Bernard Werber’s Poetics of Ecological Reconstruction: “In Praise of Amnesia”?

Abstract

Contemporary French science fiction, influenced by American writers of the genre, is essentially dystopic. The novelist Bernard Werber, although deeply influenced by American science-fiction, proposes “other” modes of thinking as alternatives for a new ecological imagination. This article considers the five principal strategies that he uses to write a utopian fiction focused on new ways of thinking: the insertion of non-fiction, such as encyclopaedic fragments, in his novels; the use of interspecies analogies; the insertion of ideological arguments into the narrative; a description of otherness that interactively engages readers; a multidimensional perception of time.