When the Catastrophe occurred, part of humanity took refuge in the Greenhouses. They survived there, locked up for over a century, in the company of selected plants and animals. Outside, the wars exhausted themselves and the climate stabilized: the time came to reclaim the Earth. Braids tells the story of an expedition in this now foreign universe, and the reunion of the inhabitants of the Greenhouses with a humanity that has followed a different path. The heroine, welcomed by a tribe living in autarky in an extinct volcano, sees her relation to the world and to others profoundly challenged.

Braids also collects the intertwined stories produced by humans in a time of dramatic change–a future age in which our species is about to diverge into new branches. In this transitional era, stories are at the heart of our experience of the world: the narratocene.

Strasbourg-based writer Leo Henry (born 1979) is old enough to remember the Chernobyl disaster (narrowly). He writes books (but not only), mainly science fiction (but not only). For this book, he really enjoyed the research and documentation work. He is not quite sure that fiction and reality are opposed concepts.

We are immortal not because our knowledge will survive but because it will fade and give way to something else. We are the humans of the narratocene: slow, powerless, fragile, connected to each other and to all that proliferates around us. We live to speak and lend voice to the spirits, desires, goats and nostocs that are like us, to machines, to the principles of thermodynamics, to geological movements, to DNA sequences, to centuries, to music and to death. We are voices, air vibrations, signals emitted, degraded, muffled, we are contradicted, completed, refined and intertwined messages.

We are not saying: we should say that, we are saying that.

Leo Henry is a writer of fantasy and science fiction, comic books and role-play.

Denis Vierge is an artist and illustrator renowned for his narrative drawings.

Herve Le Guyader is a professor of evolutionary biology, world-renowned for his work in conceptualizing a new phylogenetic approach to the evolution of life and the classification of living organisms.

Other books in theIllustrated Tales for Adults series include The Adventures of Percival by Pierre Senges, The Man Who Refused to Die by Nicolas Ancion and Theory of MultiDreams by Jean-Philippe Cazier.