As always with Dunyach the language is beautiful, the words are just right and the images superb. The endings are often open, defined enough not to be frustrating (nor to give the impression to the reader that the author didn't really know where he was going), sufficiently blurred to leave the reader with a good margin of interpretation and the possibility of finishing the story in his own way. We are left with an impression of sweet melancholy, smiles and tears. This is the feeling that Lusophones call "saudade" which comes over so well in their variety of music, and for which we have no exact word.

Jean-Marc Laherrère, actu-du-noir.over-blog.com

So much more than a creator of utopias, Jean-Claude Dunyach is the one who questions, with his consummate art of malicious subversion, the utopias that forge our society. Whether they try to respond to the most ancient of questions or claim to answer our dearest wishes... He manages to do it again in the six short stories in his latest collection, Les harmoniques célestes, recently published by Atalante (end April 2011).

[...]

The sum total is a little gem of maturity. Its success, the fruit of a balance between four skilfully mastered elements: sensitive, poetic and dazzling writing; a consummate art of description and décor (two islands, in this collection... two pure gems!); originality of the chosen themes or of their renewal; painstaking updating of the plots. The endings, honed to within a millimetre, are integrated in a coherent way into one of the possibilities imagined by the reader... all the while managing to surprise him yet again.

You could, as I did on the second reading, read the six stories in reverse, to experience a different mounting of tension, with other harmonics ringing out, and perhaps revealing a rather different implicit message...

But I won't forgive you if you don't read this collection!

Magali Duru, magali.duru.over-blog.com

Mea culpa, I admit it, this is the first time I have read Jean-Claude Dunyach.  Of course his name is not unfamiliar to me since he has been awarded many prizes and was the curator of the SF collection in Bragelonne. But the occasion for a literary encounter had not yet occurred and the publication of this collection has been the occasion. This is fortunate as I have been completely captivated by the writing in these six narratives!

 [...]

My first contact with Jean-Claude Dunyach has been through these six stories, stories that contain ideas and images that will remain in the reader's mind long after the event: six stories where Hard-SF rubs shoulders with Fantasy to produce only the best. Not having had any contact with Jean-Claude Dunyach for a long time, only because I hadn't come across his work, I think that I'll look up his other collections and novels straight away!

Stegg, Psychovision

I must say I really enjoyed them. Get the other six collections!

Vincent, Le blog de Viinz

In fact in this collection, unencumbered by any mysterious shimmering or other great cosmic events, science-fiction has begun to re-investigate these important human and perhaps eternal themes of death, paradox, time, communication and more.

Mureliane, Les Chroniques de l'imaginaire

Harmoniques célestes once again confirms that Jean-Claude Dunyach is one of the best French short story writers of our time.

Bruno Para