Henri René Guieu (March 19, 1926 – January 2, 2000) was a French science fiction writer who published primarily with the pseudonym Jimmy Guieu. He occasionally used other pseudonyms as well, including Claude Vauzière for a young adult series, Jimmy G. Quint (with Georges Pierquin) for a number of espionage novels, Claude Rostaing for two detective novels and Dominique Verseau for six erotic novels.
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Of all the authors published by Fleuve Noir company’s Anticipation science fiction series, Jimmy Guieu was the one who achieved the most surprising commercial success.
His first novel, Le Pionnier de l'Atome [The Pioneer Of The Atom] (1952), concerned a journey into the microcosmos through psychic powers. With his second novel, Au-delà de l'Infini [Beyond Infinity] (1952), Guieu introduced the character of American biologist Jerry Barclay and reversed the theme. This time, it was our universe that was a microcosmos contained within the knee of a beautiful woman from a macrocosmos. Guieu continued the Jerry Barclay series for three more books.
With La Dimension X [Dimension X] (1953) and Nous les Martiens [We The Martians] (1954), Guieu introduced a new hero: archeologist Jean Kariven. In the Kariven series, Guieu began to explore his favorite themes such as UFOs, close encounters, Erich Von Däniken-like theories of ancient astronauts, secret societies, lost civilizations and occult conspiracies. Throughout his novels he featured footnotes claiming that the various facts upon which he was basing his tales were indeed “authentic”. In Nous les Martiens [We The Martians], Kariven discovers that, during the remote past, men had emigrated to Earth from Mars. Eight more Kariven novels were published subsequently, often pitting good aliens from Polaris versus evil aliens from Deneb with Earth secretly caught in the middle. Univers Parallèles [Parallel Universes] featured a crossover with Jerry Barclay.
Guieu continued to exploit his UFO and occult theme with increasing success. After the Kariven series, he published a number of novels unrelated to each other, except for two that featured a team of American investigative reporters, Ericksson and Wendell: Les Monstres du Néant [The Monsters From The Void] (1956) and Les Êtres de Feu [The Beings Of Fire] (1956).
He also wrote two successful non-fiction books about UFOs, Les Soucoupes Volantes viennent d’un Autre Monde [The Flying Saucers Come From Another World] and Black-Out sur les Soucoupes Volantes [Black-Out On The Flying Saucers], the latter prefaced by Jean Cocteau, and by the 1970s, had become a major personage among French writers about UFOs.
Simultaneously, Guieu began to chronicle the exploits of two daring space traders, Blade and Baker. The series began with Les Forbans de l’Espace [The Space Pirates] (1963).
During 1967, with Le Retour des Dieux [The Return Of The Gods], Guieu revamped the Kariven character into that of journalist Gilles Novak who, with the help of his girl-friend Régine Véran, and various friends and allies, often real-life friends of Guieu or thinly-disguised real-life figures, fought against would-be tyrants, communists, terrorists, drug cartels and various alien menaces. Novak was helped in his struggles by Michael Merkavim, the commander of a new, powerful Order of Knights Templar, equipped with futuristic weapons and based in a parallel universe. Merkavim was introduced in Les Sept Sceaux du Cosmos [The Seven Seals Of The Cosmos] (1968) and L'Ordre Vert [The Green Order] (1969). The theme was later developed as the Les Chevaliers de Lumière [The Knights of Light] sub-series.
Due to the increase of popularity of his novels, Guieu was granted his own imprint during 1979. At first, it reprinted rewritten, updated versions of his original novels, then it began publishing a series of "sharecropping" novels, featuring Gilles Novak, Blade and Baker, Jean Kariven, etc., written by other writers, mostly Roland C. Wagner, but also Philippe Randa, Nicolas Gauthier and Laurent Genefort.
Four reference articles on Jimmy Guieu by Richard D. Nolane, written in French, are available at the Le Monde du fleuve (noir) website.