BOOKS


CALIBAN N°63


DYNAMICS OF COLLAPSE IN


FANTASY, THE FANTASY AND SF


Dynamiques de l'effondrement dans le fantastique, la fantasy et la SF

Collective collection of texts on American, British, Irish, Quebec and Filipino literature and TV series (among others). The main dossier, made up of scholarly articles on the theme of societal and civilizational, environmental, economic and political collapse in works of science fiction, horror and fantasy, was edited by Florent Hébert and myself. It is followed by a section entitled "Detours" which includes reviews, small essays, poems and short stories, which was edited by Helen Goethals and James Gifford, and to which Mr. Hébert and I also contributed. Finally, a section of reviews of scientific works on various themes (edited by Nathalie Rivère de Carles and Emeline Jouve) concludes the collection, and includes a review of mine, which is in line with the themes of the other sections. To be published on 25 February 2021.


Back cover: While a variety of future-set science fiction focusing on the effects of climate change (commonly called "climate fiction" or "cli-fi") is developing, more and more voices are being raised, in the scientific community, no longer to prevent a distant apocalypse, but to take notice of a collapse (of climate, biodiversity, energy resources, hence thermo-industrial civilization) already underway. The purpose of this collection is to accomplish part of the technical and anthropological study of this context offered by theoreticians of systemic collapse, or "collapsologists", but to focus specifically on its impact on fantasy, the fantastic and science fiction. The studies featured in this book are about recent works that may have been influenced by the current context of ongoing collapse and about older works that are then re-read in light of the new context. They provide analyses developed from a collapsological perspective, and reflections on the concept of collapse.


The book's page on its publisher's website:

https://pum.univ-tlse2.fr/produit/n-63-dynamiques-de-leffondrement-dans-le-fantastique-la-fantasy-et-la-sf/


The whole issue can be read online, at this address:

https://journals.openedition.org/caliban/7118



MYTHE ET FABULATION DANS LA FICTION FANTASTIQUE ET MERVEILLEUSE DE NEIL GAIMAN
Academic essay (critical analysis of novels, short stories, comics and films written by Neil Gaiman mainly, but also of works by  Alan Moore, Shakespeare, Borges, Lovecraft, Philip José Farmer, Jack Kirby, Winsor McCay, Roger Avary, and many others). Released in October 2018 and adapted from my doctoral thesis.

Back cover: Neil Gaiman’s fantasy works are often deemed postmodernist since they experiment with self-reflexivity and mix it with a supposedly antagonistic impulse towards popular fiction. Typical postmodernist works mostly emphasize their attacks against the fictional illusions of referentiality, character or plot. On the contrary, Gaiman’s works unapologetically remain within the bounds of fantasy, a genre in which imagination and storytelling are paramount–along with their related issues: characterization, plot, emotion and suspense. Thus, Gaiman’s fiction is not experimental fiction enhanced with elements of popular fiction, but actual popular fiction made self-reflexive. Thanks to that peculiar mood, studying Gaiman’s work is a very fruitful means of investigating the distinctive features of popular fiction, and its inherent emphasis on storytelling–or, as Henri Bergson called it, “fabulation.” Both Bergson and Frank McConnell focused on this notion which they saw as the essential link between ancient mythmaking and today’s fiction writing. Gaiman’s fiction mostly relies on such a dialectics between myth, popular fiction and storytelling or fabulation. His fantasy stories constantly rewrite ancient, religious myths, modern myths or the “myths” of popular fiction, and feature many fictional and historical writers, traditional storytellers, or Gaiman’s own personae, so that in paratext as well as in the heart of a narrative, in the quiet and supposedly reliable words of an introduction as surely as on the most striking comics panels, fiction is portrayed as myth, writers as mythical avatars of some archetypal storyteller, and storytelling as the one, quintessential human act.

Page of the book on the publisher's website:
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