In the 1936 second edition of [The Xenobiotic Invasion], Varlet mentioned a sequel to that novel. However, that sequel, titled Aurore Lescure, pilote d’astronef wouldn’t be published until 1943, five years after Varlet’s death.

In his “Introduction”, Brian Stableford speculates Varlet may have hoped this novel would be picked up in translation in America. Varlet was almost alone among roman scientifique authors of the time in his interest in advances in rocketry. While Varlet’s style probably wouldn’t have been amenable to an American pulp audience, if he had managed to place it in that market before he died, it might have been fondly remembered as the first pulp story to feature sentient dinosaur-like creatures. Instead, that distinction goes to Norman L. Knight’s “Saurian Valedictory”.

This novel is Varlet’s least ambiguous and most explicit attack on modernity, specifically industrial civilization.

It’s two years after the events of The Xenobiotic Invasion. The great powers of the world, still fearing infection from more alien fungi, are still maintaining a moratorium on rocket flights exiting the atmosphere.

But what are they doing behind the scenes? Well, young reporter Oscar Frémiet has discovered, working undercover, that the German military is very interested in rocketry and has been doing secret launches. (Varlet even mentions Hermann Oberth, one of the future inventors of the V-2.) He plays a minor, but important, role in the preceding novel and is narrator Gaston-Adolphe Delvart’s nephew.

Oscar, not so coincidentally, shows up at his parents’ house to see Delvart and his wife, Aurore Lescure. He’s trying to sniff out why Aurore Lescure is meeting with the famous Madame Simodzuki. She’s a billionaire and a very famous philanthropist who inherited her dead husband’s industrial fortune.

Gaston, Oscar’s father, argues with the narrator and Oscar that each nation developing rocket technology will, inevitably, lead to an arms race as it did before World War One. Delvart argues that many nations possessing rocket powered weapons could achieve peace through deterrence.

Professor Nathan, Aurore’s scientific colleague, has died two weeks ago in a car accident. He was the only reason she continued working at a scientific institute run by the Moon Gold Company. (Aurore is very wealthly and doesn’t need the money.)

While she isn’t about to tell this to prying Oscar, Aurore has been asked to pilot the Ad Astra I by Simodzuki. Delvart eagerly encourages Aurore in this. He’s lost interest in his profession as a painter and has been wishing that, as when they first met, he and Aurore could work on an enterprise together. He is delighted to accompany Aurore into space, to “serve science” under Aurore’s orders.

But the political fallout of Oscar’s revelations have caused many governments to reconsider going into space. The French government is now quite interested in what Simodzuki, a private citizen, is up to on the Île du Levant.

A raid forces a premature launch of Simodzuki’s ship. The goal was originally to check out Eros, now at its closest position to Earth and exhibiting some unusual changes in lumonosity, and then Mars. Oscar is brought along to be an engineer.

But Oscar brings something extra: a stowaway, his fiancé Ida Miounof.

They can still reach Eros, but there will be no trip to Mars.

There they find a race of sentient, dinosaur-like aliens and a human-like race so degraded, dumb, and cannibalistic they are dubbed the “bowwows”.

The four are imprisoned, but the aliens are really only interested in human science, and only Aurore knows anything substantial on that subject. She is interrogated for months, so long that the position of Eros will not allow an immediate return to Earth.

Delvart may be at a loss as to what to do with his eventual freedom, but Oscar and Ida aren’t. She is determined to make the lives of the bowwows better.

Ida is an unpleasant person, the novel’s villain because Ida is a Bolshevik agent, and she proves surprisingly competent and clever in inciting a revolt among the bowwows.

As is always the case with Varlet’s novels, solo or collaborative, his style is smooth and pleasant. Here he switches between past and present tense and presents the story not only through Delvart’s account but journals, newspapers, and radio broadcasts.

There’s a reason Varlet is considered one of the best of the inter-war roman scientifique authors. If you’re interested in French science fiction, Varlet is a good place to start. ( )