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- Title
The Topography of (Science) Fiction: Claude Ollier's Life on Epsilon.
- Authors
Lindsay, Cecile
- Abstract
The eight volumes of Cluade Ollier's fictional cycle, Jeu d'enfant, were published between 1958 and 1975 and together comprise an active meditation on the nature and function of fiction. La vie sur Epsilon (1972), the fifth book in the series, moves the cycle to a distant planet and becomes a ߢscienceߣ of fiction which seeks self-consciousness of its own laws and mechanisms. On a planet of sand and snow, four stranded astronauts attempt to save them-selves by discovering the laws which govern this unknown world (of Epsilon). Their investigations take the form of a blindly random journey in a vast book, as the strange topography of Epsilon becomes also a typography which confounds and disquiests O., the leader of the expedition. What frightens him is the terrifying feminity of this text/planet. In part virgin, in part master-code, the planet refuses to let itself be ߢreadߣ or comprehended by O. It asborbs all inscriptions, including the astronauts' spaceship itself. The menace which this subversive textuality hold is that of castration. In this far-flung allegory, the tradiational protaganist sees himself threatened by a futurist textuality which denies him all his traditional privilages: centrality, order, sense. It is this terrain as a contemporary experimental novelist conceives it that I have charted as ‘The Topography of (Science) Fiction.ߣ
- Subjects
SCIENCE fiction; PLANETS; SOLAR system; EPSILON Aurigae; LA vie sur Epsilon (Book); OLLIER, Claude
- Publication
Science Fiction Studies, 1984, Vol 11, Issue 1, p39
- ISSN
0091-7729
- Publication type
Literary Criticism