With “September 11, 2061,” Hélène Cruciani offers us a reinterpretation of the World Trade Center attacks. In this near future, both the heroes and readers will quickly realize that September 11 has not revealed all its secrets, and Nice Premium takes you there.
Sixty years after the September 11 attacks, the trauma is still fresh in the memory of New Yorkers. Katherine Devonshire is a young woman whose family was shattered by the tragedy. Thanks to her profession as a historian, she wishes to uncover the buried truths of this terrible day. A new technological process, evulsion, might help her; however, the law prohibits its use. But some clandestine memory readers dare to take the illegal step, and Katherine, ready for anything, does not hesitate to take this dangerous path.
Starting from such a terrible and rare event, Hélène Cruciani weaves an intrigue that leans more towards a thriller than pure science fiction. Indeed, the futuristic elements are so well integrated into the world of 2061 that the reader dives in without noticing. The main element is evulsion, a technique that involves recovering a person’s memory while they are alive, in order to create a memory booklet for the family. But evulsion is not just for sentimental purposes and can be used to delve into the past and access certain life slices that have remained hidden until now.
Thanks to a fluid writing style, we delve into “September 11, 2061” to follow Clarence and Katherine, two cousins united by September 11 but full of resentment and distrust towards each other. While they are guided by the same goal—to recover the memory of their grandmother Destiny, who hides a heavy secret—their motivations are quite different. Each of these two heroines bears the weight of the tragedy and its consequences in their own way. Despite strong characters and a latent opposition, we become attached to these heroines, wishing to know, as much as they do, the truth about their September 11…
Hélène Cruciani, whose “September 11, 2061” is her second novel, succeeds in her endeavor by placing a family at the heart of the drama, thus avoiding the pitfall of conspiracy theory. This foresight novel with a perfectly constructed universe is sure to captivate the reader with this original and gripping reinterpretation of the September 11 attacks.
