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Magazine - The New York Review of Science Fiction - 309 - 2014-05
Magazine - The New York Review of Science Fiction - 309 - 2014-05 Read online
The New York Review of Science Fiction
Contents
Amy J. Ransom: The New French SF: The Imaginary Worlds of Jean-Claude Dunyach
Barbara Bengels: Writing Outside the Box: Advice from Science Fiction Writers about Nurturing Gifted Children—and Their Writing
Jessica Amanda Salmonson: Remembering Jody Scott
Sergeant Chip and Other Novellas by Bradley Denton, reviewed by Don Webb
Mark von Schlegell: The Great Jack Vance
Joe Sanders: The Emperor of I Scream: Torture, Revenge, Justice, and Hope in Iain M. Banks’s Surface Detail
Brendan Byrne: William Gibson and The Anxiety of E-Mail
In the Company of Thieves by Kage Baker, reviewed by Michael Levy
Photos
Editorial: Shameless Self-Promotion
Samuel R. Delany, Contributing Editor; Kris Dikeman and Avram Grumer, Managing Editors. Alex Donald, Webmaster; Jen Gunnels, Theatre Editor; David G. Hartwell, Reviews and Features Editor. Kevin J. Maroney, Publisher.
Staff: Ann Crimmins, Sophie Logan; Heather Masri, Lisa Padol, M’jit Raindancer-Stahl, Jason Strawsburg, Eugene Reynolds, and Anne Zanoni.
Special thanks to Arthur D. Hlavaty and Eugene Surowitz.
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Copyright © 2014 Burrowing Wombat Press.
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Amy J. Ransom
The New French SF: The Imaginary Worlds of Jean-Claude Dunyach
As Art Evans proposes in “Good News from France,” a recent review essay of three new studies of sf from France written by French scholars, it appears that the traditionalist French academic establishment has begun to acknowledge the legitimacy of French science fiction as a national genre worthy of comment. Until very recently, in spite of Jules Verne’s frequently acknowledged paternity of the genre, even ardent historians of French sf tied its history, including its production in France, to its developments in the Anglo-American world, insisting that sf began in 1926 with Gernsback’s invention of the term (Vas-Deyres 22–23). Natacha Vas-Deyres in an extensive, rigorous study, Ces Français qui ont écrit demain: Utopie, anticipation et science-fiction au XXe siècle (The Frenchmen Who Wrote Tomorrow: Utopia, Anticipation, and Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century; 2013), begs to differ, tracing the roots of French sf back to the merveilleux scientifique (scientific marvelous) of Verne and Maurice Renard. Vas-Deyres also makes a compelling case for the significance of contemporary French writers of sf such as Serge Lehman, [Yal] Ayerdhal, Serge Brussolo, Philippe Curval, Pierre Perot, Laurent Genefort, and others. Unfortunately, very few of these writers have been translated into English; once again, the image of French sf—particularly its image in the Anglo-American sf mainstream—remains trapped in the past.
Back in the 1960s, DAW Books experimented in publishing translations of what were then contemporary French sf writers such as Gerard Klein, and in the 1990s, Bantam Spectra took a chance on French-born Canadian sf writer, Élisabeth Vonarburg. More recently, thanks to the efforts of Wesleyan University Press with its Early Classics of Science Fiction Series and Black Coat Press in Encino, California, an increasing number of proto-science-fictional and “classic” (read public domain) sf texts are being translated from French into English. But in terms of writers active today, such translations remain few and far between. Grand Junction (2009), Cosmos Incorporated (2008), and Babylon Babies (2005) by Maurice G. Dantec (b. 1959) have been published in English by Del Rey books, the last as a movie tie-in with Babylon A.D. (2008), directed by French filmmaker Mathieu Kassovitz and starring Vin Diesel. But Dantec remains among the select few along with Jean-Claude Dunyach (b. 1957).
Considered by Élisabeth Vonarburg to be among the best French sf writers currently active, Dunyach tops her list because of both the literary quality of his work and the scope of his imagination. His stories have appeared in magazines like Interzone, the Australian Altair, and the Canadian On-Spec, as well as in US anthologies like Full Spectrum and David Hartwell’s Year’s Best. Most recently, his story, “God, Seen from the Inside” (translated by Sheryl Curtis), appeared in the January 2014 issue of Galaxy’s Edge Magazine. Moreover, Black Coat press has published two collections of his work: The Night Orchid: Conan Doyle in Toulouse (2004) and The Thieves of Silence (2009). Much of our access to the work of Jean-Claude Dunyach in English is due to a core group of devoted translators led by Canadians Jean-Louis Trudel and Sheryl Curtis; the latter are responsible for twenty-three of the twenty-nine stories collected there. In the paragraphs that follow, I will survey the imaginary worlds of J-C Dunyach, first the short fiction available in English, but then I will also reveal a glimpse of his novels, still only available in French.
Dunyach is among the few French sf writers of hard sf, and his cyberpunk fiction has earned him comparisons with William Gibson; the rigor of his science can be linked to his educational and professional background. Holding a PhD in mathematics and supercomputing, Dunyach has worked for the French aeronautic corporation Airbus for decades. Although he is only a part-time writer, his production is significant in both its quality and its quantity: since the mid-1980s, he has published seven novels and nearly sixty short stories. In 2000, the Nantes-based publisher, L’Atalante, began reprinting Dunyach’s earlier tales alongside previously unpublished texts in what is now a seven-volume collection of his “nouvelles,” a sign of his status in a developing canon of contemporary French sf writers. His stories and novels have won him most of France’s genre prizes at least once, beginning with the Grand Prix de la Science-Fiction in 1984, the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire in 1997, and both the Rosny-Aîné and the Ozone Prizes twice each during the 1990s. His short story, “Unraveling the Thread,” translated by Ann Cale and Sheryl Curtis, also won the British magazine Interzone’s Best Story of the Year award in 1999.
The Short Stories
Dunyach’s versatility shines through in the two Black Coat Press collections, The Night Orchid and The Thieves of Silence. Although a certain amount of his lyricism is unavoidably lost in the translation, the breadth of his range is not. From the hard cyberpunk of “Shark,” a work that Natacha Vas-Deyres describes as a rigorously constructed metaphor for the cyberworld (444–45),
to the gruesome horror stories, “Time of the Worm” and “Spun Sugar,” and the whimsical fairy story, “A Wish for the Fay,” the French writer works effectively in all of sf’s sub- and peripheral genres. Dunyach’s sf ranges from his recent, environmentally engaged, near-future extrapolations like the as yet untranslated “Aime ton ennemi” (“Love your enemy”) in Les Harmoniques célestes (L’Atalante, 2011) to the far-future, deep space opera found in his magnum opus, the novel Étoiles mourantes co-authored with Yal Ayerdhal. Before I turn to that work, I would like to survey the range of what is available in English.
The brilliantly engaging title story of Dunyach’s first Black Coat publication, “The Night Orchid (Conan Doyle in Toulouse),” translated by Jean-Louis Trudel in 2000, is set in Dunyach’s home town in 1890. Professor Frédéric Picard requests the assistance of his friend A. C. Doyle—since their “mutual friend” Holmes was busy with another matter—in solving a colleague’s strange murder. Also on the case is Doyle’s other great hero, Professor Challenger, a young scientist whose features rather resemble those of a Mousterian caveman on display in Picard’s museum. That the culprit turns out to be a pterodactyl that has survived in an isolated cave in the south of France adds to the story’s charm and whimsy.
Dunyach also writes serious sf, including a number of colonization stories earlier in his career; one of his first publications, “The Sand Swimmers” (1983; in Night Orchid, trans. Sheryl Curtis), seems typically French in its marriage of far-future space travel with references to two nineteenth-century French poets, Baudelaire and Rimbaud: both the poets and Dunyach’s science-fiction characters envision the voyage as a form of escape from the mundane here and now. A project for colonization of a desert planet has all but failed until the remaining survivors, the only three children—now adolescents—to be born on the planet, learn to adapt to their new home world by developing the practice of sand swimming, hence the story’s title. Its assertion that “[t]hose who survive will be transformed” (256) engages an aspect of sf from settler-colony nations like Canada, where national identities are constructed by the appropriation of characteristics from the new territory. A somewhat similar treatment of the space colonization theme and how it impacts relations between generations occurs in “Station of the Lamb” (1995; in Night Orchid, trans. Sheryl Curtis), in which a nameless single father brings his early adolescent daughter to visit a crucial monument to those who gave their lives so subsequent colonists could survive. The title refers both to the founding family, the Lambinis, and the sacrifice of a lamb, the youngest child who died with its mother as the family used their own frozen bodies to fill an anomalous gap that occurred in a space station linkage.
Extraterrestrial life forms and the problem of the Other appear in stories like “Footprints in the Snow” (1997; in Night Orchid, trans. Sheryl Curtis) in which Lovecraftian, shapeshifting aliens stranded on Earth meet each year in the Andes to mate, a sterile release since Earth’s polluted atmosphere will eventually kill them all before a rescue ship can arrive. This story interestingly reverses both the alien invasion parabola—since conquest is impossible for the small group of survivors—and the Lost in Space parabola, which usually features humans stranded off-world. “All the Roads to Heaven” (1999; in Night Orchid, trans. Sheryl Curtis) offers a more sinister alien invasion in which volunteers like the protagonist, Wander, hike into the remote areas where extraterrestrial cocoons drop each year. If a human witnesses their opening, the species doesn’t attack but instead offers an ecstatic experience that leaves the human in a raptured but catatonic state.
Memory, its loss and recovery, represents a central theme in Dunyach’s work as seen in the early story “In Medicis Gardens” (1986; in Night Orchid, trans. Dominique Bennett). As the title suggests, the narrative is set in Italy, in a completely flooded Venice of the distant future, a metaphor, perhaps, for the lost memory of the protagonist and his former lover. Like others in need of cash or wanting to forget the pain of the past, she has sold her memories. Hoping to respark the old flame, the protagonist begins to visit her daily until the frustration of repeatedly renewing the forgotten acquaintance forces him to take a drastic measure: to sell his own memories. Of course, the mechanism fails since after the procedure he does not recognize her at all. Such ironies recur throughout Dunyach’s oeuvre. He develops the theme of recurrent amnesia more fully in the untranslated novel Étoiles mortes (Dead Stars; 2000), and memory, as it is obviously connected to personal identity, appears again in “The Parliament of Birds” (1996; in Night Orchid, trans. Jean-Louis Trudel).
Linked to memory is the theme of time, another of his preoccupations, as seen in the titles of “Time, As It Evaporates” (1986; in Night Orchid, trans. Jean-Louis Trudel) and “Time for Worms” (1998; in Night Orchid, trans. Sheryl Curtis). One of his first stories to be published, “Scenes at the Exhibit” (1983; in Night Orchid, trans. Jean-Louis Trudel) combines the problem of time with a thematic concern which, to my mind, sets this French writer’s work apart from Anglo-American strains of sf: the preoccupation with art. Like Élisabeth Vonarburg, Dunyach has written several stories which feature artist protagonists, societies in which the practice of art is the organizing principle, and extrapolations of future types of art, as do his major novels in the AnimauxVilles (AnimalCities) series. “Scenes at the Exhibit” poses as an excerpt of a gallery catalogue describing “time slices.” Using a technique that is not fully explained, artists access the “Multiverse” and use surgical precision to excise slivers of time precisely at very violent moments in history such as John Lennon’s assassination or “The Sarajevo Incident.” This story also demonstrates Dunyach’s interest in the human body as art, which appears as well in “Come into My Parlor” (1985; in Thieves of Silence, trans. Dominique Bennett) in which a predatory duelist living in a decadent, domed space colony transforms his victims into works of art for his vast gallery. In “The Dead Eye of the Camera” (1986; in Thieves of Silence, trans. Jean-Louis Trudel), the first-person narrator has developed the art of screaming within the context of a society in which the entire city appears to have become a gallery in which buskers constantly circulate practicing innovative art forms. The title refers to their goal: for their performance to be broadcast and watched by others. Published in the mid-1980s, the story anticipates both reality television and YouTube, it would seem. The title story of Dunyach’s second collection for Black Coat, “Thieves of Silence” (1990; trans. Ann Cale), also centers on the career of two psychic artists who combine their respective talents to create a stage show.
The Novels
Dunyach’s preoccupation with these themes also appears in his AnimauxVilles novels; it is unfortunate that these have not yet been translated because they are particularly deserving of a wider readership. As Élisabeth Vonarburg explains in her two-part review published in Solaris, Dunyach’s publisher, Paris’s well-known genre press Fleuve Noir, published his second novel, Étoiles mortes (Dead Stars) in two volumes, Nivôse (1991) and Aigues-Marine (1991), following them up with a collection of stories, Voleurs de Silence (1992), presented as a third-volume epilogue. This fictional universe features a sentient biological species that lives both independently in space and anchored to planets in symbiosis with the human populations that inhabit them. Now available in a single e-volume, Étoiles mortes follows its protagonist, Closter (whom we believe is a clone), his cat Ombre, and a woman, Marika. Again drawing on the problems of authenticity and identity, it is not Marika herself but her astral projection whose adventures we follow in Dead Stars as this odd trio jumps from city to city to search for her flesh-and-blood body and to escape a man pursuing Closter/Monteori for reasons that are not quite clear.
Étoiles mortes is deeply intellectually engaged with questions of identity as humanity’s elite has developed the technology to create “copies” of individuals and the capacity to remove a consciousness from its corresponding body. Vonarburg argues that this solo novel reveals Dunyach’s talent and lyricis
m as a writer:
It’s not just the novel’s plot that thrilled me, as complex, logical, and well-oiled as it is. Rather, it’s Dunyach’s tone, voice, and music, which is finally complete [in comparison with his stories and earlier novels]. Here, we have it all, the dynamism, discrete ferocity, what I would call Dunyach’s Karateka side.... (Rev. of Nivôse, 57; my translation)
Vonarburg’s reference to the 1980s video game influenced by Japanese martial arts is not gratuitous here, either, as games—from hopscotch to Go (the universe is referred to as the “Ban,” the board on which this Japanese game is played)—represent a central motif in many of Dunyach’s works, suggesting that game theory would offer a fruitful theoretical approach to his writing. At times this novel felt a bit long to me, perhaps suggesting that the short story form is Dunyach’s strength, but it introduces the fascinating concept of biological, sentient cities—the AnimauxVilles—one of which is described as follows:
Noone had thick skin. The thousands of years passed in deep space, from one side to the other of the stellar mass known as the Milky Way, had toughened her epidermis. The light ochre of her youth had turned brown, then dark gray. She had lost all feeling in several areas of her carapace centuries before and others were soon to follow. Plaques of hardened cartilage speckled her surface, surrounded by waves of dried flesh which also seemed as heavy as beached whales. Her belfry was a blade of bone, her streets deep valleys that the light of the stars never penetrated. She nonetheless preserved in the core of her depths a zone of tender flesh with visible capillaries.
These cities can jump through space via a pattern of nodes that transect the universe, thus instituting an instantaneous form of transportation, which they share with certain humans.
The AnimauxVilles recur in Étoiles mourantes (Dying Stars; 1999), Dunyach’s collaboration with another icon of contemporary French sf, Yal Ayerdhal (b. 1959; he publishes using only his surname), a work which could be an internationally significant work of sf and which deserves a much wider readership to assess its merits. As its title suggests, the book climaxes with the supernova of a pair of twin stars, which allows one strain of humanity, the Mechanists, to end the AnimalCities’ monopoly on instantaneous teleportation through space. While it has become a commonplace to describe French sf as “soft,” concerned more with the extrapolation of social and psychological developments, this cannot be said of Dunyach and Ayerdhal’s collaboration. In addition to expressing metaphorical concerns about the ability of a divided human community to bridge differences that have developed over time through an isolation forced on them by the AnimalCities generations ago in order to end millennia of conflict, Étoiles mourantes is deeply engaged in the description of extrapolated science and technology and current and speculative cosmology and astronomy.
Magazine - The New York Review of Science Fiction - 309 - 2014-05