Alain Damasio


Alain Damasio is a French writer of sci-fi and fantasy. He also works as a scriptwriter for comics, radio fictions, movie and TV series. He is also notable as an audio and spoken word artist.

Biography

Alain Damasio was born in Lyon. His father was a self-employed car body repairperson, while his mother was agrégée in English. Alain Damasio graduated from high school with a specialization in science. He then passed the entrance exam for ESSEC Business School, one of France's top business schools, that he left in 1991 without graduating. He then embarked on two solitary retreats to write, residing first in Vercors and then in Nonza. His works have focused heavily on futuristic politics and incorporate significant science fiction and fantasy elements.
As a young man he wrote many short stories. His first longform fictional work was La Zone du Dehors, a futuristic novel dealing with a model of society under control on a democratic model.
His second novel was rewarded with the Grand Prize of Imaginary Writing in 2006, in the works of fiction category: La Horde du Contrevent. This novel comes with a soundtrack composed by Arno Alyvan. It was a great success and sold 120,000 copies; this book is regularly quoted as a must-read of French fantasy books.
In 2008, he lent his voice to Bora, a piece of music by Rone.
In 2009, he wrote La Rage du Sage, a poetic and political essay on our times, for the free single of the group Sliver.
Alain Damasio also wrote the script of WindWalkers, an animation film taken from La Horde du Contrevent with Jan Kounen as director and Marc Caro as art director. The project was abandoned due to a lack of funding.
In 2019, he published Les Furtifs, his most recent novel which was also rewarded by the Grand Prize of Imaginary Writing. In collaboration with the composer Yan Péchin, he has developed a musical environment based on this novel in an album called Entrer dans la couleur.

Works

Collected short stories

  • Aucun Souvenir Assez Solide La Volte, 2012

    Short stories

  • Les Aiguilleurs du ciel, in Onze pour Mille, Cylibris, 2000
  • El Levir et le Livre in Libelle, pub. In DESS of the Sorbonne, 2001
  • Les Hauts Parleurs, in, 2002
  • Aucun souvenir assez solide, in Galaxies, #38, 2005
  • So phare away, in Galaxies, #42, 2007
  • Le Bruit des bagues, in L'Expansion, #723, 2007
  • Définitivement, in Appel d'air, Les Trois souhaits, 2007
  • Disparitions, in Apple d'air, Les Trois Souhaits, 2007
  • Dual universe, 2016

    Novels

  • , Cylibris, 1999
  • , La Volte, 2004
  • , new version, La Volte, 2007
  • , La Volte, 2019
  • , Albertine/Seuil, 2024

    Other written works

  • Sociétés de contrôle et cinéma,, on the site of La Zone du Dehors
  • Appel d'air contre la narcose Sarkozy on the site of La Zone du dehors, 2007
  • La Rage du sage in Memento Mori, 2009

    Video games

Alain Damasio is co-founder of Dontnod Entertainment with Aleksi Briclot, Hervé Bonin, Jean Maxime Moris and Oscar Guilbert. He was director of the narrative department from 2008 to 2010, then he committed this job to Stéphane Beauverger to dedicate himself to his next projects Les Furtifs and Fusion. He has written the first two narrative bibles of the AAA game Remember Me before directing a writing workshop of seven people so as to complete the bible of a thousand pages and the first version of the script. Remember Me was published in June 2013 and sold 2.1 million copies.
Remember Me was awarded the prize of the best script at the Paris Games Awards.
In 2022, Alain Damasio is also one of the six writers of Cross The Ages: The Chrome Spell Book. Those books are the spine of the digital collectible card game Cross The Ages: TCG.

Audio creations

Alain Damasio is particularly interested in the music of words and in the potential of sound as language. He worked repeatedly on sound versions of his texts but also created a soundwalk: La Sansouïre.
  • The Chrones, audio adaptation of several texts from La Horde du Contrevent which was rewarded by le Prix du Coup de Cœur du Jury at the Radiophonies Festival 2012.
  • La Sansouïre. An audio walk on Napoleon beach at Port-St-Louis-du-Rhône, created when Alain Damasio was a guest on Radio Grenouille for Marseille-Provence in 2013.
  • Since September 2013 Alain Damasio has lent his voice and his pen to several jingles on the web radio Phaune Radio.
  • In 2014, Alain Damasio started Phonophore with sound directors Floriane Pochon and Tony Regnauld, an audio version of his fiction Les Furtifs, a composition of 42 audio items the project was awarded a grant by the foundation Beaumarchais-Orange in May 2014.
  • Fragments Hackés d'un futur qui résiste is a piece which was originally created for the 2014 version of the Festival des Libertés at the National Theatre in Brussels from a scenario by Alain Damasio and audio accompaniment by the studio of art sounds Tarabust and Phaune Radio.
  • In 2021, he created a "slam" in support of the "ZAD de la colline" to music by Laurent Pernice.

    Collaborations

  • In 2008, Rone used Alain Damasio's voice for his song Bora Vocal
  • In 2009, he wrote La Rage du Sage for the free single Memento Mori, by the group SLIVER.
  • In 2011, he appeared in an on-line documentary INSITU by Antoine Viviani. The video was shot in the La Défense neighborhood in Paris, and he talked about how he related to urban space. In the film, his voice resounds in the mall Les Quatre Temps, then he alludes to his work in les Clameurs in La Zone du Dehors.
  • In 2020 he participated in the French documentary Un pays qui se tient sage about police violence and the handling of the "Gilets Jaunes" movement.

    Conferences

  • In 2009, Alain Damasio gave an hour-long lecture on L'homme qui prenait sa femme pour un clavier ou l'anthropotechnique à l'épreuve de la pire des science-fictions about man–machine interaction, at IHM 2009, a conference in French on man-machine interaction.
  • Conférence Convention 2010: Societies under control and Liberty.
  • In 2010 he was a guest at the Festival of fantasy Worlds Les Imaginales in Epinal where he lectured about his work as a writer.
  • In 2012 Alain Damasio took part in several conferences organized by the Festival de L'Imaginaire Grenoblois Rêves d'Ailleurs in Grenoble on the following themes: Dystopies et nouvelles technologies et Invasion, le zombie comme figure de l'Autre. Dystopias and new technologies and Invasion, the zombie as the Other.
  • Since 2010 he has been a regular guest in Nantes for the Utopiales where he has taken part in numerous conferences. In 2010: Les Réseaux, un monde sans frontières ? and Nanotechnologies at the limit point of the infinitesimally small. In 2012, De l'écriture au scénario, Science-fiction et jeu vidéo,, Une technologie de l'invisible. In 2013, Citoyens du futur, Interface cerveau-machine and the conference: Philosophie et jeu video.
  • In 2014, Alain Damasio lectured at TEDx Paris at the Châtelet Theâtre in Paris "Très Humain plutôt que transhumain ?"
Soundtracks and videos of his numerous conferences are available on the ActuSF website.

Literary prizes

  • Special Elbakin prize 2014 for La Horde du Contrevent
  • Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire in the French novel category for La Horde du Contrevent 2006
  • Prix Imaginales des lycées 2006 for La Horde du Contrevent
  • European Utopiales Prize 2007 for La Zone du dehors.

    Other prizes

  • SACD prize for digital Creation 2014 for Remember Me and the whole of his digital creation

    La Volte

  • Alain Damasio's books have the distinctive feature of not being just books but books and objects: one edition of The Outer Zone comes with a DVD of a short film, animations in 3D and other bonuses to enhance one's reading experience; La Horde du Contrevent comes with A BOL composed by musician Arno Alyvan.
  • There also exists a special prestige edition of La Horde du Contrevent, signed and numbered with the sound track, a DVD featuring unreleased interviews of the author, recorded by his brother, film director Bruno Raymond-Damasio.

    Decorations

  • Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters