La Pandémie en science-fiction ed. by Christophe Becker and Clémentine Hogue

Abstract

Reviewed by: La Pandémie en science-fiction ed. by Christophe Becker and Clémentine Hogue Amy Ransom A French Take on the Pandemic. Christophe Becker and Clémentine Hogue, eds. La Pandémie en science-fiction. Books on Demand, 2021. 164 pp. €8 pbk, €1,99 ebk. Stella Incognita is a French scholarly association for the promotion and development of the study of sf (http://stella-incognita.byethost18.com/). Analagous to our SFRA, it organizes colloquia, but it has also developed one response to the evolving landscape of scholarly publishing by sponsoring juried essay collections available in print from Books on Demand. This [End Page 552] volume, which acknowledges in its introduction, "Penser l'après" [Thinking about Afterward], its inspiration in COVID-19, includes seven articles by university-affiliated academics, including a number of graduate students, on the theme of pandemic in (mostly) twenty-first century works of film and literature. In addition, the volume opens with an article devoted to its presence in the late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century French merveilleux scientifique. These studies offer a partial answer to the questions posed by the editors in their introduction: to what extent has sf documented the realities we have all so recently faced, and what answers does sf provide for the problems posed by the pandemic? The volume includes two essays in English, which I will address first because of their accessibility for readers of SFS. Héloïse Thomas's "'Have You Considered the Perfection of the Virus?' Pandemics, Apocalypses, and the Arts" analyzes how Emily St. John Mandel's critically acclaimed novel Station Eleven (2014) represents (and elides) aspects of the pandemic, deploys multiple types of temporality (linear and cyclical), and ultimately suggests that meaning-making itself functions like a contagion in the novel, positing the arts as both a nostalgic refuge and a utopian remedy. In addition, Helen Mundler's "From the Unheimlich to the new Heimlich: Rereading Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam Trilogy from the Perspective of Covid-19" performs the task so very clearly outlined in its title, invoking, of course, how reading novels published from 2003 to 2013 invokes Freud's uncanny in the context of the current pandemic. Articles in French also analyze works from the Anglo-American corpus, including "Le virus du language dans The Flame Alphabet de Ben Marcus" by Stefania Iliescu, which looks at how this 2012 American novel anticipates aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic, and specifically how it depicts the state of crisis and the social evils this entails. The volume closes with an examination of the "Black" or bubonic plague in fiction, "La Peste," by Jean-Luc Gautero and Camille Noûs; it addresses an array of mostly twentieth-century works from American writers, including Robert Silverberg's Up the Line (1969) and Michael Crichton's Timeline (1999), with more extended analyses of Connie Willis's Doomsday Book (1992) and Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt (2002). Film is the topic of two contributions. Jeanne Ferrier sees the proliferation of zombies in film as itself a sort of pandemic in the twenty-first century in "'Grizzly [sic] ghouls from every tomb are closing in to seal your doom': les zombies, pandémie filmique du XXIe siècle." Invoking Kyle Bishop's "zombie renaissance," she analyzes how the creatures in Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later (2002) evolved from precursor films, proposing the idea of "epidemic zombification." Comparing how the hero awakens to the new state of zombie pandemic in a number of films, Ferrier examines the role of scientific hubris in recent Anglo-American films and looks at their relationship to ecocriticism, adding comment on the French film La nuit a dévoré le monde [The night has devoured the world, 2018]. Manouk Borzakian's "Des zombies au Covid-19, l'interminable apocalypse" associates twenty-first-century post-apocalyptic [End Page 553] films with the phenomenon of déjà vu, identifying their structural similarity to earlier films, from George Romero's classic cycle to Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys (1995), but also looking at how they differ, what they inject as new. As a geographer, the (dis)ordering...