Hachette, coll. le rayon fantastique n°124, 238 pages.
“Is Prometheus guilty? Did the inventor of fire, who gave humanity its best defense, precipitate it down the fatal slope of atomic war, then cosmic war?”
In a techno-fascist Paris of the third millennium, a young girl dreams too much. And finds herself, in a cataleptic sleep, projected into the courtroom of a very distant future where the terrified participants know that the end of the universe is nigh. The trial is therefore about fire and its discoverer (Prometheus), our distant ancestor from before recorded history.
One after another, a Celtic warrior from before Christ, a rebel who followed Spartacus, a young Leonardo da Vinci… All condemn the Fire that turned their lives into Hell. Only our heroine will defend it…
Rêve de Feu can be read as a draft of Je ne suis pas née pour mourir. Sleep, which allows her to traverse ages and incarnated eras, enables Françoise to paint a very dark picture of our species, with all the major themes that we will find in her essays and novels over the coming decade.