Henri Austruy, born in 1871, was an attorney and editor of the journal La nouvelle revue from 1913 to 1940, when occupying Nazi forces shut the journal down. 1940 is also the approximate date of Austruy’s unrecorded death, which may have been at the hands of the same forces. During his editorship, Austruy also produced several idiosyncratic works of turn-of-the-century science fiction and fantasy, which used alternate histories and imagined futures to lampoon and allegorize contemporary society. These novels,