Jacques Sternberg

Jacques Sternberg April 17 1923 Antwerp Belgium October 11 2006 Paris was a Frenchlanguage writer of science fiction and fantastique Sternberg was born to a welltodo RussianJewish family He was a poor student in school particularly struggling in French He began writing around the age of fifteen or sixteen His early writings tended toward the fantastic and the burlesque and it was only somewhat later that he began writing science fiction After school Sternberg worked as a packer in a cardboard factory before moving to Paris with the hope of becoming a publishing writer The literary climate of 1950s Paris was dominated by the Surrealists and Sternberg found some success in that environment Sternberg never identified with either his Jewish or Belgian heritage preferring to think of himself as simply mortal In his writings Sternberg never wrote of either the rich or the poor but only of the employee which represented the only world which he knew and could imagine source Lamediathequebe Sternberg a very apt helmsman owned a diminutive 12 Ft dinghy Zef class excellent for day cruising but slow and utterly unfit for racing and often undertook arduous coastal treks even in comparatively bad weather An anarchist at heart he rejected organized regatta and racing Not unlike Bernard Moitessier the famous ocean vagabond and wrote a biting satire of yachtsmen sponsors and yacht clubs in his eroticnautical novel Le navigateur published at the peak of Eric Tabarlys success Dinghy sailing means living a very close relationship with the sea and it is one of the keys to understand the important place of the sea in Sternbergs work specially in what may arguably be his best novel Sophie la mer et la nuit Sternberg died from lung cancer aged 83 Jacques Sternberg straddled the line between the fantastique and science fiction which he stated was only a subset of the former in a notorious essay Une Succursale du Fantastique nommée ScienceFiction A Branch of the Fantastic Called Science Fiction published in 1958 In Sternbergs works the causes of terror are not ghosts or vampires but the modernday city often depicted as a giant evil entity ready to crush the hapless humans who dare live within its body This theme reappears in novels such as LEmployé The Employee 1958 LArchitecte The Architect 1960 and La Banlieue The Suburb 1976 Sternbergs short stories collected in La Géométrie dans lImpossible The Impossible Geometry 1953 La Géométrie dans la Terreur The Terror Geometry 1958 Contes Glacés Icy Tales 1974 and Contes Griffus Clawed Tales 1993 to name but a few successfully mix several diverse elements a very dark sense of Surreal humor a kafkaesque notion of the absurd a taste for the macabre and finally a somber pessimistic vision of the world and the future In Sternbergs fiction love is never a source of redemption but something impossible almost alien as in Sophie la Mer la Nuit Sophie The Sea The Night 1976 and Le Navigateur The Navigator 1977 Source Article Jacques Sternberg from Wikipedia in English licensed under CCBYSA 30