Le Silence de la cité by Élisabeth Vonarburg

A singleton, Les Voyageurs malgre eux ( 1992 trans Jane Brierley as Reluctant Voyagers 1995), in a sense grounds her first series (and her subsequent work as well) through its depiction of a teacher/writer whose travels to Alternate Worlds are engineered through the stories she writes. Revelations of the artificial nature of the feminist governance of Mothers' Land sharpens the rite of passage story at the heart of Chroniques du Pays des Meres ( 1992 trans Jane Brierley as The Maerlande Chronicles 1992 vt In the Mothers' Land 1992).

The series continues in Le Silence de la cité ( 1981 trans Jane Brierley as The Silent City 1988), whose young female protagonist leaves her Underground Keep and goes to the surface, with its wild tribes, where she begins to transform the benighted world.

Many of her stories (some award-winning) have been assembled as L'Oeil de la nuit (coll 1980) and Janus (coll 1984), most being set in either of two cycles (with great gaps in the published chronology), the more important being the Baïblanca/ Mothers' Land series, in which a semi-decadent society in a far-future Europe sees the gradual appearance of Shapeshifting Mutants (the 'métames'). She was fiction editor 1979-1990 and editor 1983-1985 of Solaris and began publishing sf with 'Marée haute' for Requiem in 1978 the tale appeared as 'High Tide' in Twenty Houses of the Zodiac (anth 1979) edited by Maxim Jakubowski.

(1947- ) French-born Canadian teacher, editor, critic and author, in Quebec from 1973, naturalized 1976.

Le Silence de la cité by Élisabeth Vonarburg