along with 20-plus pages of endnotes and an afterword, which should come out in 2025. With that volume, we will have made most of Ray’s major books available in English, although his oeuvre still contains more than 1,000 works in English and Dutch, including many excellent stories and at least one other worthy novel. Jean Ray died 60 years ago, and he is only one of many authors who wrote in French whose works still await the attention of an Anglophone audience. One might expect this to be otherwise, given that translation from French to English is one of the easier linguistic transitions to make. Nonetheless, despite the vast importance of Jules Verne (1828–1905), and the more recent influence of Metal Hurlant, many French-language spec-lit authors remain all but unknown in English, represented in translation by only a few works, if that.

Penguin UK paperback cover of The Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle, published in 1966 as “Monkey Planet.” Art by Hans Bellmer (1951).

How many readers are aware that the entire Planet of the Apes franchise began with the1963 novel La Planète des Singes by Pierre Boulle (1912–1994)? Who remembers the 1970 novel The Ice People, by René Barjavel (1911–1985), which was translated from his work La Nuit des Temps, originally published in 1968. The 1973 animated film Fantastic Planet (La Planète Sauvage) has a acquired a dedicated following among English speakers, but the 1957 novel upon which it is based, Oms en Série, by Stefan Wul (1922–2003), did not receive an English translation until 2010, four decades after the film’s release. These authors are among the few Francophone spec-lit authors who have any substantial presence in English.

Now we come to Julia Verlanger, real name Éliane Grimaître, née Éliane Taïeb (1929–1985). From 1956 to 1963, “Julia Verlanger” published a steady stream of stories in magazines such as Ailleurs, Fiction, Galaxie, and Satellite, beginning with “Les Bulles” in Fiction #35. Nota bene that even though she wrote under a pseudonym, she still employed a distinctly female name at this point. Nonetheless, even working midcentury, her work was a hit with the Francophone spec-lit audience, and for seven years readers waited eagerly for the next Verlanger story to pop up. And then, as mysteriously as her output had begun, it stopped. To be sure, this was a period when publishing venues for spec-lit diminished in France.

What had become of this promising author, this unlikely reader-favorite? No one seemed to know, and those who did kept silent. That silence reigned until 1976, when the French publisher Le Masque, best known for crime fiction, surprised French readers with not one but two whole Verlanger novels: Les Portes Sans Retour (The Doors of No Return) and La Flûte de Verre Froid (The Cold Glass Flute). Also that year, the Fleuve Noir imprint published L'Autoroute Sauvage (Savage Highway), by one Gilles Thomas, as part of its beloved Anticipation collection. This novel was the beginning of a popular post-apocalyptic trilogy, a subgenre that still remained something of a novelty at the time, especially outside the U.S. Curiously, 20 years after her first published story, Verlanger/Tâïeb had finally begun using a male pseudonym, though only for part of her oeuvre. The main purpose of her pseudonyms appears to have been to protect her privacy rather than to obscure her sex.

This recommenced, even more prolific output continued until Éliane Tâïeb’s death in 1985, with sometimes as many as four novels a year published under the Gilles Thomas pseudonym. In 1986 her husband, Jean-Pierre Tâïeb, created the prestigious Prix Julia Verlanger. This is an international award, administered by the Foundation de France, and is awarded to works of both science fiction and fantasy. Today, it is a juried award. In recent years, the award has repeatedly gone to English-language authors, including Tade Thompson in 2019, Martha Wells in 2020, Mary Robinette Kowal in 2021, and P. Djeli Clark in 2022.

La Flûte de Verre Froid (The Cold Glass Flute), published 1976 in paperback by Le Masque.

Out of the entire oeuvre of this respected—even beloved—author, only her first story, “Les Bulles”/“The Bubbles,” has been translated into English, and this story provides the subject for the current installment of Stories from the Borderland. Granted, it’s a goddamn corker, and it’s been translated at least half a dozen times, including twice each into English and Russian. This is more than any of her other works, although half a dozen titles, including novels, have been published in Spanish. Other translations include Finnish, German, Greek, and Hungarian. But just this one story in English, although as I said above, it’s a real good one.

“The Bubbles” first appeared in English in 1977, in the anthology Travelling towards Epsilon, edited by Maxim Jakubowski, who also translated the story. A second English translation appeared just last year, in a new anthology entitled Continuum: French Science Fiction Short Stories, edited by Annabelle Dolidon and Tessa Sermet, with the latter credited as the translator. This new anthology remains obscure and does not yet appear in The Internet Speculative Fiction Database. And that’s it: the entire representation of one of the most important French spec-lit authors from the latter half of the twentieth century is represented in English by only one twice-translated story: her first. Meanwhile, Wikipedia lists her countryman Jules Verne as the second most translated author in the world, significantly trailing Agatha Christie but slightly above Shakespeare.

Nonetheless, one is more than none, and as I have already written twice above, “The Bubbles” is a particularly good one—as well as a particularly Weird one: precisely what Michael Bukowski and I look for here in Stories from the Borderland. And once again, it illustrated the phenomenon of an author whose first published story was a great Weird Tale, but who primarily wrote more conventional science fiction afterward. Verlanger’s examples suggests that this phenomenon is not limited to English-language authors.

The cover of Travelling towards Epsilon (New English Library, 1977) which contained the first English translation of “The Bubbles,” by editor Maxim Jakubowski. Cover art by Christos Kondeatis.

“The Bubbles” is also a rather simple and straightforward story, despite its twists. The protagonist is Monica, a 16-year-old orphan who lives in solitary isolation after the collapse of civilization caused by the bubbles, iridescent and indestructible. By some unknown means, the bubbles can sense the presence of human beings, and will rapidly and inexorably descend upon any person in their range (this story predates by over a decade Patrick McGoohan’s 1967 television series The Prisoner, with a more famous malevolent bubble, its iconic guardian Rover, although the first English translation postdates the show by an equal period). Contact between a human and a bubble leads to one of only two outcomes: the death and complete dissolution of the victim, or the person’s transformation into an “Other”: a mutant with multiple arms, or mouths, or eyes, or some other grotesque variation.

Monica, like other survivors, is able to continue living safely in her sealed home thanks to her robotic servants and the “meat vats” and “vegetable racks” that provide her food. Outside, the Others and the bubbles go about their inscrutable business. Monica derives some hope from rare television broadcasts that discuss efforts to defeat humanity’s spherical scourge. Her dream is that things will go back to the way they were pre-bubbles, though she herself is too young to have any direct memories of this time.

French poster for Forbidden Planet (1956).

As strange, grim, and futuristic as it is, “The Bubbles” is essentially a princess-in-the-tower fairy tale. I suspect a specific influence from Forbidden Planet (1956), Fred M. Wilcox’s loose science fiction film adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. A French version, Planète Interdite, appeared in August of the same year, followed by Verlanger’s debut in October. Monica’s interactions with the Frank and Eric, the first men from outside she ever meets, strongly recall Altaira’s experiences in Forbidden Planet, and the reader is likely to feel a certain justified trepidation on her behalf. And this is where “The Bubbles” takes its darkest turn. Verlanger’s story, foreboding throughout, offers a brutal twist, elegantly served. Everything comes together at the end, and the reader is likely to say “No” out loud. Princess-in-the-tower, but no happy ending.

The bubbles themselves stand as excellent examples of The Weird. Verlanger briefly offers a possibility for their origin: perhaps they derive from excessive radiation released into the environment. This explanation would place the bubbles alongside the monsters in such science fiction-horror films as Fiend without a Face (1958) and Island of Terror (1966), but both of these postdate “The Bubbles.” This premise bears a looser resemblance to that of the 1958 film The Crawling Eye, which was based on a 1956–1957 ITV serial, The Trollenberg Terror. All these works derive from the same era, but I doubt any influence on or from Verlanger’s story. I suspect instead that we are observing the action of the zeitgeist, as by this time much of the public had grown suspicious of “our friend the atom.” Ultimately, Verlanger leaves her reader to decide whether the bubbles derive from radiation, outer space, inner space, the hollow earth, or the fourth dimension—all established staging locations for science fiction investigations by that time. One other possible connection is the 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which the pods drift down from space. Jack Finney’s original story “The Body Snatchers,” which provided the basis for the film, appeared in Collier’s as a three-part serial in late 1954. However, as neither story nor film became available in French until the 1960s, I once again suggest the operation of the zeitgeist or the collective unconscious.

A 1986 special Julia Verlanger issue of French magazine Weird. Cover art by Gérard Basiletti.

Michael and I originally selected “The Bubbles” as a candidate for Stories from the Borderland in 2017, and if I had written this essay then, my commentary on the story’s historical context and relevance would probably have concluded above, but things have changed since then, haven’t they? Anyone reading this story today will find it difficult not to see a prophetic allegory of the still-ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the accelerating rise of neofascist totalitarian governments in the United States and many other nations around the world. As with the best allegories, Verlanger’s story also lends itself to multiple interpretations, including, I recognize, those of the anti-vaxxer community and other proponents of irrational and dangerous science-denialism. Of course, the very nature of conspiracy-theorism is that all narratives are either twisted to fit the ideology or rejected as “part of” the conspiracy itself: confirmation bias taken to the same extreme levels as in fundamentalist religion. With that in mind, one can also read the mutagenic effect of the bubbles as an allegory for the mainstreaming of the anti-vaxxers and such outré bad craziness as QAnon, which led one of its mentally-twisted victims to launch an armed invasion of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant in order to “rescue” the children he imagined were chained in a cannibal slaughterhouse in the establishment’s nonexistent basement. Let us also make note of the genuinely prophetic portrayal of the role of television in “The Bubbles.”

Little surprise then that Verlanger’s story was just retranslated and republished in English. What is surprising is that we have here a major French science fiction author who work is known only in English from two translations of her 1956 debut story, neither of which is widely available. Michael Bukowski and I hope that this essay and his drawing might inspire a translator (and publisher) to tackle some larger portion of Verlanger’s oeuvre, regardless of whether or not it continued deeper into Weird Fiction. We hope that some of you will examine the works of other authors who wrote in French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Greek, and many other languages who remain minimally represented in English, if at all. What Weird gems might we find there? In the meantime, please enjoy Michael’s images of both “une bulle” and one of its victims.

Stories from the Borderland will return in two weeks with a story by one of my personal favorite science fiction authors that first appeared in a seminal horror anthology from almost 45 years ago. Whistle the answer, my lad, and a prize may come to you.