Find every Tuesday a Time.news, an interview or a portrait linked to a science fiction text that is making the news. This week, the first volume of a space opera trilogy by Pierre Raufast.
The Orc Tragedy starts with an uncapped beer 50 light years away “and wheelbarrows” of the earth. Reserves of beer and rum, this will be discussed later, a way to reassure crews of two on a mission for more than a year. Pierre Raufast’s novel takes place in 2173, global warming has devastated the entire north of the blue planet, the “great climate migration” has decimated 4 billion inhabitants, space represents a land for the conquest of energy sources . For fifty years, the Antimatter Research Agency for the miniaturization of quantum computing centers has been training and sending its best recruits in Orca ships to find them. Without success so far.
Black hole
Quite classically, the shape of the tragedy of the orc is based on communication between the commander-lieutenant tandems embarked on Orca modules for eighteen months and the engineers of the Agency. Up there, the motivations are pure. “We do the best job in the world. We work for future generations, you know…” said Tom to Yuri, 59 and thirty-five years of antimatter gold panning to no avail. On land, the motivations are sometimes less rosy and more political: a power struggle reignites between the Agency and the Institute of Stratigraphy, which deems this quest useless. Especially since Sara and Slow’s Orca-7131 no longer responds. Caroline, Slow’s turtle on board, a young genius mathematician, nibbled at a cable causing serious damage. To the point that they can no longer close the black hole created by their passage and risk putting humanity in danger. The Orca-7113, ready for the return, that of Youri and Tom who were feasting on beer, will be called to the rescue.
Another pillar of the novel, the non-android autonomous robots, whether they are “Experts” and guide a ship or “Sofias”, which accompany all humans in their education, representing for some of the kinds of nannies essential to their decisions. This is the case for Sara’s daughter, Mia, who thinks that her mother, who regularly leaves for long space missions, has abandoned her and her wife Ness. This is the emotional aspect of the story, in which the cultivation of cactus also plays a role of escape…
Twists
Written under the auspices of Asimov and Clarke (to whom explicit reference is made) and advice from particle physics specialists in plant molecular physiology, the tragedy of the orc is in the wake of a tradition of space opera, where the exploration of space continues to reserve happy surprises. Pride of place is devoted to long dialogues between space-time miners in the solitude of their Orca, a way of telling the story that has passed over the past hundred and fifty years (and the reader’s present), of giving an emotional dimension and discuss the meaning of the human quest. This first part of a trilogy, by a mining engineer writer and author of several books for fifteen years, reads like an adventure novel with twists and turns, thriving on unresolved sections of astrophysics, and leaving for the end of this first part a huge cliffhanger likely to give impatience for the second.