{"id":58271,"date":"2026-01-28T08:00:40","date_gmt":"2026-01-28T13:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/?p=58271"},"modified":"2026-01-27T19:25:27","modified_gmt":"2026-01-28T00:25:27","slug":"francophone-speculative-fiction-and-the-challenge-of-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/non-fiction\/francophone-speculative-fiction-and-the-challenge-of-politics\/","title":{"rendered":"Francophone Speculative Fiction and the Challenge of Politics"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"L'EveOn two occasions, I\u2019ve taught courses on francophone science fiction to graduate and undergraduate students at Virginia Tech. This essay by no means follows directly from those experiences, but it does explore a persistent impulse of mine to grapple with the relationship between the anglophone and francophone traditions in the genre, differently configured as they are, and to confront an aspect of the genre that French cultural production has doubtless always set very much in the foreground: \u201cpolitics.\u201d By politics I mean both a thematic concern for people\u2019s struggle for social power in all its forms, from palace intrigue to struggles between social classes or their analogues (robot slaves and human masters, and so forth), and also a tendency to advocate for certain moral perspectives on existing social realities (in view of uplifting the downtrodden; emancipatory politics, etc.). French science fiction, even at its least realist, tends to bear a simultaneous concern for formal and stylistic invention\u2014sometimes with downright hallucinatory results\u2014and for the ideological Message, tending even toward a clunky didacticism. This can yield some rather contrasting results, for example weird hybrids of the pamphlet and avant-garde linguistic experiment. The best instances of contemporary French science fiction, though, find artful ways of balancing utopian urges and visionary language, and the ways different writers navigate this tension might offer some instructive insights to an anglophone readership.<\/p>\n

What the anglophone world calls speculative fiction, the francophone world calls \u201clitt\u00e9ratures de l\u2019imaginaire\u201d\u2014literatures of the imagination, or even literatures of the imaginary. I\u2019m fond of the term: The anglophone world might do well to adopt it, since \u201cspeculative fiction\u201d may never have been much more than a slightly distasteful placeholder for some better umbrella word which no one has ever managed to dream up. French readers of this \u201cliterature of the imaginary\u201d typically need no introduction to the anglophone tradition: Many read fiction directly in English, and legions more benefit from abundant catalogues of translated fiction like those of publishers including Au Diable Vauvert and Le B\u00e9lial\u2019. In fact, our anglospherical hegemony casts such a Morgul shadow over French speculative fiction that many French-speaking readers may have a better grasp of the history of the genre in English than they do of the history of speculative fiction in the francophone world.<\/p>\n

In France, the collection of overlapping genres designated as litt\u00e9ratures de l\u2019imaginaire has enough of a readership to merit two well-attended annual festivals, Les Utopiales in Nantes and Les Imaginales in \u00c9pinal. So these genres have plenty of native practitioners, with the possible exception of horror and horror-adjacent work, which remains, alas, scarce. [1<\/a>]<\/a> But, while science fiction\u2019s famed forefather Jules Verne was French, SF properly speaking remains largely a 1950s import in France. French-native forebears of SF prior to 1950 tend to appear as slightly oddball offshoots of other local genre traditions like the roman d\u2019aventure (the traditional adventure novel with its world travelers and swashbucklers, a mutant example of which might be Verne\u2019s work itself); utopian fiction and its cousin the dystopian satire (Albert Robida in the 1880s); or what I would call the \u201cweird savant\u201d novel, in which a strange, visionary \u201cscientist\u201d leads the reader from invention to invention (L\u2019<\/em>\u00c8ve future<\/em> by Villiers de l\u2019Isle-Adam in 1886, for instance, and Raymond Roussel\u2019s Locus Solus<\/em> in 1914\u2014but Verne\u2019s Nemo himself is not far off in this department). [2<\/a>]<\/a> The space opera, for example, really only emerges in the 1950s. The vast frescos of whole societies that we associate with SF, the sociological or anthropological thrust that such scale suggests (as opposed to the isolated \u201csavant\u201d I just mentioned), find a place in later classics like Stefan Wul\u2019s Oms en s\u00e9rie<\/em> (1957), which yielded the celebrated Ren\u00e9 Laloux\/Roland Topor animated film Fantastic Planet<\/em> (1973; if you haven\u2019t seen it, do).<\/p>\n

Of course, even in examples like Oms en s\u00e9rie<\/em>\/Fantastic Planet<\/em>, French SF has its own distinct flavor, notably by way of surrealism, whose influence pops up everywhere. The late SF stalwart Philippe Curval (1929-2023) happened to associate closely with the movement. His classics include Le<\/em> Ressac de l\u2019espace<\/em> (1975, reissued by La Volte in 2022) and Cette ch\u00e8re humanit\u00e9<\/em> (1976, translated as Brave Old World<\/em> by Steve Cox in 1981\u2014this book is most certainly a social fresco<\/em> of the kind I mentioned). But Curval wrote innovative fiction until the end. His colleague Serge Brussolo\u2019s (1951-) hallucinatory narratives owe much to Andr\u00e9 Breton\u2019s oneiric avant-garde movement. Brussolo wrote some 150 novels across his long career (not all of them speculative fiction), and Edward Gauvin\u2019s 2016 translation of his 1992 Syndrome du scaphandrier<\/em>, under the title Deep Sea Diver\u2019s Syndrome<\/em>, is the first to be translated. In addition to surrealistic dreams and dreamlike imagery, Brussolo\u2019s work has an unsettling feel that rubs shoulders with the best weird fiction. [3<\/a>]<\/a> Yet both Brussolo and Curval, staples of French SF, are undertranslated and nearly unknown in the anglophone world despite Gauvin\u2019s and Cox\u2019s translations. In contrast, Antoine Volodine, a literary descendent of Beckett and magical realist writers like Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez rather than of surrealism, has been abundantly translated into English by Jordan Stump and Jeffrey Zuckerman, among others; Volodine is among the few who have scraped their way to relative prominence in the anglophone world (not without reason in the case of this visionary writer).<\/p>\n

These examples already demonstrate a few characteristics of the francophone tradition: how powerfully the historical avant-gardes, whose epicenter was Paris, inflect the genre. Early examples of speculative fiction, when they do not belong to popular fiction, overlap entirely with avant-garde production: Blaise Cendrars\u2019s extraordinary voyage into interiority\/exteriority, L\u2019Eubage <\/em>(1926), or Henri Michaux\u2019s imaginary ethnography Voyage en Grande Garabagne<\/em> (1936) are cases in point, to say nothing of the aforementioned Locus Solus<\/em>. Volodine\u2019s inscription into Beckett\u2019s literary family tree speaks volumes about hyperliterary aspirations, and C\u00e9line Minard\u2019s Plasmas<\/em> (2021, published in a translation by Annabel L. Kim in 2024 by Deep Vellum) belongs to the same tendency: Like Volodine from the nineties onward, like Minard, Marie Darrieussecq, and others, science fiction with literary credentials often \u201cdisguises\u201d its connection to genre fiction by appearing in non-genre editorial contexts. These disguised works tend to win more non-genre prizes and find translators more easily.<\/p>\n

A part of speculative fiction in France has therefore always aspired to literary lettres de noblesse in a way that seemed long out of reach for writers in the anglosphere\u2019s genre ghettos. La Volte, the publishing house responsible for my first novel, Le Premier Souper<\/em> (2021), displays this tendency, publishing challenging works including translations of Nobel laureate Doris Lessing (Shikasta<\/em>, 2016, translated by Paule Givarch), the elaborate metafictional and linguistic experiments of luvan (Agrapha<\/em>, 2020), or of course the anarcho-Deleuzian, vitalist allegories of Alain Damasio (La Horde du Contrevent<\/em>, 2004; Les Furtifs<\/em>, 2019). While the early collection Anticipation<\/em> from the publishing house Fleuve noir (1951) produced much \u201cpopular\u201d fiction (much of it justly forgotten), France never had a pulp era. [4<\/a>]<\/a> In addition to explaining the higher literary aspirations of francophone SF, the absence of a pulp era may also suggest why French science fiction has always felt aligned with political commitment: In the anglophone pulp era, the \u201centertainment imperative\u201d offers a convenient alibi to keep certain political issues at arm\u2019s length (even when they are in fact present not far beneath the allegorical surface of those tales). French science fiction may have felt freer to wear its politics on its sleeve from an early date (and the avant-gardes were, of course, heavily involved in politics, whether of the futurist proto-fascist and nationalist variety<\/a>, [5<\/a>]<\/a> or of the communist-surrealist variety).<\/p>\n

\"Les<\/a>For example, Catherine Dufour\u2019s 2024 novel Les Champs de la lune<\/em>, from Robert Laffont) has garnered an astonishing pile of (French) prizes in part because it seems to accomplish the desire for genuine political commitment while avoiding excessive didacticism, preferring literary subtlety to American science-fictional pyrotechnics. It is never shrill nor heavy-handed. And, contrary to the likes of Volodine or Minard, it does not compromise its genre identity in order to seem literary; this is as pure a science-fictional story as one might hope for, and fairly \u201chard\u201d without feeling relentlessly technical. Les Champs de la lune<\/em> avoids a key characteristic of SF space opera\u2014if the moon still counts as a form of space opera setting\u2014that have traditionally positioned it within the preoccupations of adolescence; namely, \u201caction,\u201d which is to say, violent confrontation. A reader on Amazon.fr complains that \u201cthe first 100 pages are dedicated to plants and their manner of development on the moon. The rest of the novel is just as uninteresting\u201d (\u201cLes 100 premi\u00e8re pages sont d\u00e9di\u00e9es aux plantes et leurs mani\u00e8res de se d\u00e9velopper sur la lune. Le reste du roman n\u2019est pas plus passionnant\u201d). But the comment, like many one-star reviews, and besides being a substantial misrepresentation, misses the point: The narrator is a botanist and gardener<\/em> who has dedicated her life to caring for living creatures on the surface of the moon (under a protective dome), while most of the colonists live in vast underground caverns. She is neither a warrior nor an adventurer, and those seeking \u201cthrills\u201d are unlikely to find them here. Dufour\u2019s narrator takes a special interest in what the poet Theodore Roethke called \u201cthe small\u201d (\u201cI live to woo the fearful small,\u201d he writes), and this includes the small among men and women; she looks after the least privileged members of the people living underground or wandering in the moon\u2019s deserts. She cares even for the mad machines, whom she seems to pity.<\/p>\n

Let us note that this avoidance of high-intensity conflict reflects a calculated choice on Dufour\u2019s part, who is no stranger to action-packed narratives\u2014her short stories, in collections like L\u2019Arithm\u00e9tique terrible de la mis\u00e8re<\/em> (2020), can be satirical, sharp-witted in the extreme (often deploying huge amounts of slang and colloquialism, Dufour is wicked smart and speaks our language), and fast-moving. Les Champs de la lune<\/em> departs from this earlier work in its contemplative, almost meditative quality. It is the journal of a soul whose activity removes her from spaces of sociability, who chooses to relate to a select few as she confronts the persistent problems of the surface\u2014a growing crack in the dome structure, an invasive species that seems able to grow anywhere, and the terrible fi\u00e8vre aspic, \u201casp fever,\u201d a mysterious illness endemic among those living underground.<\/p>\n

But the real subject of Les Champs de la lune<\/em> is hegemony\u2014not in the sense of simple domination of a class or group, but along the lines of Gramsci\u2019s original concept, that of the \u201cspontaneous consent\u201d that props up dominant ideologies, and that leads the alienated to desire<\/em> their own alienation (in the shape of the status quo that oppresses and exploits them, and that they willingly sustain). The tale suggests that, although \u201cwe don\u2019t have to live this way,\u201d we often choose to, without always being willing to accept that it is a choice, lying to ourselves and making sacrifices we should not make.<\/p>\n

The ecological thrust of the novel, and its nearby setting, reminds me of Kim Stanley Robinson\u2019s novels, which have become increasingly climate-oriented in recent years. Yet in Les Champs de la lune<\/em>, the earth\u2019s fate hardly enters the discussion; the narrator seems to assume the reader knows its fate as well as anyone, suggesting that it has become definitively inhospitable. And this absence of preachiness or self-conscious political posturing remains one of the novel\u2019s best features. It approaches the ecological question with matter-of-factness: The narrator is a gardener; accordingly, she wears her duties as a kind of pastoral role, even when she extends that role to mentoring young humans in her art. The novel rejects grand gestures, the commotion of rhetoric, and the alarmist language of crisis and cataclysm. The novel acknowledges urgency and crisis with a certain realist detachment. Strangely, this narrative, despite the revelation of grand stakes for the communities of the moon, feels like a chamber drama. This novel\u2019s understated politics appear quite welcome to its readers.<\/p>\n

A recent short story collection, Lanvil emm\u00eal\u00e9e<\/em>,\u00a0from the Martinican writer Michael Roch (2024), struggles both more stridently and more anxiously with politics than Dufour\u2019s novel, and it tends to excel where it leaves political messaging to one side. Since 2022\u2019s T\u00e8 Mawon<\/em>, Roch has accumulated accolades and visited several American universities; his variety of (Caribbean) \u201cAfrofuturism\u201d appears quite unique in the francophone world (in other words, that world, unlike the anglosphere, has not<\/em> benefited from any widespread science-fictional tradition emerging from Africa, the Caribbean, or indeed much of anywhere outside of continental France with the exception of one or two Qu\u00e9becois writers). Both the short stories of Lanvil<\/em> emm\u00eal\u00e9e<\/em> and the novel T\u00e8 Mawon<\/em> take place in the city of Lanvil, a tentacular city that spans the Caribbean, interconnecting its former islands. In some of Lanvil emm\u00eal\u00e9e<\/em>\u2019s stories, the city\u2019s structure seems to mirror its socio-economic inequality, since the wealthy overlords and powerful operators of anwo<\/em> Lanvil (\u201cupper Lanvil,\u201d as it were) exploit the various shades of underclass that inhabit anba<\/em> Lanvil (\u201clower Lanvil\u201d). This urban arrangement echoes many works, such as Arcane: League of Legends <\/em>(2021-2024); the structure represents a manifestation of the upstairs\/downstairs trope. But, while Arcane<\/em> takes an interest in characters from both sides of the railroad tracks, the oligarchs of Lanvil emm\u00eal\u00e9e<\/em> tend by design to remain invisible, silent, deliberately undeveloped, as though Roch did not want to humanize these hideous agents of exploitation, or else wished to emphasize the horizontal archipelago of human variation rather than class hierarchies and stable social categories.<\/p>\n

\"LanvilAt times, the issues of class and race hierarchies do interfere with Roch\u2019s storytelling. In the collection\u2019s second tale, \u201cAvaler la terre\u201d (Swallowing Up the Earth), Clod lives in upper Lanvil, among the bourgeoisie, and has bought into the overt racism of that milieu: Born dark-skinned in the lower city, he has employed medicines that bleach his complexion and has hidden his working class origins in his desire to arrive (Clod replicates the very real colorism that exists in many parts of the Caribbean). He is a parvenu and a class defector. Yet the story traces his sudden conversion (or reversion) to a partisan of Lanvil\u2019s proletariat. The conversion is so sudden and artificial that it fails to convince: We understand Clod\u2019s alienation, but that it should be so easy for him to free himself of that alienation feels contrived and seems designed expressly for the purpose of conveying a political message (it is better to work on behalf of the downtrodden than for our evil overlords). The conversion back to the \u201cResistance\u201d has no inner necessity from a character-building point of view. Clod, and perhaps the \u201cS\u00e9natris\u201d of the final story in the collection, seem to be the sole characters of a privileged milieu drawn with any depth, and Clod inevitably resolves into another defender of Lanvil\u2019s underclass.<\/p>\n

The other tales, however, often shine very brightly. The astonishing \u201cLa Clandestine\u201d features a set of militant \u201cdigital health\u201d workers whose goal is the \u201cprotection of virtual identities.\u201d Among these militants is Man Pitak, a fugitive digital shaman who has been known to help disenfranchised citizens of anba Lanvil \u201cascend,\u201d or upload into a new virtual existence. The emancipatory thrust of the trope speaks for itself: Man Pitak works to help others evade the system\u2019s class-based gatekeeping. But Roch\u2019s stylistic virtuosity, not his politics, forms the extraordinary medium of this cyperpunk-soaked tale. On many occasions the reader senses that the distinction between the digital spaces in which Man Pitak operates and those of the city of Lanvil begin to weaken; disoriented, the reader finds herself in an elusive in-between: She experiences Man Pitak\u2019s power to navigate between the city\u2019s ever-present digital and nanotechnological \u201cclouds\u201d and physical space.<\/p>\n

In fact, Roch\u2019s narratives hardly operate without disorientation; he makes demands on his readers, who must yield to a whirlwind of unfamiliar or unconventional techniques that do not always favor transparency. Thus, his style blends creole (French and occasionally English creoles of the Caribbean) and elaborately wrought French; practically never signals direct discourse with the conventional dashes or quotation marks used in most French fiction; and drops capital letters to reflect direct discourse or inner monologue (or perhaps something like free indirect discourse). This mixture, this agar in which the urban bacteria teem, reflects the title of the book, Lanvil emm\u00eal\u00e9e<\/em>\u2014Lanvil entangled. In \u201cDrive,\u201d the character Joe muses on the word \u201ckub\u201d (a small apartment or confined living space) in the following terms:<\/p>\n

Et kub, asere, c\u2019est m\u00eame pas kr\u00e9yol. Quoi, on dit pas kub? Non, si c\u2019est kub, mais la lettre au milieu, la voyelle, en kr\u00e9yol, elle existe pas. loto-a, s\u00e9 an vwati. Virus, s\u00e9 viris-la. pa ni u. des locks naturelles, s\u00e9 nati dr\u00e8d-la, w\u00e9\u00a0! pa ni u.<\/p>\n

Alors pourquoi kub? Poutji? asere, tout \u00e7a, s\u00e9 an mouvman, c\u2019est un emm\u00ealement, les gens entrent dans Lanvil et puis ils sortent, les id\u00e9es entrent, les images, et puis les mots changent et se fixent d\u2019une autre mani\u00e8re, sur un autre mode, en fait, dans le sens o\u00f9 les moun vont. ils disent kub, on a dit kub, tout le monde dit kub maintenant. s\u00e9 en mouvman. tjip\u00a0! kuuuuub. Une piaule, quoi. Un stuuuudio, une piaule, w\u00e9.<\/p>\n

S\u00e9 kon sa qu\u2019on tient. emm\u00eal\u00e9s. y a p\u2019t-\u00eatre pas besoin d\u2019aller bien loin pour vivre, \u00bfves? si tu peux vivre dans l\u2019emm\u00ealement des voix, des gens, des mots. si tu peux vivre avec le mouvman, la bascule, ni bon ni mauvais, asere, d\u00e9pli\u00e9-repli\u00e9, toi-m\u00eame et puis tous les autres en m\u00eame temps. emm\u00eal\u00e9, quoi. si tu peux vivre \u00e7a, ta place, elle est ici. ailleurs, c\u2019est toujours l\u2019illusion. (131)<\/p>\n

And kub, asere, it\u2019s not even kr\u00e9yol. What, you don\u2019t say kub? No, yeah it\u2019s kub, but the letter in the middle, the vowel, in kr\u00e9yol, it don\u2019t exist. loto-a, it\u2019s in the car. <\/em>Virus, is viris-la. pa ni u. natural locks is nati dr\u00e8d-la, w\u00e9\u00a0! pa ni u.<\/em><\/p>\n

So why kub? Poutji? Asere, all this, it\u2019s in mouvman, it\u2019s tangled up, people come to Lanvil and then they leave, the ideas come, the images, and then the words change and are fixed in a different way, in another mode, in fact, whichever way the moun go, all those folks. they say kub, kub is said, everyone says kub now. it\u2019s in mouvman. chip! kuuuuub. a pad, right? A stuuuudio, a pad, w\u00e9.<\/em><\/p>\n

Dat a di way wi stay. Mixed up. You maybe don\u2019t need to go so far to live, <\/em>\u00bf<\/em>ves? if you can live in the tangle of voices, people, words. if you can live with the mouvman, the seesaw, not good not bad, asere, pli\u00e9-d\u00e9pli\u00e9, yourself and then all the others at the same time. tangled up, right? if you can live that, your place is here. elsewhere it\u2019s always an illusion.<\/em> (my translation)\u00a0<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cAsere\u201d is a Cuban slang term that means something like \u201cpal\u201d; \u201cves\u201d is Spanish; \u201ckub\u201d is derived presumably from French (which it is not precisely); \u201cpiaule\u201d is French slang; and French creole is peppered throughout this discussion of the high front rounded u, \/y\/, which doesn\u2019t exist in creole. The end of the passage uses triangulated address; while the characters are engaged in dialogue with one another about the languages, the text also addresses the reader: \u201cif you can live that, your place is here. elsewhere it\u2019s always an illusion.\u201d Living in the mixture of languages and multiple modes of speaking, writing, reading \u2026 is the reality with which Roch confronts his public, who must be willing to submit to the demands of an unfamiliar textual environment, not to say unfamiliar realities.<\/p>\n

The passage also suggests where Roch most excels: in his poetic deployment of language. As the Arcane<\/em> comparison demonstrates, many of Roch\u2019s ideas come from elsewhere, especially from cyperpunk; his political ideas in particular remain fairly familiar. Yet what makes these narratives hum is not the politics, but things like the narrative blur between the virtual and the physical in Man Pitak\u2019s tale, \u201cLa Clandestine\u201d (another kind of \u201centanglement\u201d) or Joe\u2019s richly textured patter in \u201cDrive\u201d\u2014in those places, in other words, where the reader risks losing her footing in a kind of delicious vertigo. If that vertigo means losing sight of the well-worn signposts of political value, it may seem a small price to pay.<\/p>\n

Lanvil emm\u00eal\u00e9e<\/em> ostensibly places the titular megalopolis at its heart. To the extent that it does so, it bears comparison to a number of books and series based explicitly around an urban center: Anouck Faure\u2019s dark fantasy La Cit\u00e9 diaphane<\/em> (2023) tells the tale of the city of Roche-\u00c9toile; Julien Heylbroeck\u2019s Lazaret 44<\/em> (2022) features a city built on the rotting carcass of a cosmic leviathan; L\u00e9o Henry and Jacques Mucchielli\u2019s Yama Loka Terminus<\/em> (2024) is based around the fictional Soviet-sounding city of Yirminadingrad; Christophe Si\u00e9bert is responsible for a parallel series involving the city of Mertvecgorod (for instance, Feminicid <\/em>[2021]). The Soviet stylings of Si\u00e9bert\u2019s and Henry\/Mucchielli\u2019s works, as well as some of their themes, recall Volodine\u2019s Russian-inflected post-exotic Bardo in a way that distracts a bit from the evident quality of these works (Heylbroeck, for his part, displays his debt to China Mi\u00e9ville with an epigraph from Perdido Street Station <\/em>[2000]). In any event, the narrative device of the megalopolis has evidently spread throughout French speculative fiction, with often excellent results.<\/p>\n

Where Lanvil differs is in its disconnected flavor, which seems to include patches of rural territory, mushroom cultures tended by robots (\u201ctechnosapiens\u201d), more or less uninhabited zones of post-industrial ruin, luxury high-rises, slums, skyscrapers, skybridges, mines and construction zones, (sentient) factories \u2026 Its patchwork includes every landscape and every condition. Like the Caribbean on which it is modeled, Lanvil is an archipelago.<\/p>\n

\"Aetea<\/a>Anouck Faure finds her inspiration in another archipelago, that of the islands of the Pacific. Faure is a native of New Caledonia now based in France, where she works as an illustrator, particularly for genre fiction. In Aatea<\/em> (2025) as in La Cit\u00e9 diaphane<\/em> (2023), her talent as an engraver is on vivid display. Aatea<\/em>\u2019s archipelago is called La Nu\u00e9e, an untranslatable term that comes from an old, poetic word for \u201ccloud.\u201d La Nu\u00e9e is an ocean\u2014suspended high in the atmosphere in a series of unpredictable, constantly shifting strata. The islands of the Nu\u00e9e are living beings and produce \u201cthe filament,\u201d a fiber that detaches from the island and forms a symbiotic bond with the islanders in infancy. Without the filament, direct contact with the islands or their many roots causes death, for the islands\u2019 surfaces bear a deadly neurotoxin.<\/p>\n

The island has developed a rigid caste system: The master navigators and the nobles rule over a vast servant class who are little better than slaves, some of whom lack the filament, many of whom are ritually castrated or sterilized. This social reality subtends the book\u2019s entire plot, which features Aatea, a eunuch who happens to be the unfavored son of the queen of the young island of Enatak. As a navigator able to \u201conceive\u201d (\u201concevoir,\u201d derived from the verb \u201cpercevoir,\u201d to perceive) his aerial-ocean surroundings, Aatea spends much of his life at sea, on the treacherous suspended waters of La Nu\u00e9e. His is yet another tale of emancipation from a grotesque system of inequality that sharply distinguishes the privileged few from the subaltern. The memory of colonial conquest in the Pacific lies under the surface of this novel, yet it reverses colonial reality: Whereas Continental Europeans\u2019 colonial conquest eventually subjugated many islands of the Pacific and their Indigenous communities, in Aatea\u2019s world, the islanders themselves, particularly the aristocracy and the privileged \u201cmaster navigators,\u201d are those who dominate others; they generally display an insufferable arrogance.<\/p>\n

In a revealing passage, Aatea discusses his identity as an islander (though without the filament) with a nomad, Berub. Berub understands only the \u201cmight is right\u201d ethos that has imposed itself on the nomads amidst the uncompromising waters of La Nu\u00e9e. Berub says to Aatea:<\/p>\n

-- Je peux t\u2019apprendre \u00e0 te defendre. Contre les humains et le reste. Reste avec nous, et je t\u2019apprendrai. Tu es intelligent et coriace, tu obtiendrais vite une bonne place. Ici, tu ne serais pas condamn\u00e9 \u00e0 rester esclave.<\/p>\n

-- \u00c7a ne m\u2019int\u00e9resse pas, r\u00e9pond Aatea.<\/p>\n

Sa hargne est retomb\u00e9e, il n\u2019a pas le c\u0153ur d\u2019argumenter, d\u2019expliquer que les deux options, la domination ou la servilit\u00e9, le r\u00e9vulsent autant l\u2019une que l\u2019autre. Seul demeure un vague d\u00e9go\u00fbt au fond de sa gorge qui lui rend la solitude plus d\u00e9sirable encore. Ici comme sur les \u00eeles, il semble qu\u2019il faille toujours un perdant. (178)<\/p>\n

\"I can teach you to defend yourself. Against humans and the rest. Stay with us, and I\u2019ll teach you. You\u2019re intelligent and tough, you would quickly earn a good position. Here, you would not be condemned to remain a slave.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not interested,\u201d answers Aatea.<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

His spiteful feelings have dissipated; he doesn\u2019t have the heart to argue, to explain that the two options, domination or servility, are both just as revolting to him. All that remains is a vague disgust in his throat that makes solitude still more desirable. Here as on the islands, it seems that there always has to be a loser.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In short, Aatea seeks a solitary escape from the dynamics of power and powerlessness that have forever constrained him. Berub and the nomads offer him no viable alternative to his previous enslavement, for Aatea does not want to survive at the expense of others as the nomads do. From Aatea\u2019s perspective, the nomad\u2019s dog-eat-dog worldview only replicates the unjust hierarchies of the islanders.<\/p>\n

Aatea<\/em> does not read like a political story. Told from the protagonist\u2019s perspective alone, it concerns his journey; it resembles a Bildungsroman<\/em> more than a novel of intrigue or social commentary. Political maneuvering, embodied by the repugnant noble astronomer Orua, remains mostly in the background and represents that which Aatea seeks to escape. We do not learn how the islanders\u2019 iniquitous hierarchies dissolve; we are offered only a very modest and timidly drawn (anarchist\/cooperative) alternative to the model of domination\/servility that Aatea resists in the passage above. Faure\u2019s novel offers no facile solutions to inequality and no political program clearly animates her narrative; her allegorical gestures do not map neatly onto existing social realities. Politics\u2014the caste system of the islanders, the survival-ethos of the nomads\u2014pushes the narrative forward but mostly does not lead to political conclusions<\/em>, with the possible exception of subtly advocating for non-violence (Aatea is no warrior, but a peace-loving navigator, although unlike Catherine Dufour\u2019s Champs de la lune<\/em>, Aatea<\/em> does contain a great deal of adventure).<\/p>\n

These three very different narratives\u2014Dufour\u2019s, Roch\u2019s, and Faure\u2019s\u2014all wrestle differently with the political dimensions of their narrative, and with the demands of form. Dufour\u2019s politics are pessimistic with regards to the possibility of transformative collective action; her protagonist remains ultimately isolated (in a position of resignation or renunciation, perhaps\u2014but ambiguously). Despite that pessimism, and her always understated approach, her politics seem clearly articulated in favor of a form of ecological stewardship. Faure prefers not to foreground political critique yet positions it at the core of her narrative; resistance to social hierarchy and systemic inequality forms the unambiguous moral backdrop against which an apparently individualistic tale takes shape. The contrast between the polity and the individual takes center stage in both these narratives. Only Roch pushes collective action to the fore: Ties to (usually dissident) communities define his characters, and isolated or solitary figures often suggest a form of irreparably damaged life, with few exceptions. Both Faure and Roch differently support belonging<\/em> as a relative antidote to the all-consuming logic of domination, although belonging itself is never a simple and settled affair.<\/p>\n

In the small but bustling world of French science fiction, political commitment is largely an expectation, at least among its producers (some of its consumers may care a great deal more about \u201centertainment\u201d). In the broader world, calling fiction \u201cpolitical\u201d often suggests criticism of that fiction, a sense that it is too preachy or moralistic. What I find interesting in the \u201cpolitics\u201d of these three books is that \u201cpreachiness\u201d is not a function of political messaging, but one of aesthetic integrity. It is because Roch\u2019s \u201cAvaler la terre\u201d does violence to logical character development that it appears \u201cpreachy,\u201d not because of the message per se. It forces Clod\u2019s story into a Procrustean bed, that of a political conversion which feels implausible regardless of how we feel about the political content at stake. We cannot believe in Clod\u2019s redemption because the psychological groundwork for that redemption has not been adequately laid. In other words, being \u201cpreachy\u201d is not in fact a political flaw at all, but an aesthetic one. This applies to the anglosphere as much as it does to French speculative fiction; arguably, it applies to all fiction. In Roch\u2019s case, the problem with \u201cAvaler la terre\u201d might be the price of the aesthetic risks he takes; Lanvil emm\u00eal\u00e9e<\/em> is doubtless the most formally inventive and innovative of the three books discussed here, and the closest in outlook and approach to the historical avant-gardes that have so heavily influenced French speculative fiction. To my mind, formal daring like that of Michael Roch has positioned francophone speculative fiction at the forefront of francophone literary experimentation in the twenty-first century.<\/p>\n

Since teaching those French science fiction courses at Virginia Tech, I have not resolved the questions I have raised here, such as the problem of form and its relation to political commitment. I cannot presume to have torn back the veil of language and revealed the specificity of francophone speculative fiction\u2014but I can, based on these strong recent examples, advocate for a more robust culture of translation in the anglosphere. Francophone speculative fiction is to be envied precisely because it resists linguistic and national barriers through a healthy ecosystem of imported literature. The same might be said of litt\u00e9ratures de l\u2019imaginaire in other countries outside the anglosphere. Translation is the only remedy to our near-sightedness, and the mission of translation is the same as that of speculative fiction: to take the human imagination as far as it can go.<\/p>\n

Endnotes<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a>[1] M\u00e9lanie Fazi writes fantastic tales of a pure sort, such as in R\u00eaves de cendre<\/em> (2023); Nicolas Liau has authored several macabre collections in a quirky, elaborate style that hovers between the comic and the gloomy. I would also include the dark fantasy La Cit\u00e9 diaphane<\/em> by Anouck Faure (2023), which I\u2019ve written about at length in \u201cThe Weird and the Fantastic: Genre in Theory, Genre as History,\u201d an academic article in Modern Language Notes<\/em>, vol. 140, no. 4, Sept. 2025, p. 870-889. This article is available as an open access publication. [return<\/a>]<\/p>\n

<\/a>[2] I\u2019m partly taking my cues here from the French scholar Simon Br\u00e9an, whose book La Science-Fiction en France<\/em> (2012) argues that, before the 1950s, the French tradition has little \u201ctrue\u201d SF and indulges instead in what he calls the \u201cnovel of scientific imagination\u201d (\u201cle roman d\u2019imagination scientifique\u201d). One of the characteristics of this proto-SF is the isolated, circumscribed nature of the science-fictional phenomenon or the protagonist: Rather than implicating an entire society, the science-fictional element (called a novum by critic Darko Suvin) is very limited in scope, just as Nemo and his Nautilus<\/em> have no impact on the broader society of the nineteenth century in Verne\u2019s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea<\/em>. [return<\/a>]<\/p>\n

<\/a>[3] Some early French works have a much zanier feel, like the bizarre and often funny Gaston de Pawlowski\u2019s Voyage au pays de la quatri\u00e8me dimension<\/em> (Voyage to the Land of the Fourth Dimension<\/em> [1912], whose \u201cadaptation\u201d into English should be forgotten in favor of a proper translation still to come. Pawlowski\u2019s work also demonstrates the mystical and irrational component often present in the French tradition. \u201cHard\u201d science fiction seems considerably rarer in France than in the anglosphere. [return<\/a>]<\/p>\n

<\/a>[4] A few pre-1950s \u201cpopular\u201d writers who deserve more ink include Gustave Le Rouge (1867-1938) and Maurice Renard (1875-1939). Renard wrote another \u201cweird savant\u201d tale called Le Docteur Lerne, sous-dieu<\/em> (1908), while Le Rouge\u2019s Martian duology (Le Prisonnier de la plan\u00e8te Mars<\/em> in 1908 and La Guerre des vampires<\/em> in 1909) anticipates several later SF tales and includes a cosmic horror component. [return<\/a>]<\/p>\n

<\/a>[5] An early proto-SF film in France is the art deco-infused L\u2019Inhumaine <\/em>by Marcel L\u2019Herbier (1924), which involved the likes of the couturier Paul Poiret and Fernand L\u00e9ger, and whose politics are deeply objectionable, including a brown foreigner as the villain and a blond, blue-eyed protagonist. On the other hand, the anglosphere has always had the likes of Robert Heinlein. [return<\/a>]<\/p>\n
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