French sci-fi stories for learners

Where will I see the French future tense?

Here, more than anywhere else in the library. Most stories are told in the past, but stories about predictions have to talk about what will happen. In La Lettre de la Classe de 2004, a village class digs up its twenty-year-old time capsule and finds a letter nobody remembers writing:

Sci-fi is also where characters weigh up what-ifs. In Les Mauvais Souvenirs, a technician from a memory-backup company offers Camille her own memories back, and explains the catch:

Which technology words will I meet?

Fewer new ones than you might expect, because French borrows freely from English here. These all appear in the free chapters:

• l'applicationapp
• le bugbug (in software)
• le codecode
• l'écranscreen
• l'algorithmealgorithm
• les donnéesdata
• la clé USBUSB stick
• le robotrobot

Bug is what most French speakers say, though the official French recommendation is bogue. Données is plural, so the data sont rather than est. And watch the pronouns for machines. In Maman-Bot the robot is il in the shop (Il sourit, it smiles), but once the family names it Maman it becomes elle: Elle range les papiers. Elle prépare le dîner.

Which French sci-fi story should I start with?

• A1: Maman-Bot, a cheap household robot that starts signing the family's papers, or Le Signal de Margot, in which a light across a Paris courtyard seems to be sending a student messages.
• A2: La Voix de Demain, the radio in Provence, or Cœur.exe, in which a joke hidden in a dating app's code starts sending messages nobody wrote.
• B1: Les Mauvais Souvenirs, the stranger's memories; L'Horloge de la Brasserie, a Lyon café where answers arrive before the questions; La Lettre de la Classe de 2004, the time capsule; or Les Bulletins de la borne Mistral, an old weather kiosk whose printouts know about a promise made thirty years ago.
• B2: Les Échos de Lyon, a startup that lets the bereaved text a digital copy of the person they lost, Le Jardin de Montmartre, vegetables that spell out a message overnight, or Le Retour de Marc Delorme, an engineer back from a lunar base project with a story that doesn't add up.

Many of these are mysteries too: see the French mystery stories. Or start from your level with the A2 French stories or the B1 French stories.