Jeury, Michel
Entry updated 28 October 2024. Tagged: Author.
(1934-2015) French author whose apprentice sf in the 1960s was written as by Albert Higon (a pseudonym he used occasionally in later decades as well); his first novel under his own name, Le temps incertain (1973; trans Maxim Jakubowski as Chronolysis 1980), very clearly evokes the world and methods of Philip K Dick in a Changewar plot that pits agents from a fascist future against those who represent a humane but Computer-run alternative. In this novel, as in some exceedingly ambitious but untranslated novels and novellas, such as "La fête du changement" ["The Change Festival"] (in Utopie, anth 1975, ed anon), Jeury goes so far beyond Dick's ultimately genre-stabilized manipulations of reality and appearance (see Perception) that he has been likened to authors of the roman nouveau like Alan Robbe-Grillet. This intense interrogation of writing itself, and a focus on long remote perspectives reminiscent at times of the Scientific Romances of Olaf Stapledon, signals how far Jeury has moved from his Higon work, which is rooted in American genre sf. His later work (none of it translated) tends to deal, in more and more abstract ways, with issues of Transcendence. [JC]
see also: France.
Michel Jeury
born Razac-d'Eymet, France: 23 January 1934
died Vaison la Romaine, France: 9 January 2015
works
- Le temps incertain (Paris: Laffont, 1973) [pb/]
- Chronolysis (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co, 1980) [trans by Maxim Jakubowski of the above: hb/Peter Goodfellow]
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