PARVILLE, Henri de.

£3,750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Un Habitant de la Planète Mars. Rare first edition; only one other copy is listed in auction records. This early sci-fi classic was published by Jules Verne's publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel and illustrated by Edouard Rioux, whose lavish illustrations helped popularize Verne's works. Rioux's otherworldly images depict the spooky "habitant", both on Earth and in the imagined landscape of Mars.The story is "based on a hoax newspaper article by Peudefer [Parville's real name] (signed A Lomon), published on 17 May 1865 in Le Pays and purporting to describe the discovery of a humanoid fossil from Mars in a deep geological stratum. The novel comprises in part a satire on the process of scientific examination of this fossil, which shifts into an expansive extrapolation of nineteenth-century Cosmology. In the 24 March 1866 issue of his journal All the Year Round, Charles Dickens described the work as a scientific romance" (Encyclopedia of Science Fiction). In 2008 Brian Stableford published a translation with the title The Inhabitant of the Planet Mars.

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