s with so many books caught in the jaws of some publisher who thinks we are not very bright, there are fogs to pierce here. For several hundred of its many pages, Babylon Babies is a techno-thriller, and like any techno-thriller, it is immensely vulnerable to outmoding. A techno-thriller may get facts wrong, or utter itself according to philosophies repellent to any civilized person, but any techno-thriller published in 2005 must sound as though it shoots the curl of 2005, that it matadores the riptide kaleidoscope of now. But this knowingness of the form has a very short half-life: It works only as long as what it is privy to has not been revealed—perhaps by some episteme-shifting event like the fall of the Twin Towers—as papier-mache. Datedness in a techno-thriller collapses its raison-d'etre. It becomes hollow, as evacuated as an abandoned set.
So maybe it's not so surprising that Semiotext(e) have declined to give (either on the copyright page, or anywhere else) the date of original publication of Babylon Babies, a novel set in 2013, which the tale depicts with an immense (but failed) effect of knowingness. The problem is, of course, that Babylon Babies was first published in 1999 (in France), and that it shows absolutely no signs of having been revised for translation. Its take, therefore, on 2013 is a pre-Twin Towers take; it is a pre-Bush War take. There is no sense (how could there be?) of the transformed rhetoric of the world since 2001, no sense of the brushfire network of ideology-based terrorism inspired by evil men but executed, semi-autonomously, by martyrables. Everyone in Babylon Babies is as cynical about geopolitics and religion as everyone thought they could afford to be in 1999, for it is a book from long ago. It is not Dantec's fault that his 20th-century techno-thriller sees 2013 in 20th-century terms; but it is, I think, Semiotext(e)'s fault that reviewers (like myself) are likely to be perplexed (and even distressed) by the book's surreal outmodedness before they manage to work out the facts in the case.
These (like the 1999 publication date) are straightforward enough. Maurice G. Dantec's Babylon Babies (which is also the original French title) was published in France to considerable acclaim. It was his third thriller, the first to have genuine SF content. The well-known photographer Marie Jo Lafontaine published a suite of her photographs—young men and women staring at us like the end of 2001, like the future staring at the crippled past—which she called Babylon Babies (2003), clearly reflecting Dantec's novel, which ends (this is a deliberate spoiler, see below) in the birth of posthuman twins for whom we are like infusoria. Mathias Kassovitz (director of Gothika) has been due to begin shooting a film version. Even though the film seems to have been delayed a couple of times, it's still clear that Dantec's novel has made a stir in Europe. Hence, one assumes, its translation now.
Piercing the veil of language
Unfortunately, this brings us to another fog we'll have to pierce before getting down to the book: which is the translation itself. Unidiomatic translations of great literature are damaging, of course (I don't think I have ever encountered more sustained and visible intellectual passion than the passion-to-redeem that burns in the hearts and minds of good translators when they encounter bad translations of great works). But a bad translation of a techno-thriller—a translation that fails to know how to convey the fabrication of knowingness that comprises the original text—does not simply damage a book; it corrodes its very Being in the World.
I have been working from a proof of Dantec's novel, and it may be that the final version smooths out some infelicities; but somehow this seems not really very likely at this late stage. Noura Wedell's translation of Babylon Babies reads as though her first language is not English, and as though Semiotext(e) Sci-Fi had not bothered to hire a copyeditor (who might for instance have noticed that a terabit is not "a thousand million bits" but a trillion bits—just to mention one highly visible technical blunder). Botched phrasings—"Vlasseiev swallowed his saliva kind of harshly," "Toorop noted a strange little detail he didn't give pause to at the time," "about which he ignored pretty much everything," "without having seen the slightest flashlight"—jostle with phrases which sound like moments of eloquence in French goosed into bathos: "The sky above him buzzed with millions of stars that two quivering and eager breasts came to deliciously conceal." There are dozens of words (usually verbs) that sound—as in "Marie Zorn expulsed the fifty pages of her diary from the memory of the neuromatrix"—as though a non-English speaker had constructed them out some dictionary that did not make it clear (why should it?) that (for instance) the verb form of "expulsion" is not "expulse" but "expel," though what Dantec probably meant here was something more like "expunge"; and time and again French phrases seem to have been literally translated into contexts that derangingly alienate them from conventional English: "Toorop finished his book within twenty-four hours, a good sci-fi, he thought," or "a good category 5 cyclone, that had hit the Florida Coast."
But this is just a few surface effects. The cumulative cost of a failure of idiom in a techno-thriller is not dissimilar to the cost of concealing its birth date: The effect is of strangulation. Babylon Babies does not breathe our air. Which means it died in transit.
It is still a book to try to read. Though he's given maybe 50 pages too much backstory which focuses too hard on Bosnia and the Inner Asian Frontiers of China (both too 20th-century to generate a techno-thriller buzz), the main protagonist of the tale, a Dutch-French mercenary named Toorop, does give off a modestly engrossing David Carradine poetry-quoting Zen I-kill-you-because-it-is-the-Way-today air, a Ronin guy (Frankenheimer, 1999), Bourne Identity without the laughs (the original Ludlum novel was 1980), and his failure to understand what's happening around him puts him on our side, because we don't, either. This is partly (I am convinced) because the translation keeps battering at us with its wooden tongue, but partly because Dantec has an exceedingly complicated scenario to unfold. I am not going to try to synopsize that scenario clearly, because I'm not paid enough to.
A techno-thriller from long ago
But it is possible to say that it adheres to a typical techno-thriller Russian-nesting-doll structure, in which the farther inside the doll you get, the bigger the plot becomes. Toorop is recruited to escort a schizophrenic French-Canadian woman named Marie Zorn back from Russia to Montreal; he understands that she is carrying something—maybe an injected virus of some sort—which is of immense value to his hirer's ultimate clients. What he finds out very slowly—as do we—is that 1) the ultimate clients think she is in fact pregnant with a mutant fetus of quasi-religious importance to a wealthy crank sect; 2) she is in fact pregnant with twins who embody the DNA of Gaia, who speak DNA, who can commune therefore with all the information in the world; 3) that they are in fact the first posthumans and will inherit the Earth and the universe; but 4) Marie Zorn herself has been radically transformed by eager wise Canadian doctors who understand that schizophreniacs understand the Real; with the result that, 5), all unbeknownst to the swarm of smugglers, she is particularly good at understanding posthuman Twins who take the double-helix shape of two Serpents entwined (one hopes Dantec doesn't think he's the first to have noticed this bit of nonsense), and is therefore a bridge (please mind the translation, which here as elsewhere is impossible as it were, ha ha ha):
She was the future. ... Panoramic, thermodynamic, absolute sensation; fractal certainty of being at the origin of a new human branch, fragile, virtual, spectral, impossible as it were. "We believe that the schizophrenic mutation is just a transitory stage," Darquandier [one of the Canadian docs] ... had told her once. "A necessary stage, but a stage nonetheless; the schizophrenic, bridge between man and superman. I wonder what Nietzsche would have thought! Ha! Ha! Ha!"
[And later ... ]
She was the Tree of Knowledge of the Island-Machine of her dreams. She was the generating schizoprocessor of the Advanced Neurobiology Lab. ... Her brain had pierced the wall of light; it was communicating with the souls of the dead. [Et cetera.]
In other words, Marie Zorn is some piece of work.
Unfortunately, as great swathes of Babylon Babies are done in Tell Not Show speak, we hardly see her in the flesh. Nor do we get more than a glimpse of her twins, who are about to find that the DNA of Everything makes for a tasty world. The twins may derive by some serpentine circumbendibus from the end of Michael Moorcock's The Final Programme (1968), but Dantec can be excused from having stolen from Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio (1999), in which posthuman children, who have much the same function as Marie Zorn's wee Babylon Babies, are generated out of a similar viral cauldron, because both books were written at the same time. It is particularly unfortunate that we see so little of Marie and her children, because what they distantly represent is what, in fact, Babylon Babies is, in the end, worth reading for.
Nothing else, I guess, really is. The techno-thriller stuff is congested and ago. Any political savvy that can be detected through the translation fog seems antediluvian at best; few techno-thriller writers have much use for the governments their readers have elected, and Babylon Babies is particularly solipsistic when it comes to relating any of its actions to the governance of the world. Way below the surface of its englishing, Babylon Babies sounds as though its author wants to rant; and in that context, given the roils of intemperance it is almost possible to decipher down there in 1999, maybe the badness of the translation has saved us from something.
We do have to say that Dantec may be a superb writer, or a foolish bad one with a gift of the gab, or a craftsman misprisioned, or a cad, or a saint, or a fanatic, or a magus; but that we have no way of knowing, here in Unilinguist Land, yet. Maybe next time round we won't be expulsed from catching a glimpse of the slightest flashlight of a good sci-fi.
