Mardi SF
Article reserved for subscribers
The French author’s alternate history, “The Nuremberg Automaton,” imagines a world where Napoleon won against Russia.
In History revisited, Eric B. Henriet noted that certain men or historical events had made us want to rewrite history. Napoleon is thus one of the beloved characters of uchronias. In the Nuremberg Automaton, The French Emperor did not abdicate in 1815, he even succeeded in his counter-offensive against the Russian army. He had just been victorious, on September 13, 1824 (nearly two centuries ago…), in Moscow and he reigned over Europe. This time frame allows for the exfiltration from Russia of the main character, the chess-playing automaton of Tsar Alexander I, who gave him his freedom as if he were a slave. We think that the chess-playing automaton is also a déjà vu: Napoleon faced a similar opponent around a chessboard, the mechanical Turk created by Wolfgang von Kempelen (who was later learned to be a hoax).
Things being thus set, we will hardly see any more Napoleon or a game of chess (although, but aborted). The book presents itself as the diary written by this famous automaton, called Melchior Hauser. Hauser… The name evokes Kaspar Hauser, the adolescent orphan who came from nowhere and appeared in Nuremberg in these same years of the early 19th century. In Thomas Day’s novella, Melchior has a brother named Kaspar. A father, Viktor Hauser, and he wants to find him in Nuremberg so that he
