| The publication of Semiotext(e)’s
translation of Maurice Dantec’s sci-fi thriller Babylon
Babies marks the first English language release by this
hard-hitting, best-selling, cult French novelist. Extraordinarily
divisive, Dantec is one of the most loved and most hated
of contemporary French authors. A superb polemicist and thinker,
Maurice Dantec offers us a premonitory story of the End of
Times, modulating the concepts of the information bomb and
the genetic bomb to fit his vision of the imminent Global
Social Accident. Babylon Babies is presently being
made into a movie by Mathieu Kassovitz.
Set in the hidden "flesh and chip" breeding grounds
of the first cyborg communities and peopled by Serbian mafioso,
the novel's hero is a hard-boiled leatherneck veteran of
Sarajevo named Thoorop who is hired (by a mysterious source)
to escort a young woman named Marie Zorn from Russia to Canada.
A garden-variety job, he figures. But when Thoorop is offered
an even higher fee by another organization he realizes Marie
is no ordinary girl. A schizophrenic and the possible carrier
of a new artificial virus, Marie is carrying a mutant embryo
created by an American cult that dreams of producing a genetically
modified messiah, a dream that spells out the end of human
life as we know it.
Dantec’s prose is a hybrid of noir thriller, science
fiction, metaphysics, cyberpunk post-humanism, psychedelia
and mysticism. Inspired by Philip K. Dick, William S. Burroughs,
Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze and other extrapolationists
of the future, Babylon Babies unfolds at breakneck
speed as Thoorop risks his life to save Marie, whose brain— linking
to the neuromatrix—loses all limits and becomes the
universe itself. Exploring the symbiosis between organic
matter and computer power to spin new forms of consciousness,
Dantec rides Nietzsche's prophecy: "Man is something
to be overcome."
About the Author:
Maurice G. Dantec was born in Grenoble in 1959. A former
advertising executive and song writer for a French rock group,
he is a shameless lover of science fiction, crime novels,
metaphysics and Rock and Roll. He has published The Red
Siren, The Roots of Evil and Villa Vortex as
well as three volumes of journal essays, Theatre of Operations. |
