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Paris (AFP)
"Science fiction no longer exists", says the cartoonist Enki Bilal while Wednesday appears the second volume of "Bug", a terrifying story of anticipation showing the planet plunged into chaos after the disappearance of all digital data.
"We are in a world of constant technological and scientific change, and we are already in a science-fiction universe," the author of "The Fair of the Immortals" said in an interview with AFP. in his studio in the heart of Les Halles district in Paris.
Published by Casterman, "Bug" begins in 2041 in a world that resembles furiously that of 2019. All computer data disappear inexplicably. More archives, more codes. Internet no longer works, digital TV either. Almost all means of transport digitized are paralyzed. From the biggest server to the smallest USB stick nothing is more operational …
All the memory of humanity seems to have migrated into the head of a single man, Kameron Obb, back from a mission on Mars. From then on, the states, the multinationals, the mafia have only one goal: to seize this man whose face is nibbled by a mysterious blue spot.
"I tell a story today, we have become extremely dependent on digital objects, and in some ways digital has become an extension of our brain," explains Enki Bilal, a smartphone at hand and a connected computer not far away. on a sofa.
"We've all been distressed by the loss of a mobile phone or tablet, but it's nonsense." Before digital went wild, we lived very well, "says the 67-year-old author. which specifies not being "nostalgic".
In its own way, "Bug" warns about the potential dangers of all digital. "Everywhere, we are working on new implants, artificial intelligence, transhumanism … In China, it's already +1984+ (George Orwell's novel, ed) multiplied by 10. Surveillance cameras are capable of 'Identify the people who cross out of nails.Spotted those who have been poorly rated will no longer be able to take a train or plane on the pretext that they behaved badly in the street,' rebels the cartoonist.
"At the time when Orwell was writing 1984," he continues, "we revolted because we found that this system of perpetual surveillance was an intrusion into our private life, a form of fascism, of dictatorship."
– The digital disease –
"Today," he says, "we accept this because we have become addicts, we have lost our ability to revolt because we are already contaminated by digital technology.
"What would happen if everything that connects us to the world disappeared overnight?" Wonders the designer. Certainly chaos, thinks the reader dizzy at reading an album of dark prophecy.
The author notably the tetralogy "Monster" (on the break-up of Yugoslavia and religious obscurantism) or, in collaboration with the scriptwriter Pierre Christin, "Hunting Party" (which foreshadowed the collapse of the USSR) ), yet claims to have "wanted to avoid the realistic aspect" of chaos.
"I remotely evoked the consequences of this huge digital bug: users stranded in lifts, aircraft crashes, psycho-traumatic suicide, hospitals that no longer work … These hundreds of thousands of deaths in a few days "he says.
Because "Bug" is especially the occasion to return on one of the obsessions of Enki Bilal: the memory and its transmission.
"Digital technology leads to a lack of transmission of memory, which still notes the phone number of his relatives or his appointments in a notebook, who can do without the internet?", He says.
A third volume ("which will not be the last and in which the main character will become aware of his powers") is already planned.
While waiting for this future tetralogy or even pentalogy, Enki Bilal is already preparing, with screenwriter and writer Dan Franck, a televised adaptation of "Bug" ("we are on a first series of six episodes") to be broadcast on France Télévisions.
? 2019 AFP
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