From 188 Contes à régler
Rather a mediocre writer, he had ambition and a certain level of self-awareness. He knew well that, since the end of the 20th century, for more than forty years, a novel could no longer sell if its author had not made a name for himself in a field other than literature.
Unfortunately for him, he wasn’t a singer, an actor, a politician, a TV or radio personality, or even a sports star.
Moreover, he hadn’t lived a particularly exciting life; he had always just aimed to get through his time, preferably by wasting it with numerous women who brought him neither the fever, suffering, nor passion that could become a source of inspiration.
Nor had he sought fulfillment in travel and adventure. He found travel tedious, and thought that all cities looked alike, just as landscapes everywhere could easily be categorized into a few types with minor variations.
He was about to turn forty-five when he thought of broadening his horizons by taking a space cruise to other planets. Perhaps he needed to escape humanity to find that spark, that burst of energy.
At that time, for ten years already, getting lost beyond belief no longer posed a problem. Humanity had taken millennia to leave its native soil, struggled to reach foreign planets, but after managing to escape its solar system, the other galaxies held no more secrets, and hopping from one unknown planet to another became first a source of endless fascination, then a heavenly windfall for the rapacious conqueror lurking in every man, and finally, an infinitely expandable revenue stream for intergalactic travel agencies. The writer allowed himself a year to explore a piece of the universe, time to find a world that would inspire him.
On the tourist level, the interest in being catapulted so far seemed very negligible to him. On the whole, nature remained nature everywhere, desert or aquatic, lush or arid, flat or mountainous, and nothing more reminded of a local sequoia than a small tree from some distant planet suffering from gigantism.
However, on a metaphysical level, it was a brain overload. Enough to challenge the imagination, inspire many epics, and serve as a starting point for fascinating musings.
The writer, who never took notes anywhere, never lingered on one world rather than another, he was content to endure, to let himself be soaked in, not to delve deeper and to change the scenery. He was a bit surprised to find that not only did life exist elsewhere, but that it was remarkably diverse - A bit frightened too by the dizzying array of choices, for there was truly a rich catalog of creatures that could make one dream or drift into fantasy.
Too rich in the eyes of the writer who was hardly inspired by excess, but he played along, went further and further, looked with all his eyes, never neglected anything, and saw unimaginable things in spades.
The Trobyles, who lived like giant slugs, stuck to the walls of their world made of smooth planes, tirelessly weaving a gigantic mosaic, the only proof of a form of civilization. The Nigrades, who had taken a dislike to the color yellow and were constantly fighting to contain this invading hue that kept relentlessly returning. The Urgids lived only amidst an unbearable noise, which was as essential to them as water or air is to us. The Guniphages, blind, deaf, mute, almost paralytic, but equipped with enormous, long hands with twenty fingers which replaced all their missing senses with astonishing faculties. The Glens, incapable of creation, exclusively devouring, enormous steel mandibles which shredded and digested an entire world without hope of being able to reconstitute it. The Astroïbes, giant molluscs which survived without ever moving, clinging to the reefs of a shallow, muddy planet. The threadlike Synphs, phosphorescent, multiform, sometimes invisible, always unpredictable, impossible to distinguish from a chaotic world where everything was crunching and sparkling, where one could never tell plant from animal. The Gorguceae, whose secret labyrinths were dug deep into the ground where, like giant moles, they attempted to find the remains of a lost, perhaps mythical, civilization. The Nuctiges, owners of a very evolved world, incomprehensible to us because language and sounds were unknown to them and they replaced them with infinite variations of lights and colors whose complexity defied our intelligence. The Silcids, parasites full of viscous liquid and fat which lived in the cells of a gigantic space sponge and fed on themselves, on their own constantly reconstituted substance. And so many others, sometimes closer to humans, sometimes defended by worlds where no one would have dared to arrive.
He came back, the writer, with the subject of several novels, but no subject in particular really inspired him. In any case, he liked neither minute descriptions nor subtle analyses, and reality aroused no comment in him. And above all, he found that traveling to the confines of space did not bring much more than lugging around on earth from one antipode to another, and that one quickly suffered the effects of a monotony of the unexpected, from which he could not escape.
In fact, he only returned from his extraordinary journey with a single thought that seemed to have never struck anyone other than him: Throughout the universe, Earthlings seemed to be the most sophisticated, the most fascinating by their complexity, but in return, by far the most fragile. The Earth was apparently the only true cemetery in the universe, the only mass grave where simply remaining alive in the dull daily life could be considered a real feat. Elsewhere, creatures mostly led a rather larval existence, but they seemed indestructible, almost like stones or trees on Earth.
The writer stretched these few ramblings over a course of around fifty pages. He added a few more pages to express his astonishment at realizing that only Earthlings, absurd creatures destined exclusively for death, had imagined from scratch not a sadistic God drunk on genocide, but a God of goodness and mercy.
His book was published by a publisher attracted to its bleak despair. The writer, who had already published around ten books without any success, regained confidence and felt that, this time, he could hope for a large print run. He even had the idea to cleverly stage a live suicide during a famous literary television program.
This act might have made the headlines the next day, if World War III had not broken out that day.
The writer's suicide was not even mentioned on the fourth page of the newspapers. Twenty-three copies of his book were sold.