La Frontière éclatée by Gérard Klein

La Frontière éclatée Reviews

• 
  Ed Erwin

  I read this slowly over the year, so I only have good memories of the ones near the end. It is part of a series covering SF short-stories written in French. This volume covers 1979 to 1984. Full contents available on this
  French wikipedia page.
  
  This includes some important authors I had read before:
  Serge Brussolo,
  Jean-Pierre Andrevon,
  Jean-Claude Dunyach, but I was mostly interested in finding new authors. To that end, these were the ones I enjoyed:
  
  "Un bonheur sans nuages" by Bernard Mathon. Feels like a 1950s pulp SF story, but was published in 1981. A man who helped develop a weather-predicting machine decides to use it to predict the "weather" in his home. (I.e. predict and control his wife.) Things go wrong....
  
  "Coineraine" by Agnès Guitard. A story of a planet of aliens who are very alien. Each one receives all the nutrition they need from the soil under their feet, but the soil elsewhere on the planet is poisonous to them. So, they can't travel far. Yet they've managed to colonize multiple planets. Bizarre, but it stuck with me.
  
  "La Vallée des ascenseurs" by Sylviane Corgiat and Bruno Lecigne. I guess this is cyberpunk as it all seems to take place in a fake world inside a computer. (That world contains a valley full of elevators, thus the title.) The main character is a programmer and thus able to change the world in ways that seem like magic to the other characters.
  
  The best was the last. I had heard of
  Élisabeth Vonarburg but this is the first time I've read something by her. It won't be the last! "La Machine lente du temps" involves a man Egon and a woman Talitha. They are part of a quasi-religious group that facilitates travel between different parallel universes. The method of travel is bizarre: basically a machine freezes your body to near absolute zero and then your trained mind sends you to another world. Not a world you consciously choose, but one dictated by your subconscious. But the story isn't really about that. It is about the characters and their society. Egon loved a woman named Talitha. Twenty years ago, she left to go to another world, but promised to come back. (Only her subconscious really knows whether she will.) One day another woman named Talitha shows up to be trained by Egon to go off on her own voyage. Complicated feelings ensue.... Not very much happens, but the story and characters feel real.
  
  This is part of a series of stories all featuring that same technology. They all take place in different parallel universes and most of them involve characters named Egon and Talitha, but life has gone differently in each universe. Some of these, including this story, are available in English in
  Slow Engines of Time, which I plan to read soon. This story feels very much like
  Ursula K. Le Guin's Hainish stories, which are connected to each other through a piece of technology (in her case an "ansible") but are really stories about different types of human societies.