On the incorporation of objects, regimes, and technological schemas in Stéphane Beauverger's Le Déchronologue

Stéphane Beauverger’s Le Déchronologueis a paradoxical novel: historical and futuristic at the same time, a SF novel and yet aspiring beyond the strictures of the genre.Being a formal performance and a spectacle, it ties the sovereign uniqueness of a style to the complexity of a chronological assembly leading to an eventual breathtaking narrative experience. It’s a “structure” hence, as well as a receptacle of the eruptive events and actions. Different times, historical anddiegetic, crisscross each other, and at times find comfort in the bloody and savage battles and the unsettling technical and technological discoveries. A chimeric productof an unnatural union between future and past, between a wild 17th century plagued by wars and piracy, and the futures of humanity, this narrative explores an alternate history of the 17thcentury,traversed by the infatuated trace of advanced technologies. This article aims, therefore,to disentangle the complicated mesh of diverse technological regimes present throughout this temporal novel and measure their representational impacts.