At the moment :

- France 2060

- The Human Factor

Extract : Human Factor - almost opening paragraphs

He was to join a cargo, the Janus, under the orders of Captain Derek Caplin, alongside Danele Cidron, communications officer, a lieutenant like himself. He didn’t know them yet but he had heard of the Captain who had been on cargoes for many years. He’d been everywhere, it was said. There wasn’t a system he didn’t know.

Good, thought David, for Pegasis V’s system was on the very edges of the Galaxi and those systems made people nervous. There was always the fear of running into the Iquouarians, or rather, there was the fear of being attacked by the Iquouarians.

The warring peoples of Terra, who had always considered themselves as being alone in the universe until their own arrival on the intersidereal scene a few hundred years ago, had found themselves in the presence of other inhabited worlds, other races of humanity, other peoples possessing technology more or less advanced, and, unfortunately, other conflicts. They found themselves thrown into the middle of an intergalactic conflict that had been going on for centuries, dominated by the Iquouarians, a people far more belligerent than themselves coming from another galaxy. The Iquouarians rampaged through the few systems they knew about, crushing everything and everybody, progressing from planet to planet like a steamroller that nobody knew how to stop. 

Extract : 2060 - Opening paragraphs :

Michael Dacosta was starting to get impatient. He was tired, he was thoroughly bored and the tension created by the journey as well as the constant surveillance was weighing heavily. It had been a journey by train covering a distance that would have been done by plane in any other country. However, in France, the only people to use the plane were the leaders, everyone else having to use high speed trains. Cars had become a rarity since the oil crash twenty years before, so the railway network had been reactivated and developed. In addition to that, no plane from a foreign country ever landed in France. Until very recently, the borders of this country had been impenetrable by any method whatsoever.

He put down the leaflet he had just looked through and tried to catch the eye of the receptionist to have a chat, but she avoided any contact, even if, from the corner of his eye he saw her glance rapidly at him. Maybe she didn’t speak English and it was imperative that he did not speak French to her. That talent had to remain hidden.

FRANCE 2060. Why this theme? Well, the extreme right has been gaining power. What would happen if they came to power? If we look at Germany in the 1930s, we see that the people thought that Hitler was the answer to the problems they were having after being humiliated following WW1. Little by little there were laws passed and one day the people woke up to find themselves under Hitler's boot and at war. Yes, sometimes the FN says out loud things one might think on some subjects, but there are all the other subjects that it would be best not to see become law. Not mention that once in power they could push through a law by force, as we have already seen with the regular government. There is a proviso for that. Tyrany is never far away and the technology exists that can crush people and dictate behaviour. We can see what happens in other countries that we thought were civilised and democratic. Nothing is guaranteed, so in a novel, let's see how far we can go, why not ?

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FRANCE 2060. It isn't the real title, but it reflects the date that I'd put on the text when I started doing it around 2014. However, time has gone by and so things change and so I've eliminated all the dates and the reader can imagine what he or she likes. The picture is what I'd like to see on the cover, however. Well, this story takes place in a France post Frexit and the National Front in power, only it isn't called that any more and it's rather amusing to see that the name they decided to change to, sounding more acceptable to the population, is similar to the one I chose back then, for the same reason! Had they been reading my mind? A lot of research has gone into the future of things like nanotechnology, surveillance, transport, etc. France isn't a good place to live in : closed borders, of the type like the wall between the USA and Mexico, redistribution of population, government racism, reeducation camps, permanent surveillance - and the last one posed a problem at one time because if everyone is watched and listened to all the time, how could my main character do what he wants to do? So, I put the whole thing to the side for a while and wrote "L'Ange timbré" which came out in 2022 (in French - the English version has yet to be done), and then dring! along came the solution to my problem. I knew it would, it's happened before. So now I'm getting on with it and all my characters can get on with their plans and their counter-plans, and as one of my characters on the "baddy" side says, everything's going according to plan. The action is happening around Les Vans as I know the region and you have to base your story somewhere, so why not Les Vans.

THE HUMAN FACTOR.  So here we are with some SF. I began some time ago at the beginning of the years 2000 and went back to it last year and I'm having a good time writing it. It tells of the encounter between a human like us and a human of another kind, an encounter which results in the existence of a hybrid, whose role is crucial to the survival of everyone. There is therefore a love story somewhere, but those it concerns do not admit to it, as they think it is impossible. This story allows me to play around with the notion of what is human. At the end of the first part, I'd read a book in the form of a comic strip by a local artist, Tom Joseph, and I liked his style, and since my writing is more "cinema-like", as I don't go in for long litterary descriptions and the dialogues go along with the action, I asked him if he would care to turn my text into a comic strip and I'd do the bubbles. He said that editors don't always take the original people, they might keep the artist and get someone else to write the bubbles (!), or vice-versa. But I don't want an artist that doesn't correspond to what I want, of course. And I don't want someone else writing my texts. So we dropped the subject. A pity, for we could have done a series as there are several parts to this story. So this story is busy trotting along to the end. However, I don't know whether I'll ever bring it out.