Raffin aside (he writes eco/social thrillers and is French), the other two aren't known much outside Québec (Pelletier has European fans, but this is a bit unexpected).

Senécal is a Stephen King with depth and a sharp eye for social critique/satire.



Pick Chronicles of the Motherland first.



LOL! I better borrow stuff from the final chapter to help me.

In a series bits of a scene (I'll spare you the other scenes it cuts to and from) a writer, a guy named Mr. Prose (all the characters have joke-names like that) is told by the survivors from
the main cast that the best way to testify about the vast worlwide conspiracy that has happened in the books is to write a fiction cycle and Prose meets with a publisher to pitch the project, tells him how he will fictionalize everything and change the names, and he won't sign the books either to protect his friends, instead he has convinced an obscure philosopher specialized in economical/financial ethics (Pelletier for real, of course) to pretend to be the writer.

The publisher objects: "but this guy writes novellas and essays".

Bah, says the writer... in between the novels I'll write in his name a few articles on speculative fiction and essays on genre literature to establish him, even an autobiography if necessary. Even the best ones are all fiction anyway.

The publisher wonders if that project is not too vast and too ambitious.... He asks how the heck the writer will be able to tell a story happening all over the planet at once., with hundred of characters. The writer explains it will be like a giant mosaic, a cinematic-like montage of short scenes happening everywhere.

But won't it all feel choppy and scattered and unfocused, worries the publisher.

The writer objects "The esthetic of the traditional novel can be compared to a game of chess: a complete dominance of the master pieces, the hero and a couple of associates or antagonists. All the rest is marginal. Pawns, plot devices. I rather envision a novel which form would be mid-way between a game of chess and a game of go. A fair part of the novel will be devoted to the main pieces as in chess, but a lot of space will be devoted to the whole, all the pieces envisionned globally and the links created between them, just like in go.

The publisher laments he's going to lose everyone with that kind of structure, and trying to carry this over thousands of pages...

The writer explains it will all be strictly chronological, without any flashback or forward, just switching between locations, characters and narrative viewpoints as the action happens. There will be as many time gaps as necessary, months and years sometimes - it's not a soap opera. To simplify things, he'll write three stand alone novels that each introduce some of the main players and begin to set out the main issues and themes, before they unfold in the cycle of seven novels proper, split in for parts: one about the commerce and manipulation of the human body and the transformation of the mafias on the model of multinational corporations, two about the world of the great finance and its control over people's wealth, two about the manipulation of religion and beliefs, and two about famine and ecology, the third world and the multinational corporations's efforts to control the world's resources. The last two volumes will unleash the four horsemen, and resolve the epic fight between good and evil.

The form will have to be hybrid, with a lot of sections functionning almost as novellas woven into the whole, and there will be bits from essays on mass manipulation and political or communication and semiology theory scattered through the novels (as chapter headings, essays presented as written by the books' villains).


The publisher mutters about all the good novels that got torpedoed by ill-advised attemps to fit too many good ideas into them.

Th writer thinks he's probably better not reveal to him just now he's also planning to have a main character who suffers from multiple personality disorder, another who can visit other people's dreams, a policeman with La Tourette's syndrome, and a gang of bikers who are actually Zen Buddhist monks who will be turned into super secret agents and infiltrators as they think embracing a fictitious life and living it as real for a while a good exercize to defeat the illusions of the Maya, a James Bond style super agent from the Vatican who infiltrates a sect which beliefs are based on the strings theory, some evil superchicks who live in an old nazi era castle in Bavaria and run a S&M and snuff farm like something out of really bad porno flick .. and all sort of other good ideas in this vein...

The writer explains he won't have any choice but to give voice to the collective discourse through the books, and the best way to do this is through the media. The books will be interrupted constantly by snippets of emails, radio and TV shows, newspaper articles, websites and even caricatures, and diagrams of Go and an explanation of its rules.

The publisher moans about "scattered and choppy". The writer answers it's just a way to render in the novel form modern reality, that our daily lives are constanstly interrupted by a mediatic bombardment: phones, emails, texting, radio and TV open everywhere constantly take our attention from what we're doing, that the media have become the canvas on which our lives are woven, that people spends their time discussing on the net their favourite characters from TV and books (*cough but don't even know their next door neighbour. He explains it will be a perfect device to both make the plot progress while at the same time giving him the occasion to show how the characters react to the message, or to juxtapose the official message and what the deciders really think in private, that just to have a character state explicitly the ideology that underpins his behaviour and that normally remains in the subtext... it will all serve to demonstrate and deconstruct some of the mechanisms of mass manipulation and propaganda.

"But people wants their books to help them escape from that sort of crappy reality!", the publisher objects.

The writer thinks to himself he can both entertain and make people think, without feeding his readers empty escapism. At this point, the radio distracts him and he suddenly reflects on the sad irony of this business meeting in a great restaurant, to discuss a novel dealing with all the worst miseries and famine.

He explains it is in a way about a serial-killer, but not as an individual who kills people, a serial-killer that seeks to destroy humanity as a whole following a pure logic of interest. That it's a novel on manipulation, both at the individual and collective level.

The publisher comments he thinks it seems to be getting really complicated.

Not complicated, the writer objects, complex. The novels will be part of a process of complexification, a series of novels working like russian dolls, each encapsculating the previous ones while pushing the issues a bit further.

The publisher sneers. He says it sounds quite didactic, that the way the writer talks about it, this is sounding more and more like the mass media's version of Plato's dialogues.

The writers muses that he might have to be cautious in truth about integrating too many bits of theorical essays in it...

He speaks of how the frame of the story is essentially that of spy thriller, with giant conspiracies but also borrowing from realistic speculative SF and anticipation traditions, and also from the Fantasy framework of the epic between good and evil, with mythologic underpinnings for many of the characters, and hero's journeys. And hybrid of all types of "genre literature", which are all close parents, going back to the same origins, and in many ways fulfilling the same functions.

But how will it all end, asks the publisher?

"By a form of descent into the abyss", says the writer. "Fitting for a story abouta bunmch of self-serving morons bringing humanity to the very edge of the abyss, isn't it?" He won't explain for now what sort of descent into the abyss he has in mind. He fears to frighten the publisher and beside it sounds a bit too literary and pretentious for genre literature. He's not going to appear to pretend he's writing Proust's "In search of lost time" after all.

The publishers says: at least, the readers will be rewarded for having waited the 20 years it will take you to write this story, and good will triumph over evil in the end, no?

Not really, Prose says. Most of the main cast will die. Fast, clinical, pointless, unglorious deaths. For villains and for heroes. People very rarely die accomplishing their life's greatest act or getting the fate they really deserved, or having time to leave long messages to posterity. That's not how life is.

The publisher: but your poor readers, attached to these characters after so long, what of their feelings?

Well... not everyone will die just most of them, and the survivors will descend into the abyss. My readers will need to face the truth, Hollywood endings are a fraud, all the George Bushes of the world and their promises of victory are frauds. There's never any final triumph of good over evil at the end of the road, the best to hope for is always a more or less succesful containment of evil's worst stupidity. Most of the stupidity will be contained in the end, temporarily...

The writer then concludes the whole of his ten books can be summarized in a single sentence that he's decided will the last of the final novel, and this sentence will bring the readers back to the real world. The publisher makes a joke about Borges' fictitious books and asks: if a single sentence encapsulates the 10 books, what's the point in spending all this time writing them?

The writer looks a bit troubled, then the publisher laughs and asks what's the famous last sentence that sums it all.

Prose tells him "And now, we must be the managers of the Apocalypse".

The novel ends like that.

Does that help?

It's got a bit of everything in it, except squirrels (it has a murder solving parrot and a couple of cats that functions as agents of chaos, though).



The genre really is anglo-saxon in origin. It had forebears, but it pretty much crystallized with Orwell, Huxley and then Tolkien etc. There's the odd exceptions like Verne (in a way), but its related genres that pretty much evolved within the anglo-saxon sphere at first.



That's close to Pelletier in his theorical articles on genres, though you wouldn't agree with what he thinks of those who broaden it too much. He sets the origins in the late 19th century and considers anything written earlier to be influences, not proto genre lit. He also criticize the trend to "claim" within genre literature acclaimed writers like Borges, Marquez, or classics like Swift, the Utopians and he especially dislikes when mythology is presented as an early form of spec fic.
In his view, that's not the way to fight off the snobism of mainstream literati toward "genre literature".





It was the latter.





Pelletier thinks genre lit. as it existed in the 20th century has now defined and established its esthetics and "rules", and they are slowly being absorbed by mainstream literature to form all sorts of new hybrids, just like many other "new" forms of fiction have been absorbed (who writes strict Nouveau Roman nowadays?) and just like many of those forms have entered genre literature itself over time.