Planète
Encyclopedia
Planète was a French fantastic realism
magazine created by Jacques Bergier
and Louis Pauwels
. It ran from 1961 to 1972.
They were the authors of the successful book The Morning of the Magicians (Le Matin des magiciens), subtitled "Introduction to Fantastic Realism," published in October 1959 (total French-language sales about 2,000,000.)
Jacques Bergier set himself up as intellectual heir to Charles Hoy Fort. Louis Pauwels would later be an editor of a review of an extremely different spirit, namely the Figaro magazine
(magazine version of a popular newspaper).
The rapid, unexpected success of this book encouraged its authors to create a review entirely devoted to the same topic: the Planet (Planète), with the slogan "Nothing that's strange is foreign to us!" After two years spent in the exiguous buildings of the editor, Victor Michon (at 8 rue de Berri, Paris VIIIe), the seat of the review settled in a substantial building on the Champs-Élysées
.
than at encroaching on the field of traditional popular science magazines (a survey revealed however that 44 % of Planet readers were also readers of Science & Vie, a magazine of the aforementioned category.)
, Robert Sheckley
, Fredric Brown
, and Daniel Keyes
known to a very general public; previously, the first of these authors was known only to a small group of literature fanatics, and the others were only known to aficionados of science-fiction magazines.
The magazine organized "Planet Conferences" (Conférences Planètes) through France, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, Quebec, even as far as Argentina (with the participation of J.L. Borges) and in Mexico. (The first three conferences took place at the French Odéon Theatre of Jean-Louis Barrault in Paris in front of 1250 people - entry was refused to 500 others at the time of the first.) The magazine also organized "Planet debate dinners" (Dîners - Débats Planète) through "Planet workshop clubs" (Clubs - Ateliers Planète) (supervised until 1977 by Adrien Bourgeois within the associative "Planet movement" - there were 57 Workshops in 1969), and created another bimonthly review called Plexus, a female magazine Pénéla, and editions with topics ("Planet Presence", "Planet Action", "More Planet", "Planet History"...) It published the first biblical oecumenical edition in three luxurious volumes within the "Spiritual treasury of humanity," and one of human civilizations through ten neat works of the "Metamorphoses of humanity."
The magazine engaged in collaborations with the French Musical Youth (discs and spectacles, plus a regular cultural chronicle within their review), the Mediterranean Club Planet forum was in Sicily (Céfalù) during two summers, then another in Corfou (Greece), in India during the hippie movement with three repeats (one of which was attended by Indira Gandhi), in Mexico, in Egypt, in Guatémala, in Peru, and in the USA, on the topic of "the future world." In 1967 it became the producer of astonishing Parisian spectacles (voodoo, the whirling dervish, Andalusian flamenco with the participation of the ballets and orchestra of Maurice Béjart in the sport hall of Paris, thanks to the Theatre of the Nations). In May 1962, Louis Pauwels also organized a show in a Parisian gallery of four painters of fantastic realism who had been featured in the magazine.
Planet (subtitle: "the first magazine of the library"): 41 issues from March 1961 to May 1968, with a book supplement in color with the last issues; the "New Planet": 23 issues from September 1968 to August 1971; finally transitory "The New New Planet" (Marc de Smedt's "Planet large format" ): 3 issues, at the end of 1971 til April 1972. Additionally there were thirty bimonthly "Planet Encyclopedias" alternated with the magazine starting in 1963, and published in conjunction with "Plexus" six times per year, and seventeen "Planet Anthologies" directed by Jacques Sternberg and Alex Grall. The magazine also had variants, through all Western Europe and South America (Pianeta, Horizonte, Planeta, Bres, Planet...), as well as an edition in Arab language in 1969 (12 international editions in all). The Dutch and Italian editions are always produced here: http://www.pianeta.org/index.htm http://www.bres.org/
Bergier's narrow personal office had posters all along the walls, featuring the characteristic humor of the movement: "You don't have to be crazy to work here... but that helps!"; and especially "Some calm, and some orthography!"
Philosophers, sociologists and writers such as Mircea Eliade, Edgar Morin, Odile Passeron, Jean-Bruno Renard, Umberto Eco and Jean d'Ormesson considered this the leading phenomenon of the Sixties.
Some of the most famous authors: Aimé Michel
, Rémy Chauvin
, George Langelaan
, Bernard Heuvelmans
, Charles Noel Martin, Jean Emile Charon
, Raymond de Becker
, Gabriel Véraldi, Jacques Mousseau (editor in chief, and future originator of the television broadcast Temps X), René Alleau, Henri Laborit, Jacques Lecomte, Guy Breton. Several sketch artists and painters of reputation made their classes there: Roland Topor, Jean Gourmelin, René Pétillon, Pierre Clayette, Pierre-Yves Trémois. The sub-editor was Arlette Peltant.
Through François Richaudeau, the leading mobility of the group moved itself around the Denoel house, with the variations of the Retz editions (which have become didactic), of the Club of the Woman, the Club of the Friends of the Book, the CELT (Culture-Art-Leisures), to some extent perpetuating the cultural outline which had been tried just after the war, with "Work and Culture" then "the World Library" of Victor Michon, Louis Pauwels and this same François Richaudeau. Today, certain works of the editions du Rocher can be considered in the spirit of the topics approached by the members of "Planet".
and Wired.
Science fiction magazines (category list)
Fantastic realism (literature)
Fantastic Realism was a self-described movement introduced in 1960 in The Morning of the Magicians , subtitled "Introduction to Fantastic Realism" by Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels. The two authors published the Planète magazine from 1961 to 1972...
magazine created by Jacques Bergier
Jacques Bergier
Jacques Bergier , was a chemical engineer, member of the French-resistance, spy, journalist and writer...
and Louis Pauwels
Louis Pauwels
Louis Pauwels was a French journalist and writer.- Biography :Louis Pauwels was a teacher at Athis-Mons from 1939 to 1945 , Louis Pauwels wrote in many monthly literary French magazines as early as 1946 until the...
. It ran from 1961 to 1972.
They were the authors of the successful book The Morning of the Magicians (Le Matin des magiciens), subtitled "Introduction to Fantastic Realism," published in October 1959 (total French-language sales about 2,000,000.)
Jacques Bergier set himself up as intellectual heir to Charles Hoy Fort. Louis Pauwels would later be an editor of a review of an extremely different spirit, namely the Figaro magazine
Le Figaro
Le Figaro is a French daily newspaper founded in 1826 and published in Paris. It is one of three French newspapers of record, with Le Monde and Libération, and is the oldest newspaper in France. It is also the second-largest national newspaper in France after Le Parisien and before Le Monde, but...
(magazine version of a popular newspaper).
The rapid, unexpected success of this book encouraged its authors to create a review entirely devoted to the same topic: the Planet (Planète), with the slogan "Nothing that's strange is foreign to us!" After two years spent in the exiguous buildings of the editor, Victor Michon (at 8 rue de Berri, Paris VIIIe), the seat of the review settled in a substantial building on the Champs-Élysées
Champs-Élysées
The Avenue des Champs-Élysées is a prestigious avenue in Paris, France. With its cinemas, cafés, luxury specialty shops and clipped horse-chestnut trees, the Avenue des Champs-Élysées is one of the most famous streets and one of the most expensive strip of real estate in the world. The name is...
.
Circulation
The first number was initially printed with 5,000 copies and had five reprintings. The peak of the sales exceeded 100,000 copies per issue. The ambitions of the magazine were rather eclectic, aiming more at the one objective of brainstormingBrainstorming
Brainstorming is a group creativity technique by which a group tries to find a solution for a specific problem by gathering a list of ideas spontaneously contributed by its members...
than at encroaching on the field of traditional popular science magazines (a survey revealed however that 44 % of Planet readers were also readers of Science & Vie, a magazine of the aforementioned category.)
Social Effect
One of the undeniable successes of this magazine is that it made authors like Jorge Luis BorgesJorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...
, Robert Sheckley
Robert Sheckley
Robert Sheckley was a Hugo- and Nebula-nominated American author. First published in the science fiction magazines of the 1950s, his numerous quick-witted stories and novels were famously unpredictable, absurdist and broadly comical.Sheckley was named Author Emeritus by the Science Fiction and...
, Fredric Brown
Fredric Brown
Fredric Brown was an American science fiction and mystery writer. He was born in Cincinnati.He had two sons: James Ross Brown and Linn Lewis Brown ....
, and Daniel Keyes
Daniel Keyes
Daniel Keyes is an American author best known for his Hugo award-winning short story and Nebula award-winning novel Flowers for Algernon. Keyes was given the Author Emeritus honor by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2000.-Early life and career:Keyes was born in Brooklyn, New...
known to a very general public; previously, the first of these authors was known only to a small group of literature fanatics, and the others were only known to aficionados of science-fiction magazines.
Anecdotes
The nearby snack bar "Elysée Quick" often has a place in the appendix of the editorial team, since its cellar was often used as the legendary hold-all for Jacques Bergier's massive stash of documents! Twice per year, the members of the leading team returned to a small inn in Chevreuse valley for a 48-hour prospective assessment.The magazine organized "Planet Conferences" (Conférences Planètes) through France, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, Quebec, even as far as Argentina (with the participation of J.L. Borges) and in Mexico. (The first three conferences took place at the French Odéon Theatre of Jean-Louis Barrault in Paris in front of 1250 people - entry was refused to 500 others at the time of the first.) The magazine also organized "Planet debate dinners" (Dîners - Débats Planète) through "Planet workshop clubs" (Clubs - Ateliers Planète) (supervised until 1977 by Adrien Bourgeois within the associative "Planet movement" - there were 57 Workshops in 1969), and created another bimonthly review called Plexus, a female magazine Pénéla, and editions with topics ("Planet Presence", "Planet Action", "More Planet", "Planet History"...) It published the first biblical oecumenical edition in three luxurious volumes within the "Spiritual treasury of humanity," and one of human civilizations through ten neat works of the "Metamorphoses of humanity."
The magazine engaged in collaborations with the French Musical Youth (discs and spectacles, plus a regular cultural chronicle within their review), the Mediterranean Club Planet forum was in Sicily (Céfalù) during two summers, then another in Corfou (Greece), in India during the hippie movement with three repeats (one of which was attended by Indira Gandhi), in Mexico, in Egypt, in Guatémala, in Peru, and in the USA, on the topic of "the future world." In 1967 it became the producer of astonishing Parisian spectacles (voodoo, the whirling dervish, Andalusian flamenco with the participation of the ballets and orchestra of Maurice Béjart in the sport hall of Paris, thanks to the Theatre of the Nations). In May 1962, Louis Pauwels also organized a show in a Parisian gallery of four painters of fantastic realism who had been featured in the magazine.
Planet (subtitle: "the first magazine of the library"): 41 issues from March 1961 to May 1968, with a book supplement in color with the last issues; the "New Planet": 23 issues from September 1968 to August 1971; finally transitory "The New New Planet" (Marc de Smedt's "Planet large format" ): 3 issues, at the end of 1971 til April 1972. Additionally there were thirty bimonthly "Planet Encyclopedias" alternated with the magazine starting in 1963, and published in conjunction with "Plexus" six times per year, and seventeen "Planet Anthologies" directed by Jacques Sternberg and Alex Grall. The magazine also had variants, through all Western Europe and South America (Pianeta, Horizonte, Planeta, Bres, Planet...), as well as an edition in Arab language in 1969 (12 international editions in all). The Dutch and Italian editions are always produced here: http://www.pianeta.org/index.htm http://www.bres.org/
Bergier's narrow personal office had posters all along the walls, featuring the characteristic humor of the movement: "You don't have to be crazy to work here... but that helps!"; and especially "Some calm, and some orthography!"
Philosophers, sociologists and writers such as Mircea Eliade, Edgar Morin, Odile Passeron, Jean-Bruno Renard, Umberto Eco and Jean d'Ormesson considered this the leading phenomenon of the Sixties.
Some of the most famous authors: Aimé Michel
Aimé Michel
Aimé Michel , was a UFO specialist.- Biography :Educated with diplomas in psychology and philosophy, Aimé Michel joined the French Radio Broadcasting in 1944...
, Rémy Chauvin
Remy Chauvin
Remy Chauvin at Sainte-Croix-aux-Mines, Haut-Rhin, was a biologist and entomologist, and a French Honorary Professor Emeritus at the Sorbonne, PhD, senior research fellow since 1946...
, George Langelaan
George Langelaan
George Langelaan was a British writer and journalist born in Paris, France. He is best known for his 1957 short story "The Fly", which was the basis for the 1958 and 1986 sci-fi film horror classics and a 2008 opera composed by Howard Shore.-Career:During World War II, Langelaan worked as a spy...
, Bernard Heuvelmans
Bernard Heuvelmans
Bernard Heuvelmans was a Belgian-French scientist, explorer, researcher, and a writer probably best known as "the father of cryptozoology"...
, Charles Noel Martin, Jean Emile Charon
Jean Emile Charon
Jean Emile Charon was a French nuclear physicist. He was the author of over 20 books on physics, scientific philosophy, and computer science...
, Raymond de Becker
Raymond de Becker
Raymond De Becker was a Belgian journalist and writer who was born in Brussels. He edited the Belgian papers Independence and Avant-Garde...
, Gabriel Véraldi, Jacques Mousseau (editor in chief, and future originator of the television broadcast Temps X), René Alleau, Henri Laborit, Jacques Lecomte, Guy Breton. Several sketch artists and painters of reputation made their classes there: Roland Topor, Jean Gourmelin, René Pétillon, Pierre Clayette, Pierre-Yves Trémois. The sub-editor was Arlette Peltant.
Through François Richaudeau, the leading mobility of the group moved itself around the Denoel house, with the variations of the Retz editions (which have become didactic), of the Club of the Woman, the Club of the Friends of the Book, the CELT (Culture-Art-Leisures), to some extent perpetuating the cultural outline which had been tried just after the war, with "Work and Culture" then "the World Library" of Victor Michon, Louis Pauwels and this same François Richaudeau. Today, certain works of the editions du Rocher can be considered in the spirit of the topics approached by the members of "Planet".
Fields/Topics Covered
- Epistemology. The magazine made formerly ignored precursors in this field known to the general public, for example, Roudjer Boscovitch.
- Science FictionScience fictionScience fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
. Writers like Fredric Brown, Daniel Keyes, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, Ray Bradbury and Robert Sheckley were published, and some discussions about their writings.
- The Fantastic. The review devoted several articles to Lovecraft and especially to Jorge Luis Borges, about whom it also published some short stories (among them, the library of Babel).
- FuturologyFuturologyFutures studies is the study of postulating possible, probable, and preferable futures and the worldviews and myths that underlie them. There is a debate as to whether this discipline is an art or science. In general, it can be considered as a branch under the more general scope of the field of...
. An interview of Isaac Asimov in 1965 on the topic "How I see the world in 1995" turns out to be almost without fault: the only thing that Isaac Asimov had not seen coming (neither had anybody in the middle of the 1960s) was the domestic microcomputer.
- SociologySociologySociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...
, EthnologyEthnologyEthnology is the branch of anthropology that compares and analyzes the origins, distribution, technology, religion, language, and social structure of the ethnic, racial, and/or national divisions of humanity.-Scientific discipline:Compared to ethnography, the study of single groups through direct...
, EthologyEthologyEthology is the scientific study of animal behavior, and a sub-topic of zoology....
. Once its role had been filled, after ten years, Planet disappeared quietly in 1972.
Succession
Two English-language magazines are in the spirit of Planète: OmniOmni (magazine)
OMNI was a science and science fiction magazine published in the US and the UK. It contained articles on science fact and short works of science fiction...
and Wired.
See also
- Future studies
- Genres, subcategories and related topics to science fiction
- Golden Age of Science FictionGolden Age of Science FictionThe first Golden Age of Science Fiction — often recognized as the period from the late 1930s through the 1950s — was an era during which the science fiction genre gained wide public attention and many classic science fiction stories were published...
- Hard science fictionHard science fictionHard science fiction is a category of science fiction characterized by an emphasis on scientific or technical detail, or on scientific accuracy, or on both. The term was first used in print in 1957 by P. Schuyler Miller in a review of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Islands of Space in Astounding Science...
- History of science fictionHistory of science fictionThe literary genre of science fiction is diverse. Since there is little consensus of definition among scholars or devotees, its origin is an open question. Some offer works like the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh as the primal text of science fiction...
Science fiction magazines (category list)
- Science fiction authors
- Science fiction Organizations