There are forbidden borders, a life-saving space flight and tribes of thinking animals to conquer in Plasmas, Céline Minard’s most recent book. But this is not quite what earned him to be considered for the 2021 edition of the Medici, an award which wishes to grant to a still unknown author all the notoriety that should come to him. It is rather this way that the French author has of deconstructing fiction to serve it as an appetizer keeping the reader in suspense until the end.
And as with any good work of science fiction, the key to the puzzle is only found at the end. She doesn’t come too early in this story, which actually takes the form of a series of short stories that at first (and even second) glance don’t have much in common. They begin in the air, on a trapeze, where a trio of tightrope walkers accomplish aerial feats thanks to this human je-ne-sais-quoi that will always mystify the sense of observation, however irreproachable, of the Bjorgs, of the “bots” who seem to have got the better of all or almost all of humanity.
Stories follow one after another which are neither chapters nor news. No linearity in the narration, which has gone through the mill. We see in turn a Jane Goodall taken straight from an alternate reality, an Ellen Ripley at the start of the journey in this Alien who saw humanity destroy the Earth, the Moon then Mars, then Dr. Ellie Sattler revisiting the first living creatures of a Jurassic era buried in a sludge dating from the Pleistocene.
Plasmas brings together 157 pages of winks and confusing paragraphs, like so many small snow globes each containing its own little world, its microcosm. Then a last page, the 158e, turns this quilt into a sort of long poem that would make even the best put together haiku run out of steam with exhaustion.
The key is life
“If we leave Earth as a playground, deserted […], life, […] without taking the monkeys for masters to think […], there won’t be ”, Céline Minard wrote in many more words than that in Plasmas.
And what are these plasmas? It is up to the reader to find out. No doubt we are as dizzy to read this science and fiction novel, but not quite science fiction, as we would have to observe with the most powerful telephoto lens the center of the Universe, then to come back towards oneself while carrying out a slow zoom out, crossing one layer after another of these plasmas which constitute space.
To visit space is also in a way to visit time, and in this case the future, to come, is possible even if it is unlikely. It’s exotic. Destabilizing. It is an emotion for the lover of anticipation novels which is rarely a good sign, since it is very human to look for landmarks along the way so as not to lose track.
In the absence of these benchmarks, one must have total confidence in the author to follow her to the end of her plasmas, at the end of space, where, hopefully, life remains possible. Because without life, there is no hope, and without hope, there are only fragments of completely disjointed stories.