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Rolland, Romain

Entry updated 1 December 2024. Tagged: Author.

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(1866-1944) French academic, journalist, playwright and author, best known for the nonfantastic Jean-Christophe series of novels beginning with L'Aube ["Dawn"] (1908). The exuberant life of the protagonist of Colas Breugnon (1919; trans Katherine Miller as Colas Breugnon Burgundian 1919) casts a fantasticated, Rabelaisian light on life in France three centuries prior. Of sf interest is La Révolte de Machines ou La pensée déchaînée (graph 1921; trans William A Drake as The Revolt of the Machines or Invention Run Wild: A Motion Picture Fantasy 1932) with Frans Masereel, couched as a (never-made and probably unrealizable) film script (see Cinema), in which Robots revolt against Homo sapiens, relegating the survivors to a Pastoral enclave. In the absence of humans, the robots, built in the image of their former masters, destroy themselves. The last image of the book is that of a new race of machines, apocalyptically huge, descending upon the world.

Rolland was awarded a Nobel Prize for literature in 1915. [JC]

Romain Rolland

born Clamency, Nièvre, France: 29 January 1866

died Vézelay, Yonne, France: 30 December 1944

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