Abstract
As an echo to Michel Houellbecq’s novel The Possibility of an Island and Greg Egan’s novel Permutation City, in his first science fiction novel, Information Theory, Aurélien Bellanger features a fictional biography of a computer scientist and businessman named Pascal Ertanger, partially inspired by the true-life story of the French Internet provider Xavier Niel. Google plays a key role in this fictional work that depicts the power of the earth conceived as a super computer and how human beings can be hacked. Finally, based on the views exchanged by Sergueï Brin—the cofounder of Google—and Pascal Ertanger, a post-humanist project is inspired in which human data stolen from Facebook are used to create an insectoid humankind. Given that in the novel the last characters think of themselves as a “corpus” and as being written/coded, this article focuses on the mythologies of writing as a key component of French science fiction imagery and as an illustration of the concept of technological singularity.
Notes
1 André Leroi-Gourhan, Le Geste et la parole I: Technique et langage.
2 « Paul Durham ouvrit les yeux, cilla devant la clarté inattendue de la pièce puis tendit paresseusement la main pour la placer dans une flaque de soleil au coin du lit. Des poussières voltigeaient dans le rayon lumineux qui pénétrait obliquement entre les rideaux disjoints, et chaque particule semblait apparaître et disparaitre comme par magie, évoquant un souvenir d’enfance de la dernière fois où il avait trouvé cette illusion si irrésistible, si hypnotique: Il se tenait sur le seuil de la cuisine, la lumière de l’après-midi sectionnait la pièce où poussières, grains de farine et volutes de vapeur tourbillonnaient dans la tranche d’air étincelante » (Egan 31).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Emmanuel Buzay
Emmanuel Buzay is an assistant professor of French and Francophone Studies in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst). He has published in Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: SITES; on the video game Assassin’s Creed (with Elisabeth Herbst Buzay) in Genre and the Modern Middle Ages (Cambria UP, 2015); and on Michel Houllebecq and Aurélien Bellanger, “Le Désir d’être écrit: Étude comparative de deux modèles d’écriture computationnels dans La Possibilité d’une île de Michel Houellebecq et La Théorie de l’information d’Aurélien Bellanger,” in Lectures croisées de l’œuvre de Michel Houellebecq (Classiques Garnier, 2017).