Trapped on Zarkass - The Fall of French Civilization
I found in a book sale and eventually read “Trapped on Zarkass”, a 2022 English adaptation of “Piège sur Zarkass”, a 2013 Science Fiction comic book based on an eponymous 1958 novel I read in my youth. The result is somewhat entertaining, yet the thought it inspires me is: Oh how the mighty have fallen.
The original is a classic French Science Fiction novel by Stefan Wul, obviously inspired by the colonization of Africa by France, and the violent unrest in Algeria in particular. In the novel, the Terrans have established a colony on far away Planet Zarkass, populated by a race of technologically undeveloped aliens who live in a strange symbiosis with their environment. A newly arrived Terran agent guided by a veteran Terran adventurer goes on an incognito mission to reckon the wreckage of a downed spaceship from a rival space-faring civilization that claims to help free the locals but actually tries to replace the Terrans. Along the way, we discover the strange mores of the local aliens and discuss the meaning of civilization, while the protagonist finds himself at the heart of the inevitable change in the relationship between Terra and Zarkass. The novel is of historical interest, but the ideas, the storytelling and the literary qualities are all more promising than fulfilling.
“... Zarkass” is less famous than the similarly themed novel of the same period, “La planète des singes” (Planet of the Apes) by Pierre Boulle, that I admit I didn’t read but that inspired many movies and TV series in the 1960s and 1970s that I did watch in my youth (I didn’t watch the reboot from the 2000s). That latter novel was written in 1963, after France surrendered Algeria and soon all its colonies to the most barbaric mass murderers around (under pressure from Washington DC as well as Moscow). In that novel, Terran survivors of a space wreck find themselves in a world where talking Apes dominate non-talking Humans, with a well-known punch-line.
The original Zarkass novel was very sympathetic to the colonized, casting their primitive culture as somewhat closer to nature, and worth overcoming the disgust it inspires to the foreign colonizing. The author mostly expunges or ignores any evil from that far away world, though the story does include to violent conflict at times. The author probably wants to focus on the Big Picture of technology vs spirituality, and wrongly believes that morality has nothing to do with civilization and barbarity, or evades the relationship between the two for lack of time or interest. Still he identifies with the colonizers, of which he conveys an overall positive self-image, with acknowledgement of past imperfections, but no shame, just hope for future improvement. The two main protagonists, the idealist agent and the burly adventurer, are not mindlessly extolled, yet respected for their virtues despite their vices. There is also a recognition that the rival empire fostering unrest is evil, which I assume is an allegory for the USSR. The book ends with some hope for a merger of the best of the colonizers and the colonized (rather than the worst), recognizing the superior minds and technology of the former though some wisdom and sense of life from the latter, with the duty and responsibility to get things right squarely resting on the colonizer, as having the most agency.
It was queer reading Zarkass in French in the early 1990s out of my father’s then extensive and eclectic collection of SF books, long after France had surrendered its colonies in Africa, and when instead Africa had started colonizing France right back. It is only saddening to read in 2024 this 2022 adaptation to American English of a 2013 comic, now that this retrocolonization is well advanced, and after I had to flee to America to find gainful productive work. France has not yet reached the “Planet of the Apes” stage, but at this point it would take a civil war to avert it.
I found the comic book in English, and noticed how bad the translation was as an adaptation to English, though it may have better conveyed the French comic book to me personally: the names of Terran and alien characters, places, fauna and plants, were all left untranslated. I could thus see them as the 2010s French puns they were, wherein the comic book writer was referencing French pop culture, mostly the names of famous politicians and personalities. I don't remember how much names in the original novel did or didn't reference 1950s French pop culture, but probably less so. This naming pattern looked more of a homage to naming in Astérix, though with the writer's unhappy politics replacing Goscinny's hilarious good nature. A good adaptation would have translated those names into references to 2010s American culture. The American and broader English-speaking worlds being less centralized than France, finding common cultural references for all readers might have been harder or blander, though, and the translator might have had been well-inspired to stick to world classics instead of references that will only be recognized by a small target culture for a short span of time. Interestingly, this would have made the translation better than its French original, hence unfaithful in a strange way. Still, it was a fun exercise for me to guess who or what each weirdly spelled name was referencing, and it gave me the feeling I didn’t lose much from the original French comic; these references will all be lost to you if you’re not deep into French culture and politics and have no one to help you about them.
Now let’s discuss the adaptation of the novel to a comic book. It keeps the general plot of the original, with a few changes that probably make it more interesting as a graphic novel. Mostly of the changes are not worth arguing. However, the main one is worth mentioning: the comic book, unlike the novel, inverts the sexual roles for the Terrans and their society. Large-breasted penis-less females do the adventuring, armying and politicking, with much violence and power games, while males stay at home to take care of kids and largely avoid those games. I don’t think it is a bad change to introduce, and it definitely adds a layer of properly science-fictiony interest to the work. Now, there's a reason that in reality, males take the physically dangerous jobs, have the more adventurous and at times violent temperament, and have the giving penetrating sexual organ, while females take the less risky jobs, are more nurturing and conflict-averse, and have the receiving sexual organ and large breasts: because, by very biological definition of sexes across all species, females are whichever sex biologically invests more in offsprings. And so, if you significantly inverted behavior, you'd also invert who is male and female, and would be back to square one, though maybe with some maladaptive organ dimorphism to slowly evolve away. And so the inversion ultimately doesn't work, though its authors may root for the inversion and not realize its absurdity. But that is exactly what Science Fiction is about: to make you think about the universe we live in, what it is, what it could or couldn’t be. The authors bring their speculations and arguments, hopefully interesting ones, and each reader does his thinking and reaches his conclusion. So that change is valid Science Fiction as such, though ultimately unconvincing.
Now this sexual inversion is indeed typical of the change in zeitgeist from 1950s France to 2010s France, and this change is reflected in all aspects of the comic adaptation of the novel. The general moral bankruptcy of France is visible. France has no more colonies, no more ambition to do good; it abandoned its active male giving role, and instead accepted the passive female receiving role of its own invasion, celebrating dilution of its people into a mixed race as the necessary end of history beyond which there is nothing else to hope or strive for. Its old institutions are seen as purely corrupt and inept, with no truth and no value to its colonial ambitions, no virtue in what made it historically colonizer rather than colonized. Aesthetically, the new authors deliberately forsake the beautiful and the refined, and instead embrace the ugly and the vulgar. Technology is taken for granted but not valued. The protagonists go through the motions, and the authors like the characters, but do not respect them. The original novel was a reflection on how to avert a predictably coming yet hopefully avoidable decadence. The comic book adaptation is that unavoided decadence made flesh-or, rather, paper.
I recommend neither this comic book nor the novel that inspired it as great works of art standing on their own. But I am recommending them both to whomever is interested in a well contained and well documented embodiment of the Fall of French Civilization. A fall not just historical and biological, but philosophical and spiritual.