Maurice Dantec
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Maurice Georges Dantec (born 1959) is a French science fiction author.
He was born in Grenoble, France, the son child of a journalist and a seamstress. He grew up primarily in Ivry-sur-Seine near Paris. While still in high school he met Jean Bernard Pouy, future author of noir novels such as Le Poulpe, who inspired Dantec to take an interest in noir fiction. In his youth, he was a devoted reader of Nietzsche who became an important influence on his work.
In the late 1970s, having graduated from high school, he began university studies in the humanities but quickly dropped out to put together a rock band called État d'urgence ("State of Emergency"). In the 1980s, he pursued a career in music while working as a copywriter in the advertising industry. He only began writing seriously at the beginning of the 1990s. His first novel, La sirène rouge ("Red Siren"), was published in 1993 as a part of the Série Noire collection. The novel won the 813 award for best crime novel.
Dantac's second novel, Les racines du mal ("The Root of Evil"), appeared in 1995 and borders on cyberpunk fiction. The novel was quite successful commercially and was awarded the Prix de l'Imaginaire. His classically cyberpunk novella Là où tombent les anges ("Where the Angels fall"), appeared the same year.
Dantec and his family relocated to Québec in 1997, where he wrote third novel Babylon Babies, which further explores themes of decadence and apocalypse from Là où tombent les anges. Le théâtre des opérations, journal métaphysique et polémique ("The Operating Theatre, a Metaphysical and Polemical Journal") appeared in 2000, and is closer to an anti-technocratic pamphlet than a novel. Dantec followed this up in 2001 with Laboratoire de catastrophe générale ("Laboratory of General Catastrophies"), which was written in the form of a journal.
The first film adapatation based on the works of Dantec, La sirène rouge directed by Olivier Megaton, was released in August 2002. A film adaptation of Babylon Babies, the most controvertial of Dantec's novels, is currently in production under the direction of Mathieu Kassovitz.
Many of Dantec's readers are disappointed by his fascination with narcotics, which was already appearent in La sirène rouge, and with gang violence, which is no longer a part of the backdrop to his novels but is increasingly their main subject. This disappointment has grown in some cases into rejection by his fans, especially since he is increasingly identified with the French far right, particularly the Bloc Identitaire.