At the moment :

- Daniel Harmann's secret war

- The Human Factor

DANIEL HARTMANN'S SECRET WAR

Not sure what the title will end up being. It's a historical novel whose theme is my father's own story. he hid what he'd really done during World War 2 until a few months before his death. The stuff of novels. This needs a lot of research as what he did had to be kept secret, so you can't find much on it in the archives. I have found some interesting books on the war in North Africa as a whole, where he was, so there's no problem for that part. The problem is how I treat this. I could tell his story, except that I don't have any information. However, I could have a fictitious character doing what he did and therefore invent details within the historical framework. And then, as I publish things here, would the story of an Englishman interest anyone? So, I thought, since he has to be able to speak fluent German, why not make him come from Alsace, who escaped from France to join De Gaulle in London? And then, we don't often hear of the FFL (Forces françaises libres) who fought alongside the Allies and participated in some of the famous battles. The hardest thing now is constructing a story for this man in the midst of History with a capital H.

Extract 1 -

"These are some souvenirs!" commented Dominique, picking up the objects with swastikas on them. "Did he take this German stuff from the dead he saw as an ambulance driver?"

"I don't think he collected dead Germans," said Daniel. "He must have found it all."

"Yeah, but what about these identity papers? No, hang on a minute! That's him in the photo!"

He held out the paper. his brother and sisters passed it arouond.

"What's he doing with identity papers in German? It says here he was born in Hamburg," said Jacqueline.

Françoise was busy looking at the photos.

"You know, there aren't any photos of ambulances. None at all in any of the envelopes. In this one, for example, there are plenty of planes. I've even foyund a photo of him with a group beside a plane."

"What of it?"

"Well, he's dressed in a flying kit. And we can see the Lorrain Cross on the plane. On a British plane, I add."

"What?"

They all looked closely at the photo. They all recognised their father in it.

"And then," went on Françoise. "There are all these photos in this envelope with just jeeps in the middle of the desert. That is Dad, there, isn't it? He isn't in a lot of photos. He must be the one behind the camera. he must have asked someone to take a picture of him in a group. But how come he never showed us any of these, for heaven's sake?"

"And how come he's in a group of airmen?" asked Daniel.

"Yeah, but he isn't with these jeeps, he isn't dressed the same."

"What does that mean, then?" asked Françoise. "What was he talking about then? Didn't he drive ambulances?"

"And what's he doing with all this German stuff?" 

"You don't think he was a German spy, do you?" asked Yves.

THE HUMAN FACTOR

So here we are with some SF. I began some time ago at the beginning of the years 2000 and went back to it last year and I'm having a good time writing it. It tells of the encounter between a human like us and a human of another kind, an encounter which results in the existence of a hybrid, whose role is crucial to the survival of everyone. There is therefore a love story somewhere, but those it concerns do not admit to it, as they think it is impossible. This story allows me to play around with the notion of what is human. At the end of the first part, I'd read a book in the form of a comic strip by a local artist, Tom Joseph, and I liked his style, and since my writing is more "cinema-like", as I don't go in for long litterary descriptions and the dialogues go along with the action, I asked him if he would care to turn my text into a comic strip and I'd do the bubbles. He said that editors don't always take the original people, they might keep the artist and get someone else to write the bubbles (!), or vice-versa. But I don't want an artist that doesn't correspond to what I want, of course. And I don't want someone else writing my texts. So we dropped the subject. A pity, for we could have done a series as there are several parts to this story. So this story is busy trotting along to the end. However, I don't know whether I'll ever bring it out.

Extract : Human Factor - almost opening paragraphs

He was to join a cargo, the Janus, under the orders of Captain Derek Caplin, alongside Danele Cidron, communications officer, a lieutenant like himself. He didn’t know them yet but he had heard of the Captain who had been on cargoes for many years. He’d been everywhere, it was said. There wasn’t a system he didn’t know.

Good, thought David, for Pegasis V’s system was on the very edges of the Galaxi and those systems made people nervous. There was always the fear of running into the Iquouarians, or rather, there was the fear of being attacked by the Iquouarians.

The warring peoples of Terra, who had always considered themselves as being alone in the universe until their own arrival on the intersidereal scene a few hundred years ago, had found themselves in the presence of other inhabited worlds, other races of humanity, other peoples possessing technology more or less advanced, and, unfortunately, other conflicts. They found themselves thrown into the middle of an intergalactic conflict that had been going on for centuries, dominated by the Iquouarians, a people far more belligerent than themselves coming from another galaxy. The Iquouarians rampaged through the few systems they knew about, crushing everything and everybody, progressing from planet to planet like a steamroller that nobody knew how to stop.