In The Human Microbes, a man unjustly accused of a murder by an evil mastermind manages to escape the guillotine and embarks on a quest for revenge that will draw in its wake a cast of characters, including mad doctors, lost children, strange gypsies, Irish revolutionaries, Russian anarchists and Utopians. In 1883, the notorious anarchist Louise Michel (1830-1905) was sentenced to six years of solitary confinement; effectively deprived of communication, she had had no refuge but writing. It is during that time that she penned The Human Microbes (published in 1887), as a distraction from her awful circumstances. It was followed by a sequel, The New World, published in a truncated form in 1988, due to Michel being shot in the head that year. Both are modeled on the classic feuilleton serials of the 1840s and were intended to be part of a six-novel series, in which Mankind would build a new utopia on Earth before moving out into space.