Pelot, Mayi
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1947-2016) Basque author, the first and perhaps the most prominent sf author to write in Basque. Biharko oroitzapenak (coll of linked stories 1985; trans Arrete Hidalgo as Memories of Tomorrow 2022) and Teleamarauna ["Television"] (1987) are set in various epochs of a shared Future History whose first significant moment – a nuclear disaster that came close to crippling Basque Country in 1992, some time before World War Three – leads to quasi-autonomy for the Basque people and language, within a fragile world dominated politically by America, but whose Media Landscape and Communication links are under the control of a Secret Master corporation. Pelot's visions of a world whose structural lineaments she perceived very early are intensified by a surreally abstract use of her acknowledged influences in American Genre SF, which include Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Philip K Dick and Philip José Farmer; in her hands, as conveyed through technologically savvy neologisms derived from the Basque language (see Linguistics), what might have seemed familiar to the generality of sf readers becomes threatening. Her estranged rendering of otherwise familiar stories gives a sense that the manifestly present Satirical elements in her portrayals of an exploitative world are as difficult to clock the register of as similar parable-like moments in the work of Franz Kafka; her anger is as crystalline as that which inspires Stanisław Lem, and as hard to parse. [JC]
Mayi Pelot
born Talence, France: 12 April 1947
died Biarritz, France: 6 October 2016
works (selected)
- Biharko oroitzapenak (Bayonne, France: Association Maiatz, 1985) [coll: binding unknown/]
- Memories of Tomorrow (Seattle, Washington: Aqueduct Press, 2022) [coll: trans by Arrete Hidalgo of the above: in the publisher's Heirloom Books series: pb/Silvia Calleja]
- Teleamarauna ["Television"] (Bayonne, France: Association Maiatz, 1987) [coll: binding unknown/]
- Olerki, ipuin eta eleberriak ["Poems, Stories and Novels"] (Bayonne, France: Association Maiatz, 2019) [coll: binding unknown/]
links
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