A brilliant physician risks his own life to force open the border between body and soul, determined to correct what he believes nature has failed to complete. When the experiment ends and only one flame returns, his assistant must decide whether to protect a dangerous legacy—or let it rise again in a new form. The Ultimate Problem by Victor Rousseau. That’s next on The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast.

Victor Rousseau joins us on The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast for the first time today.

Born in Belgium in 1879, Rousseau was educated in Europe before emigrating to the United States as a young man. He eventually settled in New York, where he moved from journalism and translation work into fiction. Like many early pulp writers, he didn’t begin in science fiction alone. He wrote adventure stories, historical fiction, and romances, building a reputation for fast-paced storytelling long before the science fiction boom fully took shape.

Rousseau became a regular presence in magazines, Adventure, Argosy, and later Weird Tales. Over the course of his career, Rousseau wrote dozens of novels and a large body of short fiction across multiple genres. In science fiction alone, he produced almost 100 short stories and several novels, most of them in the 1920s and 30s.

The Ultimate Problem appeared in U.S. newspapers in 1911. We found it in the Stevens Point Journal of Stevens Point, Wisconsin, on Friday, March 3, 1911, published under Victor Rousseau’s H. M. Egbert byline.

Sixteen years later it was published in the July 1927 issue of Weird Tales Magazine on page 77, The Ultimate Problem by Victor Rousseau…

Next on The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast, He wanted to look beyond time and prove that history was still alive, waiting in hidden dimensions. What answered him from those angles was patient, hungry, and already on his scent. The Hounds of Tindalos by Frank Belknap Long.

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