I Bitch Nicely France

When I mentioned in the last post that The Green Leopard Plague was reviewed in Le Monde, loyal reader Guillaume Jay retrieved the (rather short) review from the Bibliotek National, along with another, more comprehensive review from Liberátion, a translation of which I append below.

I used Google Translate, which broke the text into about 100 paragraphs, mostly sentence fragments, which I have tried to edit in HTML into something resembling the product of something other than a deranged mind.  The result has a kind of surreal charm, and constitutes nearly-conclusive evidence that we writers need not fear artificial intelligence in the near future.  Google’s AI seems to be a stoner.

Of the text’s many infelicities, grammatical atrocities, confusions of gender, and interjections of alien thought drawn from another universe, I’d like to correct only one.  Google picked the wrong translation of “chef,” which would have you wondering why Michelle took a cook with her to the island.  

Also: the “Rider’s Shot?”

Buckle in, it’s a bumpy ride.  Here goes:

Find every Tuesday a
column, an interview or
a portrait linked to a text by
science fiction that makes the news. Today,
an American novella
Walter Jon Williams, who talks about love
and transgenic viruses.

Her name is Michelle, she works at height
hidden on a tree in the archipelago
of the Chelbacheb, to the east of the Philippines,
in a coral and tropical forest setting
and lakes. Mermaid today (with
wings), monkey Siamang yesterday, he is here
banal to offer new bodies.

Michelle plays investigator, snooping
in electronic archives using
of crawling spiders and software
recognition of people. “A
astonishing amount of this data had
survived the Light War – this
were not priority targets and,
if they had been affected, we had
put backup copies online.”

She is supplied by a chef
customary over 200 years old. Her
in love, dead, comes back regularly
harass her with her assiduities, after having
resurrected every time thanks to storage
of its data. Here, humans continue.

Formerly, in what corresponds
in our time, we would die, period. This is what we call a “real death”,
and when Michelle talks about it, we perceive it
all the value lost. And it’s reversal
of values – death, work,
famine – which the Plague also speaks of
green leopard.

Michelle’s sponsor, who works
to a biography of Jonathan
Terzian who designed the foundation
theory of their civilization, asked him
to investigate the period when he
disappeared for three weeks. When
he reappeared in Venice, rather than the
planned speech, the philosopher presented
the first version of its revolutionary
Cornucopia Theory.

What happened in the meantime? In a
beautifully exotic universe, centuries
of ours, Walter Jon Williams (Wired,
Plasma, the fall of the Shaa empire, the
Rider’s Shot), packed a thriller
quite classic: the murder of a
biochemist at Place Dauphine in Paris who
inaugurates a chase with
stupid thugs from
Transnistria, unrecognized microstate
after seceding from Moldova.

Terzian flees with Stephanie Pais,
the accomplice of the murdered biochemist,
Paris in Provence to Italy, accompanied by a mysterious sports bag black.

“Is this a weapon?” asked
he. She didn’t seem surprised at all.

“No, exactly the opposite.” She pulled
on his cigarette and exhaled a cloud of
smoke. “It’s an antidote. An antidote to
human madness.”

We learn that Moldova has worked on
a project entitled “Green Goret”, an attempt
to make pigs plump
parking them in the sun, inspired by autonomy
plantar. The bag actually contains
a biotech, solution to hunger in
the world, genetically modified virus
capable of allowing humans to
photosynthesize their food.

There novella oscillates between searches for
the mermaid and the story of Terzian and these
three blank weeks in his life which
changed the world… After a start
slow, it gains momentum, fomenting
a revolution thanks to an encounter which
will be the trigger. Michelle the Mermaid would explain it
by love.
Good novelist,
Walter Jon Williams won the Nebula
2005 for this text which is not missing
no humor either and who bitches nicely
France. “In France,” says Terzian, “
“intellectual” is a profession. He
it is not necessary to have a diploma,
It’s just an activity.”
​