By Céline Minard
Translated by Annabel L. Kim
Publication Date: October 22nd, 2024
Winner of the French Prix de l'imaginaire 2022
A speculative masterpiece of technology mythmaking that contemplates humanity.
Paperback ISBN: 9781646053520
eBook ISBN: 9781646053643
Description
The stories in Plasmas dive into a post-human, more-than-human world where life as we know it has been replaced by life as it goes on. Acrobats glide through the air attached to biotech devices, an archivist presents scenes from Earth after interstellar colonization to her students, and scientists in Siberia play god with a manmade beast.
Written as a series of vignettes into futures near and far, Plasmas dives into questions of legacy, memory, the body, and technology through striking prose from one of France’s leading sci-fi writers. Equally comfortable in the worlds of Donna Haraway and Vladimir Nabokov, Plasmas is stunning in both philosophical and literary depth.
Biographical Note
After receiving her degree in philosophy, Céline Minard was a bookseller in Paris for seven years. In each of her books, she tries to explore new fictional territory, conducting vital experiences with times, places, voices and bodies, in order to transcend literary forms. She is the author of several novels including Le Dernier Monde (2007), Bastard Battle (2008), and So long, Luise (2011). Her books have been translated into multiple languages.
Annabel L. Kim is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University and the author of two books: Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions (2018) and Cacaphonies: The Excremental Canon of French Literature (2022).
Reviews
"Plasmas is six stories that, as an archipelago—vaguely disquieting, wonderfully styled—constitutes a unique literary planet, if not a constellation of heretofore unclassified matter, forming an unprecedented unknown.” —Le Monde
"With Plasmas, Céline Minard demonstrates the fertility of an imagination controlled by a very ‘plastic’ sense of narration, making this crafted figuration an invitation to surprise.” —Alain Nicolas, L’Humanité
"A transfusion of Plasmas will not be enough to save our ailing world... But in regenerating literature, there is no doubt.” —Elisabeth Phillipe, Le Nouvel Obs