2023-08-05 17:06:24
The writer and artist died this Saturday August 5 in Paris at the age of 93. He has been one of the great pioneers of the genre since the 1950s.
He will not finish his Tronche series, the first volume of which, Rosépine, was published last spring by La Volte. Science fiction writer Philippe Curval died on Saturday August 5 in Paris at the age of 93. He left behind a copious body of work, of which This Dear Humanity, published in 1976, is the most famous title.
The one who was known in the civil status under the name of Philippe Tronche was born in 1929 in Paris. Under the influence of an art collector father, he took an early interest in creators such as Max Ernst and Joan Miro and in speculative literature. In the early 1950s, he joined the team of the very first science fiction bookstore, La Balance, run by Valérie Schmidt in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
Alongside figures such as Boris Vian, Raymond Queneau, Jacques Bergier or Michel Butor, Philippe Curval notably participated in the creation of the pioneering exhibition Présence du futur, in the fall of 1953, a founding act of modern science fiction in France. . We owe him the presence of “Gustave”, a giant robot of 2.50 m unearthed from a scrap dealer in Vanves, exhibited among collages by the writer Jacques Sternberg or a painting by Queneau.
Philippe Curval took up the pen and never let go. Among his 40 novels and nearly 200 short stories, we can cite Le Ressac de l’espace in 1962, La Fortress de coton in 1967 or This dear humanity in 1976, his best-known novel, describing the Marcom, the Common Market, a Declining Europe, folded in on itself. More recently, in addition to Rosepine, he published Les Nuits de l’aviateur in 2016, a novel with autobiographical overtones.
He had also explored various artistic practices, such as collage or ceramics. The one who described himself as a “frustrated filmmaker” was married to art critic Anne Tronche, who died in 2016. That same year, he also said he was happy that “science fiction has arrived at what[il] wished
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