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(1893-1945) French academic, translator and author who published widely under a number of pseudonyms, none of them used for stories of the fantastic. He was in active service throughout World War One, where his pacifism was confirmed; his later Communist affiliations (presumably) occasioned his deportation in 1943 by the German government and incarceration in various camps until his death, probably in January 1945, in the Gross-Rosen complex, or Dora, or Bergen-Belsen.
Messac is of sf interest primarily for two novels. In the Satire Quinzinzinzili (1935), a Holocaust denudes the planet of almost all life (see End of the World); but a few humans survive Underground, where they gradually reconstruct a world, with all faults, creating en passant a new god they name Quinzinzinzili. The protagonist of La Cité des asphyxiés ["The City of the Asphyxiated"] (1937) is translated by unexplained Time Travel to an Underground world thousands of years hence, a Dystopia ruled tyrannically by its owners; a slave revolt promises, dubiously, some hope. [JC]
born Champagnac, Charente-Maritime, France: 2 August 1893
died Gross-Rosen or Dora or Bergen-Belsen, Germany: 1945
works (selected)
nonfiction
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Entry from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2011-current) edited by John Clute and David Langford.
Accessed 12:01 pm on 16 April 2024.
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