La Saison des singes and L'Empire du sommeil form a diptych whose galactic framework and exotic planets echo Brian Aldiss's Helliconia and Hothouse. An adventure novel and a thriller at the same time, this investigation, that lasts over a thousand years, is also a reflection on the role of technoscience.

An extremely advanced human civilisation exists in a hundred light year radius around the Earth. It has brought together under the aegis of the Friends of Humanity Charter numerous worlds in order to define methodically the relationship between the branches of humanity and technoscience. Because of this, humans from the worlds in the Charter have access to certain modifications, but the Greatly Modified Ones, who established the basics of the Charter and master space flight and nanotechnology, have in fact the real power.

La Saison des singes

3976 : Gabriel Burke, a private detective, gets on board the Abondant, a gigantic chartist vessel. Gabriel Burke's target - a mysterious and dangerous criminal - also interests two agents from the Charter Enforcing Agency, Anna Rank and Anton Margos, who are detailed to arrest her. But when the "encounter" takes place, nothing happens to plan: the criminal manages to attack the Abondant, causing it to crash...

Gabriel Burke finds himself alone on an unknown planet where he begins a stake-out for more than a thousand years. This takes him a very long way away from his quiet life as a self-indulgent investigator.

After centuries of Burke's repeatedly induced cryogenic sleep, we follow the evolution of this planet where reactionary humans and the native people, the Ninhsis, are making contact with each other. However, other survivors of the crash appear. Seemingly none of them has given up on their original objectives...

And over all this drifts the mysterious shadow of the GMOs.