the earth is blue like an orange

The Ice people is the English name that was gave to the science-fiction book called La Nuit des Temps (literally: the night of times). This romance was written by René Barjavel, the author of Ashes Ashes (Ravage). René Barjavel, a French writer and journalist, was born in 1911 and died in 1985 in Paris. In the Ice Age, he depict, like in many other books he wrote, the excesses caused by science, human greed for knowledge (even with a price for the human kind), … A group of scientists stationed in Antarctica discovers, coming from deeply above the ice, a signal, similar to a radio wave. Curious, the scientists try to reach the place where the signal comes from, but decide to call other scientists from all over the world to help them, as they don’t manage to excavate so deeply (more than a kilometer) above the ice. And what they discover is more surprising that anything they imagine: in a gold “egg”, two persons, a man and a woman, have laid, in hibernation, for billions of years. And they don’t come from a future civilization, but from a past civilization, that ruled the world billions of years before our times.  This discovery awakes the interest of all the nations on Earth. Many scientists are sent there. The team decides to awake first the woman. Both the woman and the man are incredibly beautiful. The woman, Élea, is about to reveal them fabulous things, that can. Simon, a French doctor, falls in love at the instant he sees Élea. But she always seems to be unhappy, and even when she tells them everything she new about her civilization, she is lost in her souvenirs. In fact, in the seemingly perfect world she knew, a war was about to happen between her developed continent, Gondwana, and the other continent where disorder ruled. The most impressive weapon her country had was a bomb more powerful than a nuclear bomb. But people greedy for power had decided to use this weapon. A scientist, Coban, decided to protect the human kind. He made a gold egg, and in this egg the most intelligent man and the most beautiful woman should enter and hibernate until the effects of the bomb cease. Élea was the third most beautiful woman, but the first had an accident and the second became pregnant. Élea was forced to accept Coban’s idea to perpetuate the human kind. But she loved Païkan much more than it’s possible to imagine, and did’nt want to be separated from him. All her world collapse, and the perfect world becomes a frightening one. She tries desesperately to escape with Païkan, but… The man that lies in the golden egg is Coban. In the present times, Simon is also desesperate, why he understands that Élea will always love Païkan, even he is dead. But, while Élea narrate her past, the avidity of some menaces the expedition: Élea’s civilisation had invented a way to create using… nothing, thabns to Zoran’s equation. Some countries would do anything to obtain the equation…The Ice People is at the same time an affecting romance, a science-fiction book (some aspects remember 1984 from Orwell), a philosophical work,… The love between Païkan and Élea is amazing. They never say: “Païkan is mine” or “Élea is mine”, but “I am Païkan’s” or “I am Élea’s”. I recommand this moving, amazing, fantastic book. Behind the story, a critical of our societies and the avidity of the men and the governments. In the team, there is a scientist coming from America, and another one who is a Russian woman. First both blame the other, but finally the American appreciate the Russian and vice versa. As the book as been writen during the cold war, we can see the will of the author to see a word without conflicts.

To know more, a website dedicated to Barjavel and his work (in French)

photo from flickr

All buildings are meant to collapse. As we construct them, we know  perfectly well that they will crumble, gnawed by the years. Such are societies, arts, revolutions. The men that paid with their life revolutions to establish a new government knew that this system would not be eternal, that one day other men would destroy what they had done to rebuild a new world that would also be ephemeral. The men that fought for new ideas or a new conception of art knew that one day their movement would be considered as old and outdated ; the avant-garde would give place to a new avant-garde. When we invent a fabulous machine, the oldest machines are eclipsed by it. To create is to destroy. Whatever we erect, we knock over the precedent construction. Each movement sweep away the precedent and is inevitably destroyed by the following.So why do we built and give everything to build? Maybe because some buildings cross ages. When it happens, the man who managed to build a durable thing enter in the history, because he defied the time. Everything fades with time. But the greatest reason is that we want to ignore that the time will rub out our existence. And, anyway, the creation is no vain. Indeed, what matters is not the creation itself, what matters is the moment of the creation. It is maybe a thousand times more important than the object, the idea, the government, … we create. It’s the idea that stays and not the object. We build just for building. The ideal work is the one that has never been finished, like sigh ready to fly off. The artist captured the moment of the creation. When we finish a work, then we know that it’s ended, that the spark of the creation extinguish, that we will have to make it reappear, because from then on that the work is completed, it starts its progression to oblivion and collapse.