The French, ah, ces sacrés Français… they have a way of turning even a science‑fiction convention into a miniature opera, complete with drama, eccentricity, and a touch of cosmic mischief.
This year’s XuCon, the 53rd national French SF convention, unfolded near Liège, as if the Belgians had kindly agreed to host a temporary embassy of galactic Francophonie.
And, bien sûr, prizes were awarded — with the solemnity of a literary Académie and the cheerful chaos of a village fête.
Audrey Pleynet walked away with the Rosny Aîné Prize for her novel Sintonia, a story that hums with the quiet electricity of worlds brushing against each other.
It follows a society where communication is not merely spoken but woven — threads of meaning, emotion, and memory intertwining until reality itself becomes a tapestry.
Audrey Pleynet’s heroine, caught between political intrigue and metaphysical resonance, must learn to navigate a world where silence is dangerous and harmony can topple empires.
Naturally, the French rewarded a novel about the perils of miscommunication; they’ve spent centuries perfecting the art.
Chloé Chevalier, meanwhile, claimed the Rosny Aîné Prize for Best Short Story with Les Noueurs (The Knotters), published in the Utopiales 2025 anthology.
Her tale centers on the mysterious “Knotters,” artisans who bind fragments of time into delicate braids. When one Knotter discovers a thread leading to a future catastrophe, she must decide whether to preserve the timeline or unravel it entirely. It’s elegant, melancholic, and just cryptic enough to make readers mutter “mais qu’est‑ce que ça veut dire…?” while admiring its beauty.
Pierre Stolze received the Cyrano Prize — fittingly, since no one wields flamboyant imagination quite like him — and Dominique Warfa was honored with the Convention’s Special Prize, presumably for services rendered to the Republic of Speculative Letters.
And then, as if France had not already monopolized the weekend’s literary fireworks, the Utopiales Festival unveiled its 2026 shortlist.
Five novels, five different flavors of speculative mischief, all competing for the affection of a jury presided over by Nicolas Martin, who must now pretend to be impartial while drowning in cosmic metaphors.
Guillaume Chamanadjian’s Heureux comme jamais (Happy Like Never Before) offers a sly, almost satirical space opera. Humanity’s wealthiest escape Earth aboard the Space Dragon — because of course the French imagine billionaires fleeing ecological collapse in a ship named after a mythological creature. Noah, a young engineer, overhears a secret that reveals Earth may not be as dead as advertised. Cue class warfare, conspiracies, and the delightful spectacle of elites panicking when their lies begin to leak.
Thomas Gunzig’s Spectres (Specters) is a sharp, darkly humorous critique of capitalism — the kind only a Belgian could write with such gleeful acidity. A physicist discovers that the afterlife is a parallel dimension, and immediately corporations rush in to monetize it. The dead, it turns out, are not safe from quarterly profit expectations. Gunzig’s satire is so biting one suspects he sharpens it on weekends.
Lucie Mosca’s Bordure (Edging) follows Shylot, a war veteran trying to run an art gallery on Concordia. Naturally, the gallery is a front for high‑risk data heists aimed at exposing corrupt elites. It’s a novel that proves once again that in French SF, art galleries are never just art galleries — they are espionage hubs, revolutionary cells, or portals to other dimensions. Sometimes all three.
Jeff Noon and Steve Beard’s Gogmagog (original title Gogmagog: The First Chronicle of Ludwich) is a surreal river‑journey novel featuring Cady Meade, a rum‑soaked captain ferrying a sick girl and a malfunctioning artificial being along a haunted river. It’s whimsical, eerie, and delightfully British — which means the French adore it, but only in the way one admires a peculiar cousin who insists on wearing tweed in summer.
Finally, Claire North’s Les Dieux lents (Slow Gods) expands her trademark philosophical SF into a sweeping galactic opera. Interstellar politics, cosmic mysteries, and slow‑moving divine entities collide in a narrative that asks what happens when gods take their time — and mortals cannot afford to wait. It’s grand, elegant, and just abstruse enough to make French readers sigh with pleasure.
Ah, ces sacrés Français — always ready to crown new champions of the imagination, always eager to turn literature into a battlefield of ideas, and always, always convinced that science fiction is a matter of French national pride.
And honestly?
They’re not wrong! 😊
