Under the rubric “Futures of yesteryear” we reproduce old texts in which the authors proved to be particularly innovative and clairvoyant. This is certainly true of the strange extract from Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Cruel Tales (Contes cruels), first published in a magazine in 1873; in it, the author is worried about how the sky can be made useful and proposes that it should be exploited for display purposes, for products …or possibly for politicians.
Bernard Cazes tells us that from the commentaries about it in the Castex and Raitt edition for the Pléiade series we learn that it was the earliest of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s purely satirical stories, in which he expressed his hostility towards the commercial spirit that dominated the society of his time and its reductionist vision that saw in nature – and knowledge – nothing else than the opportunity to make money. Bernard Cazes also emphasises that it was thanks to that edition that he was able to elucidate the allusions in the tale, which are often esoteric.
L'affichage céleste
This article is published in Futuribles journal ,
