Altergott on Oancea (2025)

In Dangerous Creations, Ana Oancea draws on novels by Jules Verne, Albert Robida, Émile Zola, and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam to study the development of a fictional trope in fin-de-siècle French literature: the male inventor. The inventor character stereotypically poses a threat to establishment scientists due to his creativity, unconventional methods, and motivations. Oancea considers the rise of the inventor character as a response to questions of French national identity raised by political conflicts such as the Franco-Prussian War, imperial expansion, and American capitalism embodied by the likes of Thomas Edison. By bringing together works of science fiction, naturalism, and decadence, Oancea accounts for the ways in which depictions of future French worlds are also inflected by literary genre conventions. Whereas authors like Verne use the adventure plot to convey the power of science to explain nature’s mysteries, others such as Robida and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam focus more on the ethical costs of scientific progress on society. Ultimately, Oancea argues that the inventor character functions as a “versatile signifier” (6), one that offers self-reflexive commentary on the impact of scientific progress on French national identity. 

In chapters one and two, Oancea focuses on a subset of seven “inventor novels” within Verne’s Voyages extraordinaires. Characters showcase the responsibilities and methods of “official scientists” (16), such as Professor Aronnax from Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1870) who attempts to teach various characters how to collect and classify specimens. The parallel figure of the engineer emerges as a meaningful force for change, whose problem-solving is aimed at improving living conditions. In contrast, inventor characters profit from “private science” (49), the undertaking of individualistic research projects to satisfy personal curiosity instead of serving the greater good. In Les cinq cents millions de la Bégum (1879), Verne maps this contrast onto nationalist concerns, using “moral purity” (34) and the hygienic success of Professor Sarassin’s utopian France-Ville to imagine a French triumph over the rival German inventor, Professor Schultze, and his industrial city of Stahlstadt. Oancea demonstrates that the individualistic pursuit of science by the inventor (or mad genius) is “explicitly depicted as anti-French” (67), whereas Verne’s establishment scientist characters are glorified because “they have the correct moral attitude, they represent the contemporary understanding of scientists’ responsibilities, and they possess a deep national allegiance” (84).

In chapter three, Oancea draws a sharp contrast between Verne’s inventor novels and Albert Robida’s trilogy of novels, Le vingtième siècle (1883–92), the first novel of which bears the same name. Robida takes a pessimistic outlook on the widespread, uncritical adoption of technology and casts science as a means of oppression rather than liberation (96). The more connected and informed the populous, and the more efficient their consumption of the arts, the lower their quality of life. The second novel, La guerre au vingtième siècle (1887), exposes the horrors of a possible future in which war is the driving force behind scientific and technological advancement. Oancea posits that France’s fictional, continual war serves as a metaphor for scientific progress itself (120). Following Verne, the inventor reemerges in Robida’s third novel, La vie électrique (1892) as the villain to be blamed for the decline of society. Robida’s trilogy warns that rampant consumerism and inventor celebrity may obscure the public’s capacity for critical evaluation, which can have devastating consequences on French society. 

Chapter four explores technology’s characterization within the naturalist works of Émile Zola, notably from the working-class perspective. Whereas technology was often cast as diabolical or omnipotent in Zola’s earlier novels, his later novel Travail (1901) responds more directly to Verne and Robida by pairing an inventor with a socialist philosopher. Although the protagonists strive to improve living conditions and bring about a more just world through technological innovation, Zola’s novel ends with a skeptical outlook on the liberating power of technology. Oancea uses Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the carnival to read the novel’s final fête du travail, suggesting that “[the machines’] naturalist past threatens to break through” (169).

Chapter five focuses on Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s decadent novel, L’Ève future (1886), which goes a step beyond the fictional inventors of Verne, Robida, and Zola to engage with the real-life legend of Thomas Edison that was circulating in the press at the time. At the same time, Oancea draws attention to the triumph of the literary over the scientific: not only do the inventor’s rhetorical powers provide an additional source of superiority, manipulation, and control, but Villiers’ decidedly literary and metaphysical depictions of Edison’s science have a longer shelf life than precise explanations of cutting-edge research that would have become obsolete shortly after publication. In Oancea’s words, the “inventor’s purposeful representation of his technology as magical is the aspect of Edison’s modern legend that separates him from his literary and mythological precursors” (213). Moreover, compared to the inventor-villains of the Voyages extraordinaires or Le Vingtième siècle, Villiers leans into the mythological allusion to Mephistopheles to further demonize his fictional inventor. In the end, it is due to the android’s artificiality that Edison is condemned for blasphemy rather than celebrated for his technological prowess. 

Oancea concludes each chapter of Dangerous Creations with vignettes from recent examples in popular culture, ranging from films to bandes dessinées, video games, and television series. For example, her close reading of the television series Westworld draws strong parallels to Zola’s inventor/prophet couple, as the human creators’ androids surpass their creators, liberate themselves, and create their own utopian society. While many of these examples have updated the technological premises, gender roles, and social mores, they highlight the perennial questions shared with the fin-de-siècle inventor novel corpus, from the dangers of uncritical innovation, to the corruptive forces of nationalism and research funding, to the human cost of achieving a utopian society. As Oancea convincingly shows, French inventor novels of the nineteenth century explore the boundaries between science and the arts in ways that are still highly relevant to today’s readers.