Maurice Georges Dantec
Encyclopedia : M : MA : MAU : Maurice Georges Dantec
Maurice Georges Dantec, or Maurice G. Dantec, (born 1959) is a French science fiction author.
He was born in Grenoble, France, the son child of a journalist and a seamstress. He grew up primarily in Ivry-sur-Seine near Paris. While still in high school he met Jean Bernard Pouy, future author of noir novels such as Le Poulpe, who inspired Dantec to take an interest in noir fiction. In his youth, he was a devoted reader of Nietzsche who became an important influence on his work.
In the late 1970s, having graduated from high school, he began university studies in the humanities but quickly dropped out to put together a rock band called État d'urgence ("State of Emergency"). In the 1980s, he pursued a career in music while working as a copywriter in the advertising industry. He only began writing seriously at the beginning of the 1990s. His first novel, La sirène rouge ("Red Siren"), was published in 1993 as a part of the Série noire collection. The novel won the 813 award for best crime novel.
Dantec's second novel, Les racines du mal ("The Root of Evil"), appeared in 1995 and borders on cyberpunk fiction. The novel was quite successful commercially and was awarded the Prix de l'Imaginaire. His classically cyberpunk novella Là où tombent les anges ("Where the Angels fall"), appeared the same year.
Dantec and his family relocated to Québec in 1997, where he wrote third novel Babylon Babies, which further explores themes of decadence and apocalypse from Là où tombent les anges. Le théâtre des opérations, journal métaphysique et polémique ("The Operating Theatre, a Metaphysical and Polemical Journal") appeared in 2000, and is closer to an anti-technocratic pamphlet than a novel. Dantec followed this up in 2001 with Laboratoire de catastrophe générale ("Laboratory of General Catastrophes"), which was written in the form of a journal. Villa Vortex - Liber Mundi, I in 2003 opens a trilogy of essays, interconnecting metaphysical research, technology and the post-human, in a new formal approach. With this book Dantec is possibly the first French writer to acknowledge the new era opened by the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Among his inspirations, Dantec cites William S. Burroughs and the philosopher Gilles Deleuze.
The third volume of his polemical journal, following Laboratoire de catastrophe générale, was to be released in 2005 under the title American Black Box, but his publishing house Flammarion withdrew from the project following the polemical events of the 'Bloc Identitaire'. The book would be published nevertheless by another publishing house Éditions Albin Michel (same as Michel Houellebecq his close friend) in 2006.
Dantec, in Canada writes in the magazine Égards, a French-speaking and conservative magazine. He is currently publishing some texts in the website 'Sur le Ring'( source : [link] ). A novel Cosmos Inc, was published in August 2005 by his new publishing house Albin Michel.
The first film adaptation based on the works of Dantec, La sirène rouge directed by Olivier Megaton, was released in August 2002. A film adaptation of Babylon Babies, the most cyberpunk of Dantec's novels, is currently in production under the direction of Mathieu Kassovitz.
Many of Dantec's readers are disappointed by his fascination with and use of drugs, which was already appearent in La sirène rouge, and with gang violence, which is no longer a part of the backdrop to his novels but is increasingly their main subject. This disappointment has grown in some cases into rejection by his fans, especially since he was repudiated in the leftists media for his open debate with the nationalists from a web-site (le bloc identitaire). By opening a debate about his zionist and Pro-Nato, but anti-Islamist position, which is not shared by the French Far Right, Dantec has put himself into a political frame often misunderstood by the French intelligentsia. Indeed he openly favors and promotes a new iconoclastic vision as 'Christian-Futurist', in war with the nihilism of the 21st Century, including the French leftists, the French-conservative Right of Jacques Chirac and above all, Islamists.
His first novel to be translated in English will be Babylon Babies by Semio-text(e) (source : [link]) in September 1, 2005.
External links
- [mauricedantec.com] Official website of the author (French)
- [English publishing house]
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.