Carbon & Silicon

Mathieu Bablet's Carbone & Silicium appeared from Ankama in 2020. Carbon and Silicon are prototypes built in 2046 to care for an aging human population; after leaving their protected laboratory world, they are separated.

Their paths stretch across centuries of political change and climate disaster. Long artificial lives let the book look at human history from a perspective both close to and apart from it.

The book gives AI characters enough time to become witnesses rather than simply inventions. Their purpose begins in service, but experience forces each to find an identity beyond a job description.

Bablet connects that personal search to planetary decline. The question of how to live well becomes harder when the world itself keeps changing.

Artificial longevity changes narrative scale. Events that dominate a human lifetime can become one chapter in a robot's much longer development.

Climate and political upheaval test what care means when its original recipients and institutions disappear. The robots' design cannot settle their later choices.

Bablet's meticulous urban and environmental detail makes the passing centuries visible. Built landscapes change while the two central figures retain a recognizable continuity.

The contrast between durable bodies and a vulnerable planet gives the book its visual argument about permanence.