Sometimes you just have to read a book because of its title. This was certainly the case when I decided I wanted to read Prisoner of the Vampires of Mars (1908-1909), by Gustave Le Rouge!

Like, the title has everything! Mars! Vampires! Prisoners! How could I not read it? I put the book on one of my holiday wishlists, and my roommate got it for me this past Christmas. It took me some time to read it, an admittedly my expectations were not particularly high, but I ended up enjoying the book immensely! Let’s take a look at the book, without major spoilers, below.

The first thing I learned when I cracked the book open is that it is in fact a combination of two novels that Le Rouge wrote, Prisonnier de la Planète Mars (1908), and La Guerre des Vampires (1909). And the two novels combined represent some of the strangest stuff you’ll ever read, a veritable gumbo of unusual ideas cobbled together from a lot of familiar sources.

The singular writing mirrors the singular personality who wrote it. From the introduction to this University of Nebraska Press edition, written by William Ambler, we learn that Le Rouge was an avid anticapitalist, and even though he wrote many successful books, he took pride in signing over all the financial rights for his works and getting almost nothing for them. His first book, The Billionaires’ Conspiracy (1900), was an early story about mechanical men trying to take over the world, led by a diabolical billionaire. The word “robot” had not even been created yet, and would not be until 1920!

Though perhaps ahead of his time with some ideas, he was not averse to borrowing from classic works for others. This is nowhere more obvious than his 1903 novel, titled Le sous-marin Jules Verne. In Prisoner of the Vampires of Mars, Le Rouge clearly draws inspiration from a number of the literary greats of his time, including H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe, and probably Bram Stoker for the whole idea of incorporating vampires! (Curiously, one might assume that Le Rouge borrowed from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars, but that book came out in 1912, after Prisoner.) The book is a wild ride through a variety of ideas and scenarios and one never quite knows where it is going next, to its credit.

The first book begins with the French engineer Robert Darvel running into his old friend Ralph Pitcher and sharing his recent troubles. Darvel has a dream of contacting Mars, and managed to finance a scheme to contact the red planet with giant drawings written across the Siberian plains. Cleverly, his original plan involves showing geometric figures, symbols that would be universally understood by any sentient being. However, the funding for his plan is cut abruptly, and Darvel ends up in London, penniless, and unable to marry the love of his life, Alberte Teremond, due to her wealthy father’s objections.

You might assume that Ralph Pitcher is merely a narrative conveyance, and would serve no further purpose in the story and you would be wrong! But in the short term, Darvel receives a cryptic message while spending time with Pitcher, offering him no more information than an address and the possibility of a business opportunity.

Incidentally, this book won me over relatively early with a conversation between Darvel and Pitcher about wildlife conservation, somewhat remarkable for the early 1900s:

“… we are exterminating birds, large and small, without mercy. Wherever the railroad and the electric light spread, it’s a massacre. Even migratory birds — swans, wild ducks, even albatrosses — are not spared. Do you know that at certain times of the year, lighthouse keepers find hundreds of birds at the foot of their granite towers, birds who, fascinated by the glow of these mighty lamps visible from fifty miles away, smash their skulls against the thick glass of the lantern?”

These remarks are made by two characters who are admittedly hunters, but draw a distinction between fairly hunting game individually and the systematic slaughter of entire species! Perhaps you can see why I immediately took a liking to this novel.

Continuing the story: Darvel travels to the address, and finds himself in the presence of the wealthy Brahmin Ardavena, an Indian mystic who presents the most unusual offer: he asks Darvel to travel with him to India, and there the two men will join their respective abilities, mysticism and science, to unlock capabilities undreamed of! Darvel takes the offer and is whisked off in secrecy to a well-furnished laboratory on the other side of the world.

Working tirelessly, Darvel learns some of the mysteries of Indian mysticism and combines it with his engineering knowhow, and finally presents Ardavena with a machine that can channel the mystical energy of many combined wills to accomplish almost anything — even sending a person to Mars! Ardavena immediately betrays him, and opts ironically to get rid of Darvel by giving him his wildest dream: a (one-way) ticket to Mars in a psychically-driven capsule!

From here, it becomes quite the lost world type adventure. Darvel struggles at first to find his way around, and encounters some incredibly bizarre wildlife:

Try to imagine the crude appearance of a human face made out of transparent and viscous gelatin.

Its lidless eyes had the dull, glacial expression of an octopus. But its nose, with its quivering nares, and its enormous mouth, fitted with black teeth, gave it an expression of melancholy ferocity and scorn.

This fantastical face was surrounded on all sides by thousands of white tentacles that the engineer had at first taken to be sea worms.

But the biggest threat comes in the form of a race of vampires, bat-like and the size of men, that nearly do Robert in before he realizes that they are vulnerable to fire. He chases them off for a night and continues his explorations, only to find a village of childish human-like Martians, simple-minded and helpless against the vampires, and he vows to help them.

Here, we get a story that feels very strongly like the Eloi-Morlock conflict of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine; the villager who helps Robert the most is even named Eeeoys! And Darvel vows to defeat the vampires and help the villagers.

Surprisingly, the narrative flips back from time to time to Darvel’s friends on Earth who set out to find what has happened to him. After her father dies, Miss Alberte takes over his business, and with her vast financial resources enlists Pitcher and others to track down the missing engineer. Here again, I was surprised by Le Rouge’s perspective: he portrays Alberte as an extremely intelligent and strong woman who has no problem dealing with the ruthless man’s world of business. As she says herself, of the associate who abandoned her and her father when their financial outlook was bad:

“Now they are all coming back, seeing who can be the most despicably flattering; the most insolent have become the most servile. They imagine that they can easily take advantage of a young woman with no business experience.

“They are mistaken.

“My father did not leave me just his millions. I have also inherited his insight and his determination. I have already taken all the necessary steps to protect my interests.”

Miss Alberte and her associates manage to determine that Darvel has indeed ended up on Mars, and they set out to find a way to rescue him. They recommence observations of Mars, and remarkably detect Morse code signals from the planet, presenting Darvel’s story, which is the explanation for how his narrative has been released to the public.

The first book ends on a cliffhanger, however, with Darvel captured by the vampires, and his messages stopping abruptly.

The second book begins by following the continued efforts of Alberte and her colleagues to learn more about Robert’s fate. Their efforts are haunted, however, by a being which only a blind native servant can sense, which he describes as a djinn. But, it turns out, is an invisible species of vampire, completely distinct from the first.

Yes, it turns out that Prisoner of the Vampires of Mars is also a story about invisibility! I did not know this when I asked for the book! The invisibility is of the “colors not found in nature” sort found in many science fiction stories: when the team uses an X-ray detector, they are able to see the hideous tentacled vampire in the flesh, so to speak. It seems almost certain that Le Rouge was inspired by H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man here.

I am attempting to describe the plot in only the most general way possible, to avoid spoiling it for anyone. All that I will say about the remainder of the plot is that the stories of Darvel and Alberte come back together in a spectacular manner, and that Darvel comes up against a powerful being that rules all of Mars from afar, and this is one that has to be read to be believed!

I really enjoyed Prisoner, much more than I expected. It isn’t quite as bad as many other similar novels of its era, which have an unpleasant taste of colonialism and racial superiority. In fact, Le Rouge leans somewhat the other way. In describing one of the most trusted servants of Alberte, Ralph Pitcher comments, after noting her kindness and intelligence,

“She’s an example of what the Arabs could become, if one appealed to their reason and their heart, instead of robbing and mistreating them, which happens unfortunately still much too often.”

Still a rather condescending statement, but for its time seems quite advanced in acknowledging the equality of other races and their mistreatment by colonial powers. The book is definitely not perfect when it comes to these issues, but as someone who has read through the stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs and others, I appreciated the more enlightened tone of Le Rouge. I also appreciated its less violent attitude towards other people — early in the book, Ralph Pitcher describes how he and a colleague were taken prisoner by Buddhist monks for no discernable reason, and how they made their escape while taking care not to kill any of their captors.

Overall, Prisoner of the Vampires of Mars is a remarkably imaginative and fun novel. It is an early classic of science fiction, before the term “science fiction” even existed! I’m very curious to read The Billionaires’ Conspiracy now, and that may be the subject of a future post.