| Sumario: | Bernard Blanc's book "Why I Killed Jules Verne," and its radical premise (that Verne the tyrannical "father" of sf must be killed so that his progeny, the new French writers of the late 1970s, can reclaim science fiction as their own terrain of activity) is symptomatic of a broader cultural attitude toward Verne and the materialist science he is seen to embody. This essay explores the cultural implications of the paternity of Verne and subsequent attempts to assassinate him in the context of a culture fascinated not only with tyrants and regicide but also with the mechanisms of the Cartesian cogito, itself a means, through its method of doubt, of stripping away material extension in order to assert the counter-reign of mind at the center of a hostile physical world. It argues that, because Verne in the eyes of French culture has become the icon of material science and technology, he must be killed if the cogito, representing the human privilege of mind, is to claim parity against the mindless mass of matter. The article explores this killing act in broad cultural manifestations from newspaper advertisements to commentary by Roland Barthes and Michel Serres. It concludes that the killing of Verne represents a defining act both in terms of French sf and of persistent French attitudes toward science itself.
|
|---|