2023-12-09 19:51:09
Finally, despite the mutations that exist, we realize that humans still repeat the same mistakes. And it’s paradoxically completely topical too.
We have the choice between fear and love. This is what my heroine repeats. And there we live in fear. Anyway, I listened to the news before coming. It’s a bit anxiety-inducing. So there’s a moment where we say to ourselves ‘awow, that’s awful’.
And that’s what’s happening
Yes, but we still have to react. We must not stay like rabbits facing a truck that is going to crush them. There is a moment, we have to say to ourselves: OK, we could go left, we could go right, we could duck to avoid the truck. And it is up to us, science fiction authors or science fiction authors, to suggest ways to make things work out.
I hope that the next generations want a better world than ours, but it’s up to us to find ideas and it’s a problem of imagination. So it’s up to us, science fiction writers, to come up with ideas.
When reading the book, we say to ourselves: but ultimately, it’s a book that takes a long time because it begins and ends 60 years later. But it raises the question of the history of humanity in fact, and even of the history of the world. But in 100, 500 or 10,000 years, what will we remember from what we have done here on earth and from our passage?
Exactly, that’s a real question, and it’s a question that I allow myself to ask. And at the same time, I invite the reader to relax. It goes beyond the emotional effect of immediate news. Let’s look with perspective at where we came from, what happened, how our civilization appeared and how it was weakened and could disappear.
Already, the mere fact of putting things into perspective over time, as our situation evoked, means that we are less focused, we are less focused. the Roman Empire disappeared, attacked by barbarians, and it took 1000 years before we returned to the Renaissance. We operate through collapse and rebirth. And there, what my heroine proposes is how we are going to be reborn after the collapse that seems to be coming.
What’s happening is World War III in my novel, but I handle it in 20 pages. But there, it’s a twist, suddenly we expand and suddenly something collapses. And afterward, you have to find a way to find air again, to be reborn. And I’m already trying to think of the next episode. But listening to the news, I think we’re going to have some small problems in the months to come.
You also ask the question of scientific advances. Because in the book, when you explain the mutations of human hybridizations, we are not there yet, in any case, legally or officially. But hybridizations between several species, as you explained, really exist. We are not far from the truth. We could manage, at some point, to create a human hybrid, a human chimera.
Two years ago in Japan they allowed the extension of fetuses that mix human DNA with animal DNA. Until then, it was limited to fourteen days, you could make beings that were a mixture of human beings and animals, but you had to eliminate them after fourteen days. Now there are no limits.
And the reason why we authorize this type of manufacturing of hybrids, therefore of chimera, is to have organs for transplants, because there is a huge shortage of organs for transplants. And so with man-pig or man-monkey or man-sheep mixtures, we hope to manufacture organs, hearts, lungs which can be transplanted into us and save us.
And that’s why what I say in The time of chimeras is actually going to happen. Even as crazy as it seems, it’s going to happen because in addition, there are the Chinese and the Russians who are doing clandestine research and who want to create mixtures between men and animals.
That’s striking. I don’t know whether we should be afraid or happy about the progress of science.
I tried to warn people.
But is this dangerous or a message of hope?
In the book, I show the hopes and the dangers. But above all, I show that it will lead to other humans with other mentalities. That is to say that they will find themselves thinking differently, because they fly, because they swim, because they go underground, and these human beings there, somewhere, will enrich our culture and our intelligence.
But our humanity still survives. And in my books, I always put a ‘Happy End’, because I want my reader, when he finishes reading the book, to say to himself: OK, it’s going to be complicated, but we’ll get through it.
We smile, but we ask ourselves many, many, many questions. And you, between your character’s chimeras, what do you choose? Air, water or earth?
Air, because it is flight. We all have the fantasy of flying. (…) When we walk, we are glued to the ground. There is this idea of being able to soar, to fly, to see things from above. Earlier, I said that the science fiction author must try to put things into perspective, but when you fly, you automatically have this perspective.
So, it’s true, between water, air and earth, I choose air. But I believe that, if there is global warming, it will be the earth. We’re going to have to live underground like moles and that’s also one of the possibilities. Or in the water, like dolphins or like aquatic animals. But in any case, it’s good to put this possibility into perspective and say to ourselves: ‘OK, this world has new possibilities, completely crazy, and we might be able to see them’.
You release a novel every year and here, it’s called The time of chimeras. The next one will be next October. Where is he?
So precisely, it was while being on the Paris-Brussels TGV that I found my beginnings, my takeoff. You know, it’s like a rocket, it needs a launch. I already had the structure, but I didn’t have the beginning. And then, suddenly, I found it. I’ve just been writing about it the whole time on the train, so I’m happy for that. For that alone, it was worth coming.
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