Le Docteur Lerne, sous-dieu ("Doctor Lerne, Demi-God") is a fantasy novel by the French writer Maurice Renard, published in 1908.
Inspired by The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells, Renard adds a significant twist: the narrator himself finds himself the object of a transplant experiment by a mad surgeon, Doctor Lerne. In a preface to the novel, Renard dedicated it to Wells. [1] The book has been translated into numerous languages. [2]
The novel is now in the public domain.
An English translation of the book was published in New York by The Macaulay Company in 1923, as New Bodies for Old.
An adaptation by Brian Stableford was published in 2010 under the title Doctor Lerne. [3]
An adaptation by Jean-Daniel Verhaeghe, under the title L'étrange château du docteur Lerne, was broadcast on French television on Antenne 2, on December 28, 1983. [4] [5]
Marguerite Yourcenar was a Belgian-born French novelist and essayist who became a US citizen in 1947. Winner of the Prix Femina and the Erasmus Prize, she was the first woman elected to the Académie Française, in 1980. She was nominated for the 1965 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Arsène Lupin is a fictional gentleman thief and master of disguise created in 1905 by French writer Maurice Leblanc. The character was first introduced in a series of short stories serialized in the magazine Je sais tout. The first story, "The Arrest of Arsène Lupin", was published on 15 July 1905.
Fantastique is a French term for a literary and cinematic genre and mode that is characterized by the intrusion of supernatural elements into the realistic framework of a story, accompanied by uncertainty about their existence. The concept comes from the French literary and critical tradition, and is distinguished from the word "fantastic", which is associated with the broader term of fantasy in the English literary tradition. According to the literary theorist Tzvetan Todorov, the fantastique is distinguished from the marvellous by the hesitation it produces between the supernatural and the natural, the possible and the impossible, and sometimes between the logical and the illogical. The marvellous, on the other hand, appeals to the supernatural in which, once the presuppositions of a magical world have been accepted, things happen in an almost normal and familiar way. The genre emerged in the 18th century and knew a golden age in 19th century Europe, particularly in France and Germany.
Noël Corbu is best known as a former restaurateur in the Southern French village of Rennes-le-Château who, between 1955 and 1962 circulated the story that the 19th-century French priest Bérenger Saunière discovered the treasure of Blanche of Castile. Corbu changed his story about Saunière in 1962.
Maurice Renard was a French writer.
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Louis Pauwels was a French journalist and writer.
Harry Dickson is a fictional pulp detective, born in America, educated in London, and was called The American Sherlock Holmes. He has appeared in almost 200 pulp magazines published in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and France.
Numa Sadoul (born 7 May 1947, Brazzaville, French Equatorial Africa is a French writer, actor, and director, who has been a resident of France since 1966.
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Pierre Mac Orlan, sometimes written MacOrlan, was a French novelist and songwriter.
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French science fiction is a substantial genre of French literature. It remains an active and productive genre which has evolved in conjunction with anglophone science fiction and other French and international literature.
Jean Arfel, better known by his pen name Jean Madiran, was a French far-right nationalist and a traditionalist Catholic writer who was born in Libourne. He has also used the pen name Jean-Louis Lagor.
The year 1908 was marked, in science fiction, by the following events.
Henri Bachelin was a 20th-century French writer.
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L'Homme truqué is a short novel by Maurice Renard, initially published in March 1921 in the magazine Je sais tout. Regularly republished in France during the 20th and 21st centuries, it also benefits from numerous publications abroad.
Scientific marvelous is a literary genre that developed in France from the end of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century. Akin today to science fiction, this literature of scientific imagination revolves around key themes such as mad scientists and their extraordinary inventions, lost worlds, exploration of the solar system, catastrophes and the advent of supermen.