Bernard Werber’s Le Papillon des étoiles — What Humanity Carries Off Earth

Bernard Werber, the French novelist and journalist who became known through Les Fourmis, makes stories from situations a reader might already have imagined for a moment.

His move is to take that moment seriously enough to write out what would happen next.

Bernard Werber’s Le Papillon des étoiles

Le Papillon des étoiles begins with a premise that sounds as though it might have stopped at a passing thought: build a ship large enough to hold a society and send it away from Earth.

I had previously read Werber in the shorter pieces collected in L’Arbre des possibles. This book has time to follow one idea over generations.

As science fiction, it has a point of resemblance to Battlestar Galactica. People leave a world where they can no longer live safely and have to make a society on the ships that carry them.

Private space programmes have made some parts of spaceflight feel closer to ordinary news. Werber uses that familiarity to get the reader to entertain a project much farther away from anything anyone could build.

Does History Repeat in a Closed World?

Earth has been damaged to the point that it may no longer sustain people. Yves Kramer, a scientist most people regard as mad, proposes a way to preserve human life on another planet.

Kramer’s life becomes entangled with that of Élisabeth Malory, a champion sailor who is paralysed after he hits her with his car on a rainy day.

A third person, the wealthy Mac Namara, has been told he does not have long to live. Between the three of them, a scheme that seemed impossible begins to acquire the people and resources to leave the ground.

The journey will take roughly a thousand years. The people who set out have to plan for descendants they will never meet to arrive at the destination.

The ship needs gravity and conditions in which people can live as they did on Earth. Some of those left behind oppose the project and try to stop it by force. The ship gets away in time.

Once it does, its passengers have time to repeat much of what happened on Earth. A community gives way to competing ideas about rule and freedom. Periods of peace, war, centralisation and fragmentation follow. The journey lasts 1,251 years. Only six of the original population’s descendants are left by the end.

Only two can travel down to the new planet, because the smaller vessel can carry just two people.

For a while, the two seem capable of settling. A quarrel threatens the whole undertaking. When the last man turns to a machine that can create life using one of his ribs, the ending begins to resemble another beginning.

Why It Reminded Me of Battlestar Galactica

I kept trying to picture the ship. What would a vessel have to look like for so many people to live inside it as if they were on a planet?

On my first reading, I couldn’t get a sense of how 144,000 people would live in an ecosystem they had built inside a craft.

Later I watched Battlestar Galactica. It gave me another way to picture the situation Werber had set up.

In the series, humans flee after an attack by the Cylons, machines of their own making. The fleet holds together long enough for familiar problems to return: military rule, democracy and a black market. After seeing people make another society under those conditions, I found Werber’s ship easier to imagine.

An Ark Story

Both stories have something of Noah’s ark in them. The question is what can be saved before a disaster and what the people carrying it will make of a second chance.

The later pages of Werber’s novel turn more directly to Genesis. The last man removes a rib and uses the technology brought from Earth to create Eya. When she calls herself Eve, the old story becomes visible beneath the new one.

When a Passing Thought Becomes a Novel

Werber gives an imagined situation enough room to feel inhabited. The world he builds does some of its work before a reader begins checking whether the machinery would function.

Leaving Earth is a distant premise. The novel makes the question closer by asking which habits people take with them when they believe they have escaped the circumstances that produced them.

Book Information

Le Papillon des étoiles

Author

Bernard Werber

Publication

10 July 2007 (Korean edition)

ISBN13

9788932907741

View the book on YES24

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