Le prochain volume de ma revue, Yellow Submarine (à sortir en juin, si tout va bien), sera consacré aux extra-terrestres & à l’image que nous nous faisons de ces Autres intelligences.
Histoire de me remettre dans le bain de la préparation de ce dossier, je fais un peu d’exploration sur le web… Et justement, un article du dernier numéro de Solaris (la revue québécoise de SF, n°140), m’a mis sur la piste de Epona. Il s’agit d’une planète appartenant au système d’Eridan, qui possède un véritable écosystème et une race intelligente — une deuxième Terre, mais très différente.
Il s’agit d’un projet issu des conférences Contact (donc autour des programmes de recherche SETI), pas seulement un jeu, mais bel & bien un exercice très complet d’exobiologie & de construction de monde, avec une écologie conhérente, scientifique, crédible…
The Epona Project began life as a worldbuilding exercise designed for the CONTACT: Cultures of the Imagination conference in March 1993. Worldbuilding is an activity primarily developed by science fiction writers to give depth and credibility to their fictional stories. At CONTACT, this activity is compressed into approximately 72 hours of conjecture at the end of which the designers hope to have created a sensible sophont in a believable environment. It had been the desire of program track coordinators Dirk van der Elst and Israel Zuckerman that the Cultures of the Imagination (COTI) track be continued beyond the conference in order to deepen and strengthen the background against which the alien would emerge and allow greater detail for the creature itself.
For the 1993 conference, Martyn J. Fogg designed a hypothetical solar system around the known characteristics of the star 82 Eridani. He brought his data to the conference and the preliminary design work done there became known as COTI Mundi. At the end of the conference, Martyn approached Greg Barr, then Chief Executive Officer of CONTACT, and asked for support in continuing the work after the conference and adding more participants to the process.