Review by Win Wiacek
France has had an ongoing love affair with science fiction that goes back at least to the works of Jules Verne and – depending upon your viewpoint – possibly even as far back as Cyrano de Bergerac’s posthumously published fantasy stories. A perfect case in point is Les Naufragés du Temps (alternately translated as either Castaways in Time or, as here, Lost in Time) created in 1964 by Jean-Claude Forest and classical master-draughtsman Paul Gillon.
Forest is best known for creating Barbarella, and the sexy icon quickly took the county and the world by storm. Gillon works in a refined and highly classicist style as personified by the likes of industry giants Alex Raymond, Milton Caniff and Hal Foster.
Les Naufrages du Temps first appeared in 1964, and Labyrinths is the third in the series, but opens with a necessary preamble. It explains how at the end of the 20th century humanity was imperiled by a plague of extraterrestrial spores and/or a global sickness of its own negligent making. Chris Cavallieri and Valerie Haurele were selected for a shot at survival and placed in suspended animation in individual space-capsules to preserve the best of our race and possibly reconstruct our lost glories in a newer age.
A thousand years later Chris was awakened into a bewildering, but thriving multi-species civilisation in deadly danger. Earth is a derelict, plague world inhabited by mutant monsters, and a multi-species civilisation had abandoned it and grown to inhabit a hugely re-configured Solar system. Helping the inhabitants of the patchwork “System” to defeat an invasion by alien winged rats dubbed the Thrass, Chris fortuitously found Valerie’s lost capsule and revived her. The longed-for happy event led to utter disaster when both ancient human lovers together again in a furious new future discovered that they could not stand each other.
We begin after the defeated Thrass have fled the System and Valerie, rejected by Chris, has disappeared. The resurrected Ancient and his new-found true love Mara (one of the scientists who first recovered and rehabilitated Christopher) prompt much discussion among his new friends Dr. Otomoro and military cyborg Major Lisdal. Chris himself, though, haunts morgues and seedy dives unable to shake his destructive and obsessive fear for the fate of his millennial ex-lover.
Depressed, despondent and bitterly confused, Chris wanders the exotic streets and bazaars where hordes of newly-liberated beings manically celebrate their hard-won safety and security, unaware that he has been targeted by sinister plotters.
This is a beautiful, stately and supremely authoritative adult fantasy thriller, tantalisingly teasing the reader with the promise of so much more. The second part was released as Lost in Time: Cannibal World in 1987, but even that only moved the saga forward without comfortably ending things.
Mature, solid science fiction with thoroughly believable and pettily human characters confronted with fantastic situations, lots of action and loads of nudity: how on Earth has this sublime series remained a secret French Possession for so very long?
