The Light Barrier - Paperback

by Nathalie Charles Henneberg (Author), William Oarlock (Translator)

Nathalie Charles Henneberg (1910-1977) remains a unique voice in the history of French imaginative literature. This is the third volume of a multi-volume collection of her works to be released by Black Coat Press.

In the first novel, The Light Barrier (1959) Humanity lives in the space age, but one last obstacle blocks its path to the stars: the light barrier. A cataclysm has shattered the satellite belt defending the Solar Federation. Yet a rocket returns, commanded by a charismatic stranger, Arno Heller... And on Earth, Nan, a young girl gifted with strange powers, is seized with terror, because she knows him, or rather she remembers him from the age of Atlantis...

The second novel, Bellatrix Gamma (1959), tells the adventures of four Earth astronauts whose ship has been thrown into the strange world of Bellatrix Gamma, where time and space seem to unmoored and where several species of hybrids between humans and animals, or even minerals, coexist and fight each other. They become involved in the struggle between two of these, and one of them will fall in love with an alien queen.

Combining classic French and Golden Age American SF reminiscent of Jack Williamson and Robert Heinlein, with "Old World" literature, sagas and epics, her writing precedes the "New Wave" of the 1960s and later mythopoetic space operas by Ursula K. Le Guin, Roger Zelazny, C.J. Cherryh, Philip Jose Farmer and Joan D. Vinge.