Insofar as sf can now be seen as a global phenomenon encompassing all kinds of cultural and national spheres, this is the result of a historical evolution. The US pulp market served as a catalyst, giving birth to a new genre in the 1920s and 30s. Sf books, comics, movies and pictures then originated ceaselessly from the US market to various parts of the world, shaping most iconic figures of the genre, from bug eyed monsters and rocket-ships to more elaborate objects. It enabled what Damien Broderick called the “sf mega-text”, a huge pool of references creators can liberally tap from and that readers draw upon to understand and appreciate new sf works^[1]. In short, the globalization of sf resulted from the exportation, then appropriation by readers and viewers all over the world, of a certain type of stories and icons, such as space or time travel, prospective interactions between man and technology, or encounters of every kind between our species and alien lifeforms.

Yet, the sf mega-text did not exactly flow smoothly and steadily from the US market into every corner of the world. Before sf could be claimed global, it met with various national boundaries. The best stories in the world need to be translated before most readers become aware of certain shifts or novelties in the mega-text. Publishing policies may themselves result from political or esthetic choices. However, non-US readers are not merely oblivious to some aspects of the mega-text. In countries like France, where a strong national publishing field has produced entertaining and remarkable novels and short stories, readers may actually know of another mega-text altogether.

Wherever they aroused a readership, sf icons and themes spurred on new writers. Early on, the UK scene joined in synergy with the US market, giving sf some of its most prominent authors and themes. However, this kind of partnership between two cultural spheres has yet to happen again. In almost all cases, to attain some level of notoriety on an international capacity, any new author or theme has to be anointed in the US market. Whereas several countries and cultural spheres harbor local writers, very few of them know the fate of a Stanislaw Lem or a Greg Egan.

I would like to present a minority report on the globalization of science fiction, by telling about how sf developed in France from its introduction in 1950 up to when local production peaked in the 1970s. While some French writers did attain a measure of eminence in French sf publishing series, it remains that most of the sf available to French readers over the period was an import from the US or the UK. Moreover, France exported very little to the English-speaking world.

This doesn't mean, however, that French sf writers merely mimicked external trends. As is always the case in sf, their works were born through a process of recycling, refinement and reimagining applied equally to classic texts and scientific theories, in other words by tapping into the sf mega-text. Very little of their originality reached the international readership, but it did find a sizable and appreciative audience in the French-speaking world. The dominance of "global", or US- and UK-born, sf has thus very early on been mitigated in France by the emergence of a local tradition seeking not to oppose but to complement it.

This paper means ultimately to demonstrate that French writers, critics and readers managed to develop and sustain a science fiction culture both distinct from and closely linked to the American mainstream. Such a confluence of varied cultural and iconic references in French sf could be called a “macro-text”. While Broderick's “mega-text” designates an intertextual encyclopedia pertaining to the genre as a whole, the name “macro-text” could refer to local representations of sf, attached to prevailing paradigms at given points in space and time.

When science fiction was introduced in France in the early 50s, publishers were quick to start series in order to benefit from a new genre they thought was increasingly popular in the United States. Gallimard and Hachette joined forces to launch Le Rayon Fantastique, which at first published only American and British novels, then hosted some of the most interesting French sf novels of the time. Anticipation, a book series by “Le Fleuve Noir”, provided readers with easy-to-read, fast-paced and adventure-packed French novels, somewhat analogous to what Ace Books began to publish at the same time. A third series complemented these two: Présence du Futur put the stress on fine writing, while publishing American and French novels and short stories collections.

When it came to choosing American novels to sell to their own market, French publishers did not seek specific partnerships with their American counterparts. The US publishing market was then restructuring itself: the age of the pulps was passing by, new magazines were asserting themselves, such as Galaxy and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and more importantly, the balance between short stories and novels was then shifting toward the latter. French publishers would then have had trouble choosing partners to provide them with a steady flow of first-rate novels for their series. Moreover, France's publishing market had always been very strong. At the time, publishers sought approval only from French readers and took their cues from what was actually bought and therefore liked in France.

During the 50s, the type of story that mostly embodied science fiction in the eyes of French readers and critics was that of the space adventures, in part because it was a distinctive trait from what French scientific romance had until then invented^[2]. This is, of course, similar to what had happened in the US two decades earlier. It could be interpreted either as a clue that space opera is the easiest way to provide science fiction's sense of wonder, or as an indication that the French were somewhat copying what had happened before them. Both hypotheses are certainly true to a degree, but French readers were nevertheless aware of a vaster array of themes and the space adventures they enjoyed were not exactly what American had called space opera.

When writer Boris Vian and critic Stephen Spriel praised science fiction literature in French newspapers, they spoke about unlimited imagination, ranging from the depths of space to new ways to look at their contemporary world^[3]. Their knowledge of science fiction themes was soon extended to most readers, thanks to Fiction, a magazine that started out as a mere extension of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction but quickly became much more than that. Fiction only kept short stories fitting French taste and added book reviews and critical articles allowing readers to grasp the full extent of the works of some prominent American authors like Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov and Theodore Sturgeon. We could add to them Poul Anderson, Alfred Van Vogt, Clifford Simak, Catherine L. Moore, Arthur Clarke and Alfred Bester as model writers for French critics at this time. The paradigm of space adventures, seen then in France as science fiction's trademark, differed greatly from the grand space opera of, let's say, Doc Smith and Jack Williamson. French writers were mainly influenced by Campbellian era esthetics and themes, although they kept it light on actual science and liberally inserted psychic and otherwise superhuman powers in their stories. Hard science fiction, either foreign or domestic in origin, never gained much ground in France.

French novels during the 50s featured explorers and scientists, not warriors. The main goal of the characters was to understand the universe they lived in. In one of the first French science fiction novel, Ceux de nulle part (“those from nowhere”), published in 1954 by Francis Carsac, Clair, M. D., gets involved by accident with benevolent aliens. Taken to their world, he studies their customs and becomes part of their civilization. He helps them to find answers to a pressing concern of theirs by studying another life-form, the Misliks, who compete with carbon-based living beings by extinguishing their suns^[4].

As in this novel, a lot of stories from this period can be summed up as “empowerment narratives”. Human beings are not, at the beginning of the story, very powerful or enlightened, but as they become aware of more advanced beings in the universe, they successfully emulate and sometimes outmatch their technology, advancing themselves to the level of a space-faring civilization.

One of the most striking novels in this category is arguably Gérard Klein's Le Gambit des étoiles, published first in 1958, then in 1973 in the US under the name Starmaster's Gambit^[5]. The human galactic empire in this novel is stagnant, its resources stretched out because it never achieved faster than light travel. Moreover, the human brain is worn thin by the immensity of space, with travelers and settlers struggling to come to terms with an infinite and cold universe. The main character, Jerg Algan, is to find clues about ancient dark cities built on deserted planets. While scouting for potential enemies of the empire, he instead succeeds in unlocking powers hidden in the human body. It turns out human beings are one of the possible results of a very old experiment launched by creatures living in the stars themselves. Jerg Algan delivers to humanity the real keys to space, as human beings become harbingers for the stars, strong, eternal and able to teleport at will from one planet to another.

French writers like Francis Carsac and Gérard Klein knew perfectly well what debt they had toward their American predecessors^[6]. We can read their novels both as tributes to their models and as claims to the same greatness. As their heroes became powers of their own right by emulating more ancient and wiser beings, the best French science fiction writers should have been able to compete with American and English writers. Le Rayon Fantastique, harbored an increasing number of French novels by Francis Carsac and by noted writers such as Philippe Curval and Nathalie Henneberg, while fewer American novels got published in general in France. In the early 60s, as far as French readers were concerned, science fiction novels came from all parts of the world, including Russia and Germany, and science fiction writers were chiefly American, English and French.

The prevailing paradigm began to shift according to recurring traits in published sf. Although still set in space, actions became less important than their consequences: French heroes of the 60s had to choose between several possible states of society and their adventures allowed them to explore the results of previous choices. For example, in Le Signe du chien (“Under the sign of the dog”), a 1960 novel by Jean Hougron, the main character has to investigate the crash of a starship on a remote planet whose inhabitants allegedly forsake advanced technology^[7]. In order to find out what's really going on, he has to understand their philosophy and identify the meaning of sociological inconsistencies. While his duty commands him to expose the fraud of the ruling class, so as to claim the planet for his own galactic federation, the hero marvels at some of the discoveries they made because they had chosen to remain secluded from the rest of the galaxy. Like this character, French heroes explored space and time throughout the 60s to find new ways to shape society. If it had been available to English-speaking countries, this shift in France's space adventures could have influenced the science fiction mega-text to some degree, converging for example with works by such a prominent writer as Ursula K. Le Guin.

This paradigm was, however, confined to France. Le Rayon Fantastique publisher Georges Gallet never found himself in a strong bargaining position with American publishers and no French novel was translated to English at the time. The science fiction mega-text kept on evolving, unknowingly leaving aside French space adventures with all their variations, instead tackling new issues and new narrative modes with Michael Moorcock's New Worlds and Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions. Global science fiction remained untouched by any French influence. Worse still, after the demise of Le Rayon Fantastique in 1964^[8], French readers were left with but a few sources to learn about new trends in science fiction during the last part of the 60s. The first instances of speculative fiction largely passed them by and New Wave authors, although known and respected, never gained a large readership^[9].

The new paradigm of science fiction in France was set by a confluence between French interest for patterns of alternate societies in space and time and a renewed influence from American and English science fiction.

In Ailleurs et Demain, a publishing series that started out in 1969, Gérard Klein published major works throughout the 70s and beyond, and in the wake of this success many other series arose, considerably expanding the perception of science fiction by French readers and writers. This peak in production allowed French writers to develop their own version of science fiction. In the wake of mai 68, the events that started a counter culture movement in France during the 70s, they became wary of American imperialism and favored SF themes allowing them to feed this skepticism. The prevailing science fiction paradigm in the 70s in France was about soft sciences in general, and more precisely bleak futures. French writers had from the start showed more interest for “soft” sciences like history, sociology and psychology than for hard sciences like physics or biology. They cared more about consequences of technological novelties than about explaining what made these inventions possible or how they could evolve during the story. They found kindred spirits in Robert Silverberg, Roger Zelazny, Frank Herbert, Jack Vance, Ursula Le Guin, Harlan Ellison, John Brunner, James Ballard and Michael Moorcock, to name but a few of the writers whose works were then celebrated in France.

Although obviously indebted to these authors, French sf writers did not merely copy them. They did as all sf writers have always done: they picked from the global science fiction mega-text, then broadly available to them with no or little time-lag, in order to shape their own objects. Whatever they invented was then added to what science fiction stood for in France.

A major instance of this process would be the relationship between Philip K. Dick and French writers. After Ubik was published in 1970, Dick became a major influence for science fiction in France, but this occurred, in fact, mainly through a French version of his musings about the nature of reality. The first page of Le Temps incertain by Michel Jeury, published in 1973 and translated in 1980 under the name Chronolysis, opens on a quote from Ubik about human beings carrying each their own universe^[10]. Le Temps incertain depicts the wanderings of a character lost in a strange dimension where time repeats itself and whose features are carved by the sheer will of its residents. This dimension is a disjointed state of space and time that can only be reached through the process of chronolysis, the breaking of time itself. This process can be achieved by accident, whenever the brain is subjected to an intense and sustained pain. While dying, the human being projects his consciousness into the unsettled time, where he goes on forever. Drugs and machines allow to enter this dimension as well, while monstrous entities can acquire form and consciousness inside and try to expand into our world by infecting the mind of living beings. Michel Jeury's novel was a major success in France and Dick's influence became then inseparable from his own.

Like Michel Jeury's chronolysis, some original sf ideas and images were shaped during this period. In Cette chère humanité, written in 1976 and translated to English in 1981 under the title Brave Old World, Philippe Curval depicts a European Union cut from the rest of the world, whose citizens aspire to work less and less in order to use their slowed-time booths^[11]. These machines stretch out time, so that whoever uses them ages less and gets more time to enjoy life. Slowed-time proves to be the downfall of European society, as it brings about social ineptitude and urban decay. The portraying of such decadence could have well merged later on with the cyberpunk trend^[12].

Like Francis Carsac and Gérard Klein before them, Michel Jeury and Philippe Curval, as many other French writers, strove to find elegant solutions to old and new questions asked in science fiction works^[13]. Yet they almost never, with a few exceptions, got the chance to be read in English and therefore influence the science fiction mega-text as a whole. The only writer to be consistently translated to the US market at the time was Pierre Barbet, whose works were chosen by DAW books only to the extent that they referred to French history^[14]. The sf mega-text as envisioned by Damien Broderick did not, for better or for worse, include new objects or variations on them coming from French writers and novels. The mega-text as perceived by French readers did, however.

Therefore, I would like to contribute to the study of “global” science fiction by suggesting that although science fiction classics and cutting-edge novels have become widely available, each national sphere is bound to retain its personality. This could be seen as a distortion. Maybe the lack of taste for hard science among French readers and writers came from a twisted perspective on the genre, so that they did not really know science fiction. Nevertheless, this begs the question of how this “real” science fiction could be global, while excluding hundreds of French novels published under this name^[15].

It should then be remembered, while exploring the causes, consequences and features of a globalized sf, that science fiction is accessed in each country through the filter of a national macro-text created by cultural and linguistic barriers, as well as by publishing strategies. This huge macro-text, shaped by what is published on a national market is what readers see as science fiction at a given point in space and time. Whereas science fiction scholars may trace influences and patterns on a worldwide level, most readers only take their cues from this macro-text and its prevailing paradigm: what is sold as science fiction in a given country is, for all practical matters, the main form of science fiction there.