Annie Besant, née Wood en 1847, est une femme à la vie marquée par des engagements forts pour les droits des femmes et des plus faibles. Figure de proue de la Société de Théosophie entre 1889 et 1933, elle a mis sa plume, son énergie et sa force de conviction au service de ce mouvement spirituel et culturel, alors en cours de structuration.
Man has always sought to communicate from a distance – be it by visual means, (smoke signals, torches, kites, flags…), sound (shouts, drums, tam-tams, trumpets, bells….) or by the means of carrier pigeons. Wireless telegraphy appeared towards the end of the 19th century. It was the fruit of several European and American inventions. It fed the imaginations of writers of the merveilleux-scientifique literary movement, initiated by Maurice Renard, who gave birth to strange machines and uncanny phenomena.
In 1909, the writer Maurice Renard published his manifesto on the merveilleux-scientifique literary movement. The theme of transplantation enabled the authors of the genre to examine the idea of hybridization, and the loss of humanity or personality that this intervention resulted in. In these stories, no technical obstacle got in the way of organ transplantation, be it concerning hands or the brain.
The Merveilleux-scientifique literary movement systematically took as a starting point a law of physics, chemistry or biology, and altered it.