“The Fields of the Moon”, by Catherine Dufour, ed. Robert Laffont, “Elsewhere & tomorrow”, 288 p., €20.50, digital €14.
El-Jarline tirelessly maintains and develops the vast greenhouse for which she is responsible. Located on the surface of the Moon, this bell garden is home to food and ornamental crops, as well as a number of animals, from the tiniest to slightly larger, in their patiently reconstituted ecosystems. Unlike the human inhabitants of the terrestrial satellite, refugees in their sub-lunar cities, this learned farmer and veterinarian can resist for a long time the fierce solar and stellar radiation which inexorably disrupts chromosomes and genomes: El-Jarline is a machine, endowed with formidable self-learning computer programs to carry out its mission, interact with humans and fellow human beings – and continually progress. His latest challenge, launched by one of his supervisors: to express himself in a more easily understandable way, by providing more ” context “ and fewer strictly technical abbreviations. The Fields of the Moon constitutes the logbook of this precise attempt at improvement – and of some of its unexpected consequences…
With this twelfth novel, Catherine Dufour, computer scientist by profession and punk by temperament, confirms her place as an author at the top of contemporary French science fiction and fantasy – but not only: we remember, among her most recent productions , ofAda or the beauty of numbers (Fayard, 2019), his lively biography of the programming pioneer Ada Lovelace, and ofAt the absentee’s ball (Seuil, 2020), a fantastic, cruel and hilarious foray into a world of misguided unemployment insurance and vindictive ghosts.
To sad robots
Here, having taken completely to heart (if we dare say so) this rather special task which has been entrusted to her, the robot discovers herself destabilized and sad when a little girl, on a short stay among her plants and of its animals – because the Earth’s light garden is often visited by sub-lunar inhabitants for a brief change of scenery -, contracts a fatal disease now almost endemic on the Moon, a progressive disease whose causes and treatment resist research. One thing led to another, here is El-Jarline unofficially launching his own forensic investigation, going from surprise to surprise until dazzling final revelations, judiciously orchestrated calmly and quietly – in this lunar space where, naturally, no one don’t hear you scream.
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