Safe Return Doubtful

translated (in 2025) from the French (Switzerland) by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan

Originally published in 1922 – Science Fiction

It seems these days, that few books live up to their exciting premise, but this, though I hurriedly add was first published in 1922, certainly does.

One day the news of earth’s imminent destruction is announced by telegram. “Because of an accident within the gravitational system,” the telegram says, “the Earth is rapidly plunging into the sun.” It continues, “The heat will rise and rapidly everything will die.”
Science fiction, perhaps, but such an impossible scenario may better be termed as speculative fiction. But Ramuz picks it up and runs with it, and it enables him to do some great things. His characters, none of which he seems to like very much, are banded together without status; everyone is about to die at the same time, ‘For there is no longer any difference between them.’

This news arrives to an idyllic Swiss village in June, enjoying an unusually hot and dry, and splendid summer. At first it fails to penetrate the consciousness of the villagers and vacationers, they think it’s from America, and invented to liven up the newspapers. But events proceed rapidly; there is a workers’s uprising, the trains cease, revolution turns to anarchy.

Its republication in a new translation a couple of months ago by New Directions is opportune. A natural disaster threatening civilization, the news greeted with denial, an unbearable heat, struggles over resources, a growing sense of doom. But this was 1922, and though one might expect World War references this is more like a fable told in Ramuz’s lyrical prose. He manages to keep the ‘what if it’s true?’ sense of alarm throughout. It’s less of a warning to mankind, rather a meditation on mortality.

My GoodReads score 5 / 5