Fantastic Metropolis

At that time—the mid-1980s—many new authors had appeared and French SF boasted more than forty professional writers. (Professional meaning of course they were published professionally, though very few earned enough money to make a living. The French market was simply too small and French books were rarely translated for publication elsewhere.) A monthly magazine—Fiction—featured one or more short stories by French authors in every issue, with eight to ten “new authors” every year. Regular anthologies were open to French stories and a special one-shot anthology entitled Futurs au Présent was entirely devoted to new, not-yet-professional, authors. Futurs au Présent revealed Serge Brussolo and Jean-Marc Ligny—two major French SF authors—and was followed by Superfuturs, a few years later. In the meantime, Editions Fleuve Noir published nearly sixty French books every year. Young authors were slowly replacing their elders.

Tragically, though, the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s was marked by a major editorial crisis.

At that time, Fiction disappeared, along with the annual anthology series “Univers”. Many SF publishers reduced their activity and most of them stopped publishing new French authors. The only major exception was Fleuve Noir Anticipation—but they only put out thirty French SF books a year while making several unsuccessful attempts at publishing Star Trek novels or Fantasy lite series. Fleuve Noir revealed almost all the new authors of the early 1990s like Ayerdhal and Serge Lehman—not to mention the Belgian Alain le Bussy, the Swiss Wildy Petoud or the Canadian Jean-Louis Trudel. The sole exception was Pierre Bordage, a brilliant novelist who was discovered by a regional press and climbed his way to fame in a year or so!

The situation remained more or less the same until 1995, when three SF magazines were launched almost simultaneously. The first was CyberDreams, which intended to be the French equivalent of Interzone. It played a major role in revealing the new generation of British authors and in publishing several French stories.

Bifrost and Galaxies soon followed, coming out the same month and contributing to clear more space for new authors. Each magazine published about 30 issues so far.

In the meantime, two French short story anthologies edited by famous French authors were released: Genèses, edited by Ayerdhal in 1996 through major French publisher J’ai lu, and Escales sur l’horizon, edited by Serge Lehman in 1998 (it was followed by Escales 2000 last summer, which I was in charge of, and Escales 2001 released last year).

Escales sur l’horizon was a huge book with short stories and novellas from sixteen French and Canadian authors. It also contained a very important preface by Serge Lehman, which might be considered the “French SF Manifesto” of the end of the century. These two collections were well received by the public—both won prizes—and now the press refers to us as the new “French SF wonderboys”. Don’t laugh!

In fact, even though the situation is becoming better—each major French publisher is creating or revamping its own Science-Fiction/Fantasy/Gothic line and the public seems more interested in what the future will look like (probably an effect of the millennium change)—the only way for French SF to survive is to cross borders and find readers outside Europe.

And then we went back to space—were it all started.

A good example of a writer along that trend is Laurent Genefort. He is one of our wunderkind (he is thirty, with nearly as many books behind him) and he is famous for his depiction of alien environments and strange planets. He wrote a series of independent novels that take place in a galaxy once populated by a very ancient race called the “Vangk”. The Vangk disappeared but left behind a fantastic collection of artefacts—from doors that allow travel between distant stars to an entire planet shaped like a Dyson sphere where humans as well as other creatures have been transferred en masse for some kind of experiment. This is something that you can find in books by other Europeans—Alastair Reynolds and his Revelation Space come to mind, or Juan Miguel Aguilera.

However, and even though many French authors are well aware of the cultural icons and trends of Anglophone Science Fiction, our books have a very distinct flavour. Try our wine, too…

3. Typical French themes: art, flesh and irony

It is somewhat difficult to point out the specificity of French SF —assuming it is specific, which I believe it is. Surrealism was probably a major influence in the 1980s, as well as the “Nouveau Roman” and other literary experiments, but this concerns mainly the way we write our stories, not their subjects. Besides, Surrealism is so “air du temps”—part of the background—here in Europe that it is hard not to be influenced by it.