The Xenobiotic Invasion

Aurore Lescure, the first woman astronaut to have gone into space, returns to Earth with deadly alien spores which feed on electricity and threatens to utterly destroy our civilization. Theo Varlet's 1930 novel shows the influence of J.-H. Rosny Aîné's classic disaster story The Mysterious Force (1913) and Henri Allorge's award-winning The Great Cataclysm (1922), both available from Black Coat Press. It is an exhilarating thriller which extrapolates ideas about dangerous alien lifeforms with considerable verve and polish, and foreshadows many similar-themed novels of the 1950s.