author
Charles-François Tiphaigne de La Roche
1722–1774
A physician by training and a dreamer by instinct, this 18th-century French writer blended satire, speculation, and early science-fiction ideas in ways that still feel surprisingly fresh. Best known for imaginative works like Giphantie and Amilec, he explored science and society with wit and curiosity.
1 Audiobook
Giphantia Or a View of What Has Passed, What Is Now Passing, and, During the Present Century, What Will Pass, in the World.
by Charles-François Tiphaigne de La Roche
About the author
Born in Montebourg, Normandy, on February 19, 1722, Charles-François Tiphaigne de La Roche studied medicine at the University of Caen and became a physician in 1744. Alongside his medical career, he wrote a series of unusual and inventive books that mixed natural philosophy, fantasy, and social commentary.
Much of his fiction was published anonymously, and his work often sits in the borderland between Enlightenment science and the marvelous. He is especially remembered for Giphantie (1760), a strange visionary tale often noted for describing an image-fixing process that later readers have linked to photography, and for Amilec, another imaginative work concerned with generation and human society.
Although he was not a major celebrity in his own lifetime, Tiphaigne de La Roche has attracted lasting interest from scholars of early speculative fiction because his books anticipate ideas that later became central to science fiction. He died in Montebourg in 1774.