Les déceptions sont d’autant plus cruelles que l’on a attendu longtemps avant de pouvoir savourer l’objet (plat, livre, film…).
Je viens de finir High-Opp, un « roman inédit » de Franck Herbert, retrouvé on ne sait trop où (même la préface ne le précise pas) et non daté, mais qui semble avoir été écrit entre la publication de son premier roman à succès, Le dragon sous la mer, en 1956, et celle de Dune, en 1965. Comme je suis un très grand fan de l’auteur et qu’il y a peu de livres de lui que je n’ai pas appréciés (« Destination Vide » est resté pour moi indigeste malgré une relecture), je ne m’attendais pas à être si déçu !
Les thèmes abordés sont super intéressants : une société totalitaire, des structures de contrôle bureaucratique, un homme déclassé cherchant à se venger du leader de la contestation qu’il méprisait, des intrigues multiples, des trahisons… Mais la psychologie des personnages est nulle !
Je suis même surpris que la postface de Gérard Klein n’en fasse pas mention. Déjà, le héros, Daniel Movius, est tout-puissant : très fort physiquement, très intelligent, impossible à blesser mentalement ou physiquement… Bref, il n’est pas crédible du tout. Et tous les autres personnages changent d’opinion, de camp, de philosophie, voire d’adversaire, en l’espace de quelques lignes ou quelques pages ! Puis ils peuvent de nouveau changer de position après qu’une autre personne leur ait parlé pendant moins d’une page. Le personnage féminin principal est presque une potiche, qui tombe amoureuse de Movius alors qu’elle est censée le surveiller. Lui-même ne l’aime pas… oh puis zut ! finalement si, il l’aime ! 🙄
Je termine pas les points positifs de ce roman : on y trouve des thèmes qui seront fort bien développés dans les romans suivants de Herbert ou bien semblent inspirés d’autres romans pré-existants d’auteurs de SF déjà établis.
Les structures gouvernementales étatiques bureaucratiques et les organismes chargés d’y foutre volontairement la merde : « L’étoile et le fouet » et « Dosadi » ;
La révolte des opprimés, qui prennent le pouvoir, voire un pouvoir encore plus absolu que le régime renversé : « Dune » ;
La Sémantique Générale d’Alfred Korzybski, développée dans Le non-A d’A.E Van Vogt ;
La prédiction du futur grâce aux sondages et à la psychologie font penser à Fondation d’Isaac Asimov.
Tout cela est très bien développé dans la postface de Gérard Klein, que je ne vais pas recopier.
En conclusion, je comprends que ce livre n’ait pas trouvé d’éditeur et qu’il ne présente aujourd’hui qu’un intérêt historique, sans promesse de plaisir de lecture.
I splurged again this month in terms of buying comics :scream:
Les 5 Terres – L’intégrale en édition limitée
I discovered « Les 5 Terres » recently, I liked volume 1. As I was talking about it briefly on the Bubble Facebook group, an absolute fan told me about the release of a limited edition complete. It’s a thick volume with a very nice hardback cover, dust jacket, 6 bookplates signed by the authors, with a limited edition of 280 copies at the modest price of… 235 €!
And obviously I cracked! But I do not regret my purchase, the volume is splendid.
The bookplates are beautiful but, for now, I’m leaving them safely in the comic.
Corben – Complete publications from Eerie & Creepy
I discovered Corben through <a href= »{{}} »>Métal Hurlant. The author died in 2020.
That’s why his publisher, Delirium, decided to pay tribute to him and to release an integral of his publications in the magazines Eeerie and Creepy. This limited and numbered edition of 2500 copies, with silk-screened cloth back, is proposed for the 10th anniversary of DELIRIUM.
There too, this complete set is superb.
Locke & Key
I continue my reading of Locke & Key. This time, as a gift for the purchase of the two volumes, I got a mini-comics with two short and funny stories.
Ghost World
I read Ghost World by Daniel Clowes in English this weekend. It’s a « _Coming of age_ » comics about Enid and Rebecca, two 18 years old friends, at the turning point of childhood and adulthood. Rebels, cynical, frustrated of having no boyfriend, the two girls start growing apart.
Very interesting comics, sometimes hard to understand for me because of the US slang, it’s one of the most renowned independent American comics. There’d even a film based on the book, I haven’t seen it.
Meadowlark
Another comics in English that I read last night, Meadowlark by Ethan Hawke (the actor!) and Greg Ruthe. It was not what I expected: I thought it’d be “just” a graphical novel, but instead I received a punch in the stomach! Yes, as the backcover says, it’s a coming of age story about the dysfunctional relation between a son and his father, but above all a captivating, very violent, thriller. And the violence keeps cascading until the end.
The drawing is beautiful, very realistic, although very static even when there should be movement. It’s a bit weird, like if each scene was a painting.
I loved the comics but it’s not for the faint of heart.
Here are some reading notes from the last three days.
Setting the context: for most series I read very spaced out, I have a hard time fully memorizing the story, characters, unresolved ongoing plots… And sometimes when I start a new volume, I don’t know who so-and-so is, if what’s-his-name is good, bad or ambiguous, etc. 😅
That’s what happened to me on several comics here.
Umbrella Academy T3
I loved the Netflix series, funny, crazy. Then I started reading the comics. They are funny and weird too, but even more than the TV series! And the drawing is particular, at the limit of the burlesque I find… And as much as I managed to follow the volume 1 (for your information the story has almost no relation with the scenario of the series), I have almost no memory of what happens in the volume 2…
And I understood nothing in volume 3, really nothing! After a while, I can hold on to the plot again and enjoy reading, but I don’t understand anything about what’s going on, the characters’ goals, the space travel, the time travel, or whatever. I was confused at the end, I feel like I went from one thing to another all the time.
Maybe there is a higher level of reading, or some subtleties, that I missed?
Sillage T13
Same effect of my poor memorization of certain characters or plots, but to a lesser degree. I’ve loved Sillage since the beginning. Recently, in order to read volumes 11 and 12, I quickly reread the whole series to get back into the swing of things. But now, a few months later, I’m starting volume 13, and I’m lost 😅
The story is still generally understandable and pleasant to read, but I have the impression each time that I don’t understand certain plots because I don’t know if this or that character is « nice » or not.
I will nevertheless read the rest with pleasure!
Il faut flinguer Ramirez Acte 2
Praise be to Nicolas Pétrimaux, who included a QR code at the beginning of the comic that points to a six-minute video summarizing Act 1 in still images and voice-over! It served me well. Act 2 is as funny, offbeat and breathtaking as Act 1, maybe even more bloody: people are dying by the dozen around this poor Ramirez who doesn’t seem to control anything in his life… except that we realize he has a much richer life than we thought!
Interesting revelations are made in the second part of the comic. I really like the road-movie that serves as the plot of the comic, and I invite keen eyes to spot at least one explicit reference to « Thelma and Louise« . The fake ad pages are still fun to read, and I can’t wait to read the rest!
Locke & Key T3
Again, I had forgotten some details from volumes 1 and 2 (too many keys, some details about Dodge, some secondary characters…) but I managed to dive back in very quickly. And once again, I loved it.
I feel a certain anguish when reading each volume, I am afraid for the heroes, and I find that the horrific side is very successful. I am also impatient to read the next volume.
In these paradoxically obscurantist times, even though science, society and knowledge progress faster than ever, I think the following three readings are a must.
Human knowledge is progressing in all fields, whether in hard sciences or in social sciences, the world is globally more and more at peace, we have more and more factual information at our disposal…
And yet there are more and more people who believe in conspiracy theories, each one more stupid than the other! Other categories of professional liars want to pit people against each other according to their race, gender, skin color. And a third category of liars, which often crosses the two others, wants a resurgence of religion and all the evils that go with it: rejection of science, social regression, regression of women’s rights, violence, manipulation…
One of the plausible causes is the amount of hateful, misleading and conspiracy information that can be found on social networks. For the last year or two, I have found reading the news anxiety-provoking and, even though I have cleaned up my newsfeeds on social networks, the positive, universalist and sensible people I am, post virulent messages in defense of rationality, secularism, human rights, or re-share to criticize them the hateful and misleading messages of people I don’t want to follow.
But when there is so much nuanced and factual information at our fingertips, why do we read more of the misleading, aggressive or conspiracy-oriented articles?
It becomes impossible to be heard as a universalist and rationalist without raising our voice. What’s going on? :worried:
Apocalypse cognitive
In order to understand a little bit what is going on, the reading of Apocalypse Cognitive by Gérald Bronner, a famous sociologist (and strongly criticized by the pseudo-sociologists of the extreme left, that’s a good sign!) seems to me indispensable. I have already read several of his books, and I have briefly talked about them here:
This one is in the same vein: quite easy to read (no hard vocabulary or abstruse concepts) and salutary. Even if once again the author doesn’t bring a miracle solution, he explains where the problem comes from (once again our poor brain) and gives us and our leaders some ways to act.
The situation is unprecedented. Never in the history of mankind have we had so much information at our disposal and never have we had so much free time to draw leisure and knowledge of the world. Our predecessors dreamed that science and technology would liberate humanity. But this dream may now turn into a nightmare. The flood of information has led to a generalized competition of all ideas, a deregulation of the « cognitive market » which has an unfortunate consequence: to capture, often for the worse, the precious treasure of our attention. Our minds are under the spell of the screens and give in to the thousand faces of unreason.
Victim of a plundering in rule, our spirit is in the middle of a stake on which our future depends. This disturbing context reveals some of the deepest aspirations of humanity. Is it time to confront our own nature? On the way we react will depend the possibilities to escape from what we must call a civilizational threat.
Here is a passage from the book that I particularly liked, in French:
I find indeed that Jean-Jacques Rousseau is too much venerated in France, considering the nonsense he says about « man is good by nature, but perverted by civilization ». His words might have made sense with the limited scientific knowledge of his time, but in our time, it is absurd! I have a bad memory of my philosophy classes in which we were told about « *Rousseau… the good savage man… blah blah… » until we were nauseated.
Note : I read earlier this article by Yascha Mounk, « Facebook and the moral panic ». He says that we should not blame the hysterization of debates only on social networks. He is right to say that Facebook is not the only culprit, but Facebook’s Metaverses are an amplifier of the cognitive failings that Gérald Bronner describes.
In any case, the reading of Apocalypse Cognitive is salutary!
Le bêtisier du laïco-sceptique
Next reading, which completes the previous one very well. A small book in the form of questions and answers with an extract from the major texts on secularism at the end of the book: Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789, Law of Separation of Church and State of 1905, Law on the Freedom of the Press of 1881…
« Le bêtisier du laïco-sceptique » by Renée Fregosi, Nathalie Heinich, Virginie Tournay and Jean-Pierre Sakoun is published by the Comité Laïcité République.
This committee has just recently awarded the 2020 and 2021 Secularism Awards. The master of ceremonies is none other than Gérald Bronner and one of the 2021 laureates Rachel Khan, whose book I talk about below. I see it as a very good choice, showing that the themes of all these books are linked. But maybe others will see it as… a plot! :sweat_smile:
I said above that our time, which should be more and more rational with the progress of knowledge, becomes paradoxically more obsessed by religions, and I regret it. This resurgence of the religious fact leads the fundamentalists, the believers and all the idiotic allies of religions (The Regressive Left generally speaking) to deform the French secularism and to make it say false things, even to demonize it!
This book puts things in their place: there is only one secularism, it has been present in our history since the French Revolution, and it is not against religions. On the other hand, it puts religions back where they should remain, in the private sphere, and it defends the freedom to believe and not to believe.
Third salutary reading, Rachel Khan’s Racée, which won the National Secularism Award 2021. I mentioned earlier wokism and the emergence of Critical Theories on race, sex, gender, etc. This is what Rachel Khan denounces in her book with humor and intelligence.
She comes from a melting pot, with a Gambian father and a French mother of Polish-Jewish origin, « _Afro-Yiddish Tourangelle_ », and refuses to accept identity-based distinctions. She is a universalist and dismantles in this book all the indigenist and racialist hatred that is emerging in France and in other countries.
Conclusion
These three books go really well together, the news of the awarding of the Prix de laïcité reinforces even more the intellectual connivance between the three themes.
All three books are overall positive and calming to read, rather than stirring up hatred like a lot of content in social networks or the media right now. I highly recommend them to people who are interested in critical thinking and universalism.
I am a fan of Death Note. It was only natural that I would fall for a great artbook of Takeshi Obata‘s works!
There are drawings from Death Note as well as other works by him that I don’t know. And everything is splendid!
Death Note Short stories
Some short stories in the universe of Death Note a few years after the main plot and humorous strips.
The stories are a nice read, but are less elaborated, it’s still honorable, but not exceptional.
As for the strips, they show me how Japanese humor sometimes seems so different from mine…
It’s like the humor page at the end of each volume of Attack on Titans, almost embarrassing :sweat_smile:
Spiderman – Blue
First volume of the 2021 collection of the Marvel 10, Spider-Man – Blue : excellent duo of scriptwriter
and drawer, nice story. But like many Marvel or DC Comics, you need to have already read or seen other stories to understand everything.
Batman DC Rebirth #3 Mon nom est Bane
« Batman Rebirth – My name is Bane » is the 3rd volume of the « DC Rebirth » series.
I really like the character of Bane, and Selina Kyle too 🙂
Stormtroopers
And I cracked up after an ad from my favorite comic book store this morning, I rushed out to buy the bookends and the three Stormtroopers in « monkey wisdom » style. It takes an elite troop to hold off Bane :smiley:
Blacksad
And there was also a mock journal Blacksad that caught my eye.
Les lectures de Farzad 