Pierre Pelot
Pierre Pelot, is a French writer of speculative fiction.
Biography
Born on 13 November 1945, in Saint-Maurice-sur-Moselle, Vosges, France.Pelot began his writing career by writing westerns. His first novel, La piste du Dakota, takes place in the United States after the end of the Civil War. It appeared in the imprint Marabout Junior.
In 1967, Pelot created the character of Dylan Stark, who was born in the Confederacy. The first novel in this book series, Quatre Hommes pour l'Enfer Four Men to Hell, also takes place during the Civil War. In this novel Dylan Stark reluctantly fights on the side of the Confederacy. The Dylan Stark series was mostly published by Pocket Marabout starting in 1967.
In the early 1970s, Pelot began to contribute novels to both the Angoisse horror and Anticipation science fiction imprints of publisher Fleuve Noir. For the latter, he penned a series of remarkably mature space operas under the pseudonym of Pierre Suragne. Between 1972 and 1980, Pelot contributed 14 science fiction novels and 7 horror novels to Fleuve Noir. His Anticipation novels were notable for their bleak endings, which was unusual at the time, as well as their new concepts, often incorporating post-1968 political themes such as ecology. They were written in a hard-hitting style borrowed from thrillers rather than space opera, and included the occasional sexual scenes.
Throughout the 1980s, Pelot produced a huge number of novels for virtually every science fiction publisher in France. Most, if not all, carried the same message, vilifying the evils of the military-industrial complex and capitalist economy, protecting the environment and expressing socialist ideas. His works for the most part described police states, utopias and dystopias, and usually featured doomed rebels who tried to see behind the veil of their protected lives. Transit, one of his most accomplished novels, featured an experimental hypnotic journey that leads a researcher to a peaceful utopia.
Pelot's major stream of dystopic novels during the 1980s were produced for Presses-Pocket, for which he wrote twelve novels between 1977 and 1990. Most of these fit in a series entitled Les Hommes sans Futurs, which portray the desperate and often all too futile wanderings of the last men and women on an Earth now inhabited by unfathomable new mutants.
In the 1990s, Pelot diversified his career further, producing crime thrillers, adventure novels, in addition to his science fiction work.