Le Monde selon Google dans le roman d’Aurélien Bellanger La Théorie de l’information

Abstract

As an echo to Michel Houellbecq’s novel The Possibility of an Island and Greg Egan’s novel Permutation City, in his first science fiction novel, Information Theory, Aurélien Bellanger features a fictional biography of a computer scientist and businessman named Pascal Ertanger, partially inspired by the true-life story of the French Internet provider Xavier Niel. Google plays a key role in this fictional work that depicts the power of the earth conceived as a super computer and how human beings can be hacked. Finally, based on the views exchanged by Sergueï Brin—the cofounder of Google—and Pascal Ertanger, a post-humanist project is inspired in which human data stolen from Facebook are used to create an insectoid humankind. Given that in the novel the last characters think of themselves as a “corpus” and as being written/coded, this article focuses on the mythologies of writing as a key component of French science fiction imagery and as an illustration of the concept of technological singularity.