Jeanne-A.

Debates.

-

Michael Meniane

  • The international science fiction festival begins this Thursday in Nantes, on five different sites (Cité des Congrès, Lieu Unique, CIC Ouest, Château des Ducs de Bretagne and the barge Le Sémaphore).

  • The theme of the festival is “Traces”, which necessarily refers to the current global pandemic.

  • As Jeanne-A Debats, artistic delegate of the festival, explains, the virus has often been a favorite subject in science fiction.

From Thursday until Sunday, in Nantes, it's off again for a new edition of Utopiales, an international festival dedicated to science fiction.

For this 20th anniversary, “Traces” is the theme chosen by the organizers.

This subject necessarily refers to the Covid-19 epidemic which affects the planet.

"It's a pure coincidence", confides Jeanne-A Debats, artistic delegate of Utopiales and author of science fiction.

The pandemic, is it a recurring theme in the history of science fiction?

The epidemic as a genre of science fiction is still a very old fad of history.

I think

of Stephen King's

Scourge

of 1978. As a legacy trace in the history of science fiction, the epidemic is a real subject.

For example, the Covid-19 leaves traces in our bodies, those who have been ill will not contradict me.

Also, this virus, in my opinion, we attracted it by leaving traces on animal life, for example, by destroying the habitats of bats, pangolins and other bugs.

This pandemic, we had envisioned it in works of science fiction as in the film

Contagion

by Steven Soderbergh.

In this work, you will find real things that you have experienced ...

Science fiction is a bit of a whistleblower, you mean?

Part of science fiction is whistleblowing.

Not all.

We note a present fact and we only magnify it.

When Soderbergh writes

Contagion

, he knows full well that the virus is coming because it has been said by scientists.

Moreover, he relies on scientific prospective work to make his film.

Science fiction writers always rely on that.

These foundations can become poetic in the works, but their basis is always scientific.

We start from a rational basis, and then, we take off to tell a story, and possibly warn of something.

Prevention is not the formal role of SF, but it is a role that it sometimes takes on.

And why is the virus such a favorite subject for science fiction writers?

Because it hits the mind.

Flagship works like

 The Mask of the Red Death

by Edgar Allan Poe or 

La Peste

by Albert Camus, closer to us, are not science fiction, but they deal with extremely promising subjects.

For example, we lost half of the population in Europe around the 13th century to the plague. 

Flynn's

Eifelheim

, a great SF novel, takes that up.

Does the notion of devastating consequences also interest science fiction?

Obviously, there are dramatic consequences for men, but there are also serious political and social consequences.

When the plague ravaged Europe before the Renaissance, it nipped a real rebirth in the bud.

The nations concerned take 150 years to recover.

The pandemic has not only fatal effects on the body, but also catastrophic effects for democracy, community life and the people who survive.

In

King's

Scourge

, at the end of the novel, we have a fight between evil and good, evil which is autocratic, without free expression and which enslaves.

Stephen King's novel goes from science fiction to fantasy as supernatural characters intervene in the last third of the novel.

The supernatural is not in the field of SF.

During the festival, several meetings will be devoted to the theme of the pandemic.

It is hard to imagine that you did not choose this theme on purpose in the current context ...

No, it would have been too easy to totally orient the Utopiales on Covid-19 and we did not do it because we thought it would be too easy and that the subject would already be dealt with elsewhere.

People would surely be tired of only talking to them about this.

Moreover, the “Traces” theme was decided at the end of November, the Covid-19 already existed, but we were talking about it on the margins.

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  • Culture

  • Covid 19

  • Coronavirus

  • Festival

  • Science fiction

  • Nantes