Julie Girard’s first novel, “The Twilight of the Unicorns” at Gallimard, is set in New York and the world of these new technology companies where ethics weighs little against millions of dollars.
This first novel smacks of experience. Julie Girard, Franco-American, lives in New York. Exactly like Éléonore, the central character of the novel The Twilight of the Unicorns. But if the author has worked for a long time in the art world, Éléonore is a journalist, specializing in the economy of new technologies. Married to Zack, an American entrepreneur, they have a little girl. A family in full decay, like almost everything that lives in this big city that the journalist considers to be ” under a vacuum “. “In this capitalist Legoland designed according to a checkerboard plan,” she has “ more and more the impression of wandering around in the most sterile sanitized. » Criticism of our modern world, of its everyday horrors, is fierce.
Inevitably, Éléonore is more and more unhappy. She often recalls the passionate nights spent in a Parisian apartment in the company of her first great love, a pianist who has become a star today. Nostalgic passages like sentimental and purely sensitive breaths in the quantum reactor of the novel. For her work, Éléonore meets a German researcher living near New York. He has just raised millions of dollars to develop an overpowered quantum computer.
Human augmented by quantum computer
His project is a bit chilling: he wants to connect it to probes implanted in the brains of wealthy clients. Thus, a businessman will be able to think, deduce and act with the power of the computer. A kind of human2.0.
The “technical” part of the novel is very successful. We don’t know if it’s science fiction or possibilities in a few months, but the description is glaringly true. “ The machinery was impressive. In the center, a cylinder three meters long was divided into three compartments on each of which were arranged several sets of handles. Everything was held in place by a double portico. This tubular mass, harnessed to the ceiling, looked like a space capsule. » A genius, a computer, a company that becomes a unicorn… But all good ideas have their flaws.
The novel, with formidable aggressiveness, tells how the genius will burn his wings when approaching the world of the ultra-rich. Those who earn a lot of money without the slightest qualm. An attitude explained by Éléonore’s husband, an influencer scammer: ” We don’t force influencers to go into debt. Moreover, most economic models work thanks to the stupidity of individuals. Money has been made on the backs of ignoramuses for centuries. »
This dive into today’s modern world paradoxically ends in the Austrian mountains, in a green valley, reading philosophy. As if real life was far, far away from quantum computers and artificial or augmented intelligence.
