Sur un rythme atypique, la science-fiction helvétique poursuit son expansion effrénée avec Dimension Suisse, Anthologie de Science-Fiction et de Fantastique Suisse Romande, chez Rivière Blanche, présentée par Vincent Gessler et Anthony Vallat. Le recueil héberge 13 nouvelles de 13 auteurs suisses dont, vous l’avez maintenant deviné, votre serviteur, ainsi que bon nombre d’amis et la quasi-intégralité du CREP, le cercle d’écriture local incontournable dont je faisais jadis partie.

Ma nouvelle en question, « Au-dessus de Shibuya », propose une translation géographico-temporelle distillé en un mélange de futur proche, de Japon et de réalités augmentées. Les plus impatients se réjouiront d’apprendre que le texte vient de paraître sous forme audio dans l’épisode 40 d’Utopod, le podcast désormais culte de Lucas Moreno & consorts.

Les autres se laisseront peut-être tenter par un extrait:

La biche explosa en un nuage de cœurs roses au contact de la petite fille. Les enfants autour d’elle éclatèrent de rire et se mirent à sautiller pour les attraper. Un garçon se retourna et cria quelque chose : la biche était réapparue derrière eux. Ils la prirent en chasse, maladroitement, leur kimono trop ample flottant dans le vent.

Adrian les regarda s’éloigner, fasciné. Il isola la séquence, la compressa et routa le flux vers la console qui dormait à près de dix mille kilomètres de lui sous la table de son salon, dans le XVIIIe arrondissement. Claire la verrait à son réveil. Il n’avait pas réussi à la convaincre de quitter Paris pour l’accompagner, mais elle lui avait fait promettre un compte rendu détaillé de son reportage.

Le recueil est disponible à la commande sur le site de Rivière Blanche, ainsi que dans les diverses librairies qui ont le bon goût de proposer les volumes de Rivière Blanche, ou encore dans vos festivals préférés (Imaginales, Utopiales, etc). A ce propos, les anthologistes et un sous-ensemble conséquent des auteurs de ce recueil (dont votre serviteur, décidément) seront présents aux Imaginales à Epinal pour en parler, le signer, boire des verres jusqu’à pas d’heure, etc.

L’occasion de nous dire bonjour, d’acheter Dimension Suisse, et pourquoi pas de poursuivre la découverte de la SF suisse avec le recueil « Défricheurs d’Imaginaire » de Jean-François Thomas, chez Bernard Campiche, et « Cygnis », le nouveau et brillant roman de SF enneigée de Vincent Gessler (oui, l’anthologiste de Dimension Suisse, c’est bien vous suivez) à l’Atalante!

Et pour conclure, j’adresse un immense merci à Anthony et Vincent pour leur excellent travail sur cette anthologie, ainsi qu’à Lucas Moreno pour avoir retenu ma nouvelle pour Utopod et Sylvain Demierre pour l’avoir lue avec toujours autant de talent!

PS: Pour couronner l’inceste, c’est Sylvain Demierre qui a réalisé cette belle couverture. Ou quand la lenteur légendaire helvétique fait place à l’ubiquité.

Until yesterday, I sincerely couldn’t be bothered to contribute my personal take to the already irritatingly loud buzz that keeps growing around Avatar, but too many people I know and respect have said good things about it for me to repress the sudden urge to write up a shiny rant.

(Yes, there will be spoilers, which leaves you with the amusing conundrum that you need to see the film before you can know why you needn’t have seen it.)

Avatar has been largely celebrated by the masses and the media. That it has been enjoyed by many is a fact that cannot be refuted. In fact, even I enjoyed it to some extent: the cutting-edge technological prowess, the lush colourful fantasy world, the immersive eye-candy. It would be pointless to call Avatar anything but bliss for the senses.

Even the overall action follows a pattern so predictable and well-proven that it couldn’t possibly have failed to overwhelm the viewer with adrenaline-fuelled excitement.

But as soon as the 3D glasses are taken off, the effect wears off and evolves into one of two possible feelings: most people leave with a dreamy head; I left with a profound taste of unease in my mouth, as if I had been cheated in ways I couldn’t yet put my finger on. So I turned to the Internet.

Naturally, critiques abound, usually raising valid issues all related but in my opinion only peripheral to the central flaw. The recurrent comments include:

• It’s Pocahontas in Space/Fern Gully/Dance with the Ewoks or the white guilt complex all over again.
• The confrontation is strictly manichaean and all the characters are one-dimensional and never truly challenged.
• The action is littered with incoherences (Na’vis chat in the no-comm zone, etc).
• The plot is simplistic and the world greatly under-used (awkward human/na’vi interaction, etc).
• The hippie, green, anti-capitalist message is at odds with the blockbuster nature of the work ($1B mark in three weeks, good job).
• It’s bad quality science-fiction.

All of which are obviously accurate and described in enough details elsewhere. The converts typically counter these arguments by arguing that they are inevitable because of the budget and by claiming the freedom to use archetypes to structure the story (as does Lionel Davoust in his convincing essay, in French). I personally refute the idea that a big budget is ever an excuse for a simplistic development (e.g. Matrix, Lord of the Rings, The Dark Knight, Wall-E, etc), and while I have no problem with archetypes, I found their use too superficial to convey any kind of message.

However, one particularly interesting article details what Avatar could have been, based on a much earlier script codenamed Project 880. It’s interesting because it addresses most of the issues above and fills in the numerous narrative blanks which anyone who stopped staring at the wonders of Pandora for over a second couldn’t help noticing.

For instance, in Project 880, humans are fascinated by Pandora as an Eden compared to their ravaged Earth, which is shown and the motivation of several characters. The human-Na’vi relationship is also more complex (in Avatar, it is awkward and skilfully avoided, at best). And Jake Sully gains respect from the Na’vis by sweating and performing well in a hunt, possibly thanks to his past marine training (character building, how exciting!), not by dropping on the back of a giant orange dragon and magically riding it at the other end of the narrative ellipsis.

Project 880 had a broader scope, developed human and Na’vi characters with actual motivations, more interesting plot twists and a richer background that tied everything together. And at some point during the production, this vast science-fiction script was transformed into a one-dimensional manichaean naive fantasy film.

Note for the purists: this is not to suggest science-fiction is superior to fantasy. There is bad science-fiction and good fantasy; this just isn’t it, and it’s worth pointing out that a paradigm change happened along the way.

It is easy to imagine why: simplifying the film alleviated any risk of confusing viewers and helped maximize the audience. Nevertheless, there was definitely a risk that by streamlining the concept to death, people would be disappointed by its superficiality.

But they weren’t. They loved it.

Partly thanks to the distraction of the spectacular world they were placed into and the steady pace at which they were led through it. But most of the trick consisted in tapping one of the fundamental weaknesses of humans today: their laziness.

And here comes what I consider the central problem with Avatar: it is a tremendously passive film.

Cinema, like any art, isn’t a passive medium. The spectator engages with the piece emotionally, intellectually. Art plants seeds in his mind and lets them flourish through his imagination. He inhabits the characters, feels their doubts, struggles, joys and tears. He immerses himself in the story and might even end up changed in his own self at the end of the journey. It is a celebration of human nature and life.

This is why good films need rich, human characters and a powerful story to shake them.

But because Avatar is so shallow, because its story is so linearly binary and its characters uni-dimensional, it requires all the power of its fantastic visuals to stun the viewers into a wonder-induced stupor so that they can be guided passively through the bump-free narration. They can fully engage with their senses, but not their human emotions, let alone their intellect. It elevates the whole film to a state of dreamy fantasy, a happy ending fairy tale for adults.

It’s a happy tale indeed, in a black and white world where no sacrifices, no hard choices have to be made, where efforts are unneeded (Jake succeeds at everything without much pain), where small tribal minorities and Mother Nature (Good) win over a fully-equipped technological army of trained warriors (Evil), where only minor characters nobody cares about die and where the hero wins everything at the end without any loss (or any psychological change). Even when the great Hometree falls, the utmost catastrophe moments ago, laments last but a few minutes before the matter is set aside and everyone hugs below the backup Tree of Souls.

No wonder so many people claimed they “wish they could go to Pandora.”

But nobody can go there because it doesn’t exist, cannot exist, outside of a dream. Dreams, like funfair rides, are beautiful, free of disappointment, and in them the spectator can happily veg out.

Sadly, Avatar marks our time, not as a technological milestone, but as the ultimate product of an era in which society is so disillusioned with its responsibilities that it welcomes total abandonment to passive fantasy narratives which elegantly conceal our denial to marvel at true human nature and reality.

Indeed, in order to maintain the illusion, Avatar is soothing, devoid of any asperity that would let some humanity in. It brings no answers, no questions, no disturbance.

It is a bright, vivid but passive journey into an ephemeral dream world everybody would rather live in than our own.

The question is, who will take care of our world then?

2010 is here, so it’s about time to wrap up 2009 with a micro-panorama of the albums which, according to me, defined that year.

As always, I call bullshit on people who pretend that no good music is released anymore. Here is my own subjective proof, in the form of a 2009 top 10 albums (followed by drop-outs from the short-list), accompanied by their respective Twitter-length micro-review.

10. Bill Callahan — Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle

Intimate stroll with a lone crooner and his humble orchestra. Simple, deep, human songs.

9. Florence + The Machine — Lungs

More than pleasant hipster pop, its tunes either catchy or naive.

8. The Dead Weather — Horehound

Jack White’s new supergroup and latest genius iteration of rock’n'roll, conjuring a sexier vibe, sharper sounds.

7. Phoenix — Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

Strongest instalment of Gallic pop-rock yet. Tighter, richer, more daring and referential than ever.

6. Bat For Lashes — Two Suns

Natasha Khan steps outside and embraces a broader musical scope in her mystical journey.

5. Au Revoir Simone — Still Night, Still Light

Casio-pop elevated to a new level, where naive words dance with trivial melodies and shine.

4. Sufjan Stevens — The BQE

Beautiful mini-symphony swirling from Tchaikovsky to Gershwin, seamless wedding of orchestra & electronica.

3. The XX — XX

2009’s revelation of minimal rock, haunting production of dry beats and clear guitar and tense duets.

2. Dinosaur Jr. — Farm

Conquering guitars, fuelled by a rare melancholic humility. A new gem of classical rock.

1. Fever Ray — Fever Ray

Incense and lasers. Soundtrack for a pagan celebration of drums, synths & obsessive, forbidden melodies.
Read the rest of this entry »

One positive aspect of getting an Android smart phone, i.e. of being online anywhere/anytime, is that I can read Neil Gaiman’s ever entertaining Twitter feed while sleep-walking home from a night out. A corollary of this is that I can then tweet to my own Twitter feed, too. Which I do.

It’s an interesting technosocial experiment on an interesting medium, which is most of the time used for useless purposes (“I sneezed twice this morning” kind of posts), but not exclusively. Interesting to see information propagate. Interesting to be encouraged to write micro-reviews of things I’d otherwise be too lazy to write a whole blog post about. Interesting to bathe in ambient superfluous noise. Interesting to hear people constantly mistake “entertainment” for “information”. Interesting to be one click away from your favourite celebrities. Interesting to read what people are interested in, what they think is relevant, and disagree with them. Interesting to observe people communicate, because that’s what we all do, and that’s just a new way to do it.

Twitter has a huge number of shortcomings, the most evident of which is its extremely poor support for semantics (“it’s all just text” is a lame workaround to avoid having to solve a deeper problem); in that technical regard, I find Tumblr incomparably more attractive and interesting. I might even give it a go in parallel, to explore all what it offers, while hoping that Twitter catches up with richer features.

But I’ll keep reading and posting to Twitter, too, because it’s where the critical mass has been attained to make it one of the most interesting online social artifact at the moment.

So if you’re so bored that you need to read more nonsense from me, subscribe to my Twitter feed (best done if you subscribe to the service yourself)!

I finally gave in to the 21th century a few weeks ago and bought a smart phone. A very smart phone. It goes by the grandiose name of HTC Hero, although T-Mobile somewhat confusingly sells it under the G2 Touch moniker, which is not to be confused with the T-Mobile myTouch 3G (originally HTC Magic), or the HTC Touch.

Confused yet? Me too.

The HTC Hero runs Android, the (mostly open source) operating system developed by Google, although the Hero actually uses the HTC Sense interface, which is significantly slicker and better than the native Android one. In particular, multi-touch zoom, a better onscreen keyboard, better widgets, more home screens and native integration of Facebook & Twitter.

I’m not going to write an in-depth review of the device, though, because there are plenty on the web already, and I’m not going to play the compare and contrast game with the iPhone, because it’s puerile and off the point. All I’ll say is that while the iPhone is still more fluid and polished, it’s lagging behind now (no homescreen, no multitask, no background apps, no Ogg Vorbis or Flac playback, etc). Anyway, I don’t want an iPhone because I don’t want to/cannot depend on iTunes, and the elegant but totalitarian Apple kingdom. If anything, I’d rather have a look at a Palm Pre: more open, HTML5 technologies, audacious gesture interface, physical keyboard.

Back to the HTC Hero.

I’m happy to say it replaced three devices, while still being smaller in volume than any of them: my crappy Nokia 6100, my Nokia N810 internet tablet and my iAudio X5 music player.

Of course, the physical keyboard and larger screen of the N810 made for a better desktop-like experience, but its Maemo system was precisely too desktop oriented and slow and cumbersome. I fear the same shortcomings will apply to the upcoming Nokia N900, by the way.

And of course, my iAudio X5 had 60GB, which already wasn’t enough, and the Hero only has 2GB by default (can be upgraded to 32GB which I probably will soon). Definitely a downgrade, but sadly inevitable.

All things considered, it’s still much more comfortable to carry a single device, especially one with good phone and wifi connectivity, a pretty UI and a boatload of applications to install for free.

By synchronizing with the technogeek crowd (which would have been referred to as “cyberpunk” only 20 years ago), I feel like I’ve joined the new phase of humanity, a phase of ubiquitous connectivity, of ambient information, an organic mesh of individuality waiting to be harvested. There is no point dismissing it, just like there was no point dismissing mobile phones, phones, radios, electricity or written words. We can only accept it, embrace it, and look forward to the horrors and wonders it is going to bring us.

Incense was burning at the front of the stage while two sharp green laser rays cut through the thick fog, pulsating along the sinister, industrial purring of “If I had a Heart” that preceded Fever Ray’s arrival, last Thursday at Shepherds Bush Empire. The electronic festivities perfectly blend with the odd decoration on stage — vintage lampshades imported from your Swedish grandparents’ living room — and the grotesque, mysterious costumes worn by the band members. And how often do you see a woman playing the congas at an electronic concert?

I was really going to write a review for this fantastically surreal gig, but the Guardian’s review simply says exactly what I had in mind, conjuring such appropriately evocative images as “a pagan ceremony with lasers”.

Fever Ray, at Shepherds Bush Empire, London, by theefer

Her live band are only dimly visible, their faces painted or masked. They are equipped with keyboards and computers, rattles and shamanistic paraphernalia. In their midst is a strange, heavily cloaked figure which may be Andersson or may not – we cannot say for sure until this great cloth chrysalis releases a slender woman with long blond hair.

Fever Ray, at Shepherds Bush Empire, London, by theefer

Untreated, as on the haunting “Keep the Streets Empty For Me”, Andersson’s voice evokes a demonic Björk; processed, it can become disconcertingly masculine, and part of the effect of seeing Fever Ray live lies in the disjunct between Andersson’s appearance and the ungodly sounds she produces.

Fever Ray, at Shepherds Bush Empire, London, by theefer

See the full Flickr set for this gig.