EDWARD GAUVIN

I am proud to debut a new author in English: Laurent Queyssi! His story “Sense of Wonder 2.0” has now been presented for your reading delectation in Issue #2 of that smashing bi-monthly British anthology, The New Accelerator. Bringing cutting-edge science fiction to a global audience, The New Accelerator (named after H.G. Wells’ famous short story) is available exclusively through Apple’s Newsstand app and the Google Play store for easy access on all mobile devices.

Set in a future suburb, “Sense of Wonder 2.0” weaves potshots at commercialism into a seemingly shaggy-dog mall quest to score a new recreational drug. Sudden violence slices into jaded anomie. But as its title indicates, the story packs a meta-punch: a powerful contemplation, both critique and fan lament, about the imperial reach and broken promise of Anglophone science fiction on SFnal cultures across the globe. Weltschmerz-punk, if you will.

Born in the southwest of France, Queyssi is a lover of genre in all its forms, especially fantasy, science fiction, and thrillers. He is the author of four novels, a biographical essay about James Bond, and a critically acclaimed collection of SF stories, Comme un automate dément reprogrammé à la mi-temps [Like a Demented Robot Reprogrammed at Halftime], from which “Sense of Wonder 2.0” is taken. His latest graphic novel, Section infini [Infinity Bureau], in collaboration with Brazilian artist Greg Tocchini, was recently published by Lombard. He is currently working on a YA series and a comics biography of Philip K. Dick.

Laurent reached out to me last year about the possibility of translations, and I fell in love with his work. Here I am, smoking a cigar courtesy the author, over a discussion about how Hannibal said “I love it when a plan comes together” in the old French A-Team broadcasts.

Laurent showed me a great time in Bordeaux last summer, organizing a little soirée with local writers, comics artists, and translators, all with a toe or more in the SF world.

Here’s hoping we see more of Laurent in English soon!

Topping the (ahem, alphabetically ordered) Best Comics of 2014 is the first volume of aama, Swiss artist Frederik Peeters’ Angoulême -winning far-future science fiction series, equal parts Stanisław Lem and Stefan Wul, about family, AI, evolution, and strange plant life on distant planets. Oliver Sava says:

“The sci-fi aspects allow Peeters to venture into more experimental design territory with his artwork, but he doesn’t lean too heavily into genre elements, instead focusing on how to present Verloc’s personal experience with clarity and nuance.”

If you’re hankering for the full-on SF visual explosion, wait’ll you see Book 2, just out in the UK, and Book 3, whose proofs I just went over. Peeters really ramps up the psychedelia, joining the ranks of psychedelic 70s animation classics from Topor, Moebius, and René Laloux one better. I mean, check it out:

Thank you, Oliver Sava and the Onion AV Club!

Topping the (ahem, alphabetically ordered) Best Comics of 2014 is the first volume of aama, Swiss artist Frederik Peeters’ Angoulême -winning far-future science fiction series, equal parts Stanisław Lem and Stefan Wul, about family, AI, evolution, and strange plant life on distant planets. Oliver Sava says:

“The sci-fi aspects allow Peeters to venture into more experimental design territory with his artwork, but he doesn’t lean too heavily into genre elements, instead focusing on how to present Verloc’s personal experience with clarity and nuance.”

If you’re hankering for the full-on SF visual explosion, wait’ll you see book 2, just out in the UK, and and 3, whose proofs I just went over. Peeters really ramps up the psychedelia, joining the ranks of psychedelic 70s animation classics from Topor, Moebius, and René Laloux one better.

Thank you, Onion AV Club!

My translation of Jean Ferry’s The Conductor and Other Tales is now officially a year old! As if in celebration, over at the erstwhile Necessary Fiction, Matt Pincus says Ferry’s tales “linger somewhere between Kafka’s The Castle and Bataille’s Story of the Eye. At times transgressive, and at others with a Poe-like Gothic, the stories are also ironically mythical, creating a juxtaposition of nuance and beauty.

“These 25 stories have transient, wandering elements in which characters inhabit a place somewhere between fact and fiction, history and illusion, dream and reality of an eerie murkiness.

There is a ghostly, ethereal quality to each tale, which, as the collection progresses, become darker and phlegm-like. A tale not part of the original collection is of a man on a mountain expedition who loses his partner climbing an ice sheet, but seems to be only clinging a few feet off the floor in someone’s home. Each story shifts between admiration for spectacle, and violence or mortal danger within that spectacle. As any excellent story collection, the tension vibrates at unexpected moments, and the language expands, or crests at moments of insight to allow the reader’s creativity to see a new perception of their own imagination.”

The latest Fall/Winter issue of Epiphany features two short translations by yours truly: Yann Coridian’s “Seagulls and Fig Newtons,” about memories stirred by a phone conversation between two brothers, and the return of Thierry Horguelin with “Positions in Space,” a neurotic extrapolation about getting lost in airports.

Coridian is a French filmmaker and a writer. He has written ten novels, many published by l’école des loisirs. His first feature film, “Ouf,” was released in theatres in February, 2013. He is currently completing his next screenplay.

Thierry Horguelin won the Royal Academy of Belgium’s Franz de Wever Prize for his collection The Endless Night (2009), a story from which was published in Eleven Eleven #15 and Best European Fiction 2014 from Dalkey Archive. He has published two other books of short prose with Quebec’s L’Oie de Cravan press: The Night Voyager (2005), and These Foolish Things (2012). He blogs at Locus Solus. My translations of his work have also appeared in Birkensnake.

Born in Montreal in 1965, Horguelin has lived in Belgium since 1991. For twenty years, he worked as a book reviewer and film critic for numerous magazines and newspapers in Canada, France, and Belgium. A former bookseller, he has also worked as a free-lance translator, copy-editor, and proofreader for various publishers in France and Belgium. He is currently copy-editor-in-chief at Indications (Brussels), editor and book designer for les éditions Le Cormier (Brussels), and assistant manager of Espace Livres & Création, a Belgian small-press network.