L. Timmel Duchamp--Home
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Chercher La Femme coming in August
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"Everything about the humanoids inhabiting the planet La Femme is
beautiful and desirable. Even their names are a pleasure to the
tongue, a pleasure that can be experienced only in meat space."
—Paul
22423
They named the planet "La Femme" and called it a paradise and refused
to leave it. Now Julia 9561 is heading up the mission to retrieve the
errant crew and establish meaningful Contact with the inhabitants. Are
the inhabitants really all female, as the first crew claimed? Why
don't the men want to return to Earth? What happened to the women on
the crew? And why did Paul 22423 warn the First Council to send only
male crew members?
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L. Timmel Duchamp reading from
Chercher La Femme at WisCon |
Advance Praise
Chercher La Femme, which unfolds in a strange, complex, alien future,
effectively explores several themes: of personal identity and how it
holds itself together but is also porous to experience; of
communication with alien life forms and how amorphous and challenging
that might be; and of the visceral power of alien forms of beauty and
art, giving the story compelling depths. The tense stretch between the
Pax and the "Outsiders" offers an interesting representation of the
real-world tension we now live with, between low-tech societies and
those racing to colonize outer (and inner, personal) space in all
sorts of ways.
There's some interesting tidal stirring going on at the more cerebral
levels of modern SF, which I think began with books like A Voyage to
Arcturus and Solaris. It's now manifesting itself in, for example,
Jeff Vandermeer's Southern Reach books and in this book, Chercher La
Femme, as well as in films like Arrival, They Remain, and of
course Annihilation. Human bafflement and consternation characterize
these stories, in the face of the most alien kind of alien-ness we can
imagine at this point, and a necessary softening and yielding of our
age-old infatuation with a propulsive, often violent drive to control
(or kill) whatever is ineffable and strange to us.
—Suzy McKee
Charnas, author of The Vampire Tapestry and the Holdfast Chronicles
"Speculative fiction at its purest."
—-Vonda N. McIntyre, author of Dreamsnake and The Moon and the Sun
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