Artforum, December 1st, 2005
BABYLON BABIES BY MAURICE G. DANTEC, TRANSLATED BY NOURA WEDELL CAMBRIDGE, MA: SEMIOTEXT(E) (DISTRIBUTED BY MIT PRESS). 650 PAGES. $20.
Maurice Dantec's French publisher, Gallimard, once dubbed the novelist a "master in the art of combining science fiction and the police procedural." While Dantec does indeed cross-fade these two genres with almost algorithmic seamlessness in Babylon Babies (his third novel, written in 1999, and the first available in English), he also manages to defamiliarize the more predictable mannerisms of their combination.
Dantec's aesthetic, like that of early William...
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