Alain Damasio
Alain Damasio is a French writer of sci-fi and fantasy. He also works as a scriptwriter for comics, radio fictions, movie and TV series. He is also notable as an audio and spoken word artist.
Biography
Alain Damasio was born in Lyon. his father was a self-employed car body mender, his mother was "Agrégée" in English. Alain Damasio graduated from high school in science. He then passed the exam to enter one of the top French business schools, the ESSEC Business School. He graduated in 1991. Then he chose a solitary retreat, first in Vercors and then in Nonza to write. His favorite field of specialization being futuristic politics. He blends in this genre elements of sci-fi and fantasy.As a young man he wrote many short stories. His first long fiction was La Zone du Dehors, a futuristic novel dealing with a model of society under control on a democratic model.
His second novel was rewarded with the Grand Prize of Imaginary Writing in 2006, in the works of fiction category: La Horde du Contrevent. This novel comes with a soundtrack composed by Arno Alyvan. It was a great success and sold 120,000 copies; this book is regularly quoted as a must-read of French sci-fi books.
In 2008, he lends his voice to Bora, a piece of music by Rone.
In 2009, he wrote La Rage du Sage, a poetic and political essay on our times, for the free single of the group Sliver.
Alain Damasio also writes the script of WindWalkers, an animation film taken from La Horde du Contrevent with Jan Kounen as director and Marc Caro as art director.
In 2019, he published Les Furtifs, his most recent novel. In collaboration with the composer Yan Péchin, he has developed a musical environment based on this novel in an album called Entrer dans la couleur.
Works
Collected Short Stories
- Aucun Souvenir Assez Solide La Volte, 2012
Short Stories
- Les Aiguilleurs du ciel, in Onze pour Mille, Cylibris, 2000
- El Levir et le Livre in Libelle, pub. In DESS of the Sorbonne, 2001
- Les Hauts Parleurs, in, 2002
- Aucun souvenir assez solide, in Galaxies, n° 38, 2005
- So phare away, in Galaxies, n°42, 2007
- Le Bruit des bagues, in L'Expansion, n° 723, 2007
- Définitivement, in Appel d'air, Les Trois souhaits, 2007
- Disparitions, in Apple d'air, Les Trois Souhaits, 2007
- Dual universe, 2016
Novels
- La Zone du Dehors,Cylibris, 1999
- La Horde du Contrevent, La Volte, 2004
- La Zone du Dehors, new version, La Volte, 2007
- Les Furtifs, La Volte, 2019
Other written works
- Sociétés de contrôle et cinéma,,on the site of La Zone du Dehors
- Appel d'air contre la narcose Sarkozy on the site of La Zone du dehors, 2007
- La Rage du sage in Memento Mori, 2009
- Words of the song Bora, for the artist Rone
Video games
Remember Me was awarded the prize of the best script at the Paris Games Awards.
Audio creations
Alain Damasio is particularly interested in the music of words and in the potentialities of sound as language. He worked repeatedly on sound versions of his texts but also created a soundwalk: La Sansouïre.- The Chrones, audio adaptation of several texts from La Horde du Contrevent which was rewarded with le Prix du Coup de Cœur du Jury at the Radiophonies Festival 2012.
- La Sansouïre. An audio walk on Napoleon beach at Port-St-Louis-du-Rhône, created when Alain Damasio was the guest of Radio Grenouille for Marseille-Provence in 2013.
- Since September 2013 Alain Damasio has been lending his voice and his pen for several jingles on the web radio Phaune Radio.
- In 2014, Alain Damasio starts the Phonophore with sound directors Floriane Pochon and Tony Regnauld, an audio version of his fiction Les Furtifs, a composition of 42 audio items the project was awarded a grant by the foundation Beaumarchais-Orange in May 2014.
- Fragments Hackés d'un futur qui résiste is a piece which was originally created for the 2014 version of the Festival des Libertés at the National Theatre in Brussels from a scenario by Alain Damasio and audio accompaniment by the studio of art sounds Tarabust and Phaune Radio.
Collaborations
- In 2008, Rone uses Alain Damasio's voice for his Bora.
- In 2011, he appears in an on-line documentary INSITU by Antoine Viviani, the clip was shot in the area of La Défense in Paris, and he talked about how he relates to urban space. His voice resounds in the commercial mall of Les Quatre Temps, then he alludes to his work in les Clameurs in La Zone du Dehors.
Conferences
- In 2009, Alain Damasio gave an hour's lecture on L'homme qui prenait sa femme pour un clavier ou l'anthropotechnique à l'épreuve de la pire des science-fictions about the interaction man – machine during the meeting IHM 2009, a conference in French on the interaction man- machine.
- Conférence Convention 2010 : Societies under control and Liberty.
- In 2010 he is a guest at the Festival of fantasy Worlds Les Imaginales in Epinal where he lectured about his work as a writer
- In 2012 Alain Damasio takes part in several conferences organized by the Festival de L'Imaginaire Grenoblois Rêves d'Ailleurs in Grenoble on the following themes : Dystopies et nouvelles technologies et Invasion, le zombie comme figure de l'Autre. Dystopias and new technologies and Invasion, the zombie as the Other One.
- Since 2010 he has been a regular guest in Nantes for the Utopiales where he took part in numerous conferences. In 2010 : Les Réseaux, un monde sans frontières ? and Nanotechnologies at the limit point of the infinitesimally small. In 2012, De l'écriture au scénario, Science-fiction et jeu vidéo,, Une technologie de l'invisible . In 2013, Citoyens du futur, Interface cerveau- machine and a conference :Philosophie et jeu video.
- In 2014, Alain Damasio lectured at TEDx Paris at the Châtelet Theâtre in Paris "Très Humain plutôt que transhumain ?"
Literary Prizes
- Special Elbakin prize 2014 for " La Horde du Contrevent "
- Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire in the French novel category for La Horde du Contrevent 2006
- Prix Imaginales des lycées 2006 for La Horde du Contrevent
- European Utopiales Prize 2007 for La Zone du dehors.
Other Prizes
- SACD prize for digital Creation 2014 for Remember Me and the whole of his digital creation
La Volte
- Alain Damasio's book have the distinctive feature of not being just books but books and objects : one edition of The Outer Zone comes with a DVD of a short film, animations in 3D and other bonuses to enhance one's reading experience ; La Horde du Contrevent comes with A BOL composed by musician Arno Alyvan.
- There also exists a special prestige edition of La Horde du Contrevent, signed and numbered which with the sound track, a DVD featuring unreleased interviews of the author, recorded by his brother, film director Bruno Raymond-Damasio
Decorations
- Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters