We live in formidable times: as the planet overheats, at least five of the largest governments on the planet prefer to turn their gaze to the Moon, first, then to Mars, second. Reality is certainly catching up with fiction… which has not yet said its last word.
Tomorrow always comes too soon
A sign of the times, one of the most popular subgenres of science fiction is climate fictionOr cli-fi, a science fiction fiction that dives headfirst into climate change to see how humanity will fare. Fiction being what it is, it is far from rosy. It’s even a little too heavy, sometimes, like during the first pages of the Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, which has just been published in French.
The story of a ministry formed in 2025 at the initiative of the signatory countries of the Paris Agreement takes shape as we read the testimonies of different people who experience the effects of the climate in very different, rarely joyful, ways. The author immediately throws us into a heat wave that is occurring in India and sticks our noses at buildings that are not all very healthy and certainly not air-conditioned in this overpopulated country, where people are dying by the hundreds due to lack of been prepared for a world where the famous threshold of one and a half degrees Celsius above the average temperature of the pre-industrial era has indeed been crossed.
If you are reading to escape from a somewhat gloomy environment… immediately move on to the next two suggestions.
Mars calls Earth
Crystal Singer is the name of this young woman who, at the end of 1960, decided, with her boyfriend Rick and three other students from the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), to cross the United States to go to the desert of Arizona. Their objective: to send a message to our “neighbors”, Martians who have not given any sign of life for 30 years. Because, you see, The Crystal Singer affair takes place in a parallel world where Earthlings have been receiving messages from Mars since 1896, in the form of ever more difficult mathematical puzzles. The most recent one has not yet been answered.
Except that Crystal suspects she has found the cause of this silence which transcends time and space as we normally understand them. What turns out: communication resumes and the five academics become famous immediately. Now, here it is: Crystal Singer suddenly disappears and Rick, her lover, will have to suffer the consequences, which was certainly not in his plans at the start.
Ethan Chatagnier’s first novel transcends genres. The work promises to be fantastic and loaded with science fiction elements, but it is only the framework for an incursion into all human contradictions: the head and the heart, love and reason, attraction and distance.
Because, you guessed it, after Rick goes looking for his lost love, he’ll discover that she’s already answered all his questions… just not in the way he imagined.
From Earth to…tomorrow
A French critic who read From Earth to Mars by Olivier Zarrouati came away with this advice for future science fiction authors: never forget that “science” comes before “fiction” in the name of this literary genre where authors sometimes get carried away a lot, pour into the fantastic and quickly move away from anticipatory fiction.
The tone is set for this futuristic novel where humans return to settle on Mars only a century after a first exploratory visit, a delay which makes one wonder what could have happened in the meantime. Speaking of deadlines, this novel is not yet sold outside Europe, although it can be purchased digitally on some online platforms.
The author, a French engineer, former manager of the aerospace industry and until now publisher of scientific and technical books, turns here for the first time to fiction. He does not betray his expertise that much by writing this fictional exploration in the form of a technical document that reads well, despite a more serious background that is almost reminiscent of an instruction manual.
It must be said that Zarrouati, from the foreword, invites readers to read this story as a novel by Jules Verne, the spiritual grandfather of all science fiction authors. “In the hyperrealist style of the master, he seeks the springs of a dream which is not only an escape,” he says in the foreword.
This reading nourishes both hemispheres of the brain, therefore, and brings us closer to From the Earth to the moon of Verne, precisely, that of the trilogy of Mars the red, the blue and the green by Kim Stanley Robinson, himself little known for his phantasmagorical digressions.