Jacques Barbéri (1954– ) is a French writer of science fiction and fantasy. He was initially inspired to write science fiction by the film 2001: A Space Odyssey and Philip K. Dick’s novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch in the early 1970s. While working on a doctorate in dental surgery and dentistry, he continued to write, leading up to his first collection of short fiction, Kosmokrim (1985), which revealed his obsessions with time, memory, myth, metamorphoses of flesh, and perceptions of reality. He is also a screenplay writer, a translator from Italian, and a musician (in the group Palo Alto).
With Antoine Volodine, Francis Berthelot, Emmanuel Jouanne, and a few other writers, he formed Limite, a group that worked to experiment and push back against the conventions imposed by the history of the genre. Their first collective work, Despite the World, profoundly changed the French science fiction of the eighties.
Barbéri has published a dozen novels (none yet in English), including Narcose (Narcosis, 1989), his most popular title, and one hundred short stories. In addition to a new edition of the Narcosis trilogy (Narcosis, La Mémoire du crime [The Memory of the Crime, 2009], Le Tueur venu du Centaure [The Killer from Centaur, 2010]), he recently has published in French (through La Volte editions) two collections of short stories, L’Homme qui parlait aux araignées (The Man Who Speaks to Spiders, 2008) and Le Landeau du rat (The Rat’s Cradle, 2011), as well as two novels, Les Crépuscule des chimères (The Twilight of Chimeras, 2013) and Cosmos Factory (2014).
“Mondocane” (1983), appearing here for the first time in English, is a stunning example of surreal science fiction, carrying forward the legacy of Paul Scheerbart and Alfred Jarry in a much more visceral way.