René Barjavel

[Dieu] avait fait l'homme à son image, mais il l'avait pétri dans la boue qui contient en puissance toutes les pourritures. Il le pesa pourtant avec la même balance qu'il eût employée pour un pur esprit. C'était la vraie justice. L'homme s'il veut rester au Paradis, ou y entrer, doit se nettoyer de la boue dont il est fait.
Journal d'un homme simple, 1950.

René Barjavel (Nyons, January 24, 1911—Paris, November 24, 1985) was a French novelist, journalist and critic.

He was the first to dramatize the grandfather paradox with Saint-Menoux, an imprudent time-traveller, mistakenly killing his ancestor instead of Napoleon (in "le Voyageur imprudent", Denoël (1944), translated as "future times three" in the English language).

Beyond the gifted sci-fi author, he was an incisive critic, a warmhearted moralist and a resourceful essayist, with a unique look on society anchored in moral values and scientific rationalism. For his uncompromising evaluation of the state of the world, he was often regarded as a pessimist, but was, beyond any other limiting adjective, an elated lover of all things.

«Je suis dévoré par une curiosité qui ne sera jamais satisfaite, je voudrais tout savoir et tout voir. Et par une anxiété perpétuelle concernant le sort de ceux et de ce que j'aime. Et j'aime tout»

He is my favourite author in the French language. I have read everything he wrote. In 1995, I released a web page, the Barjaweb (archived) presenting his main themes and summarizing his main works. The site was later considerably enhanced and reshaped into a new Barjaweb thanks to the amazing dedication of Pierre Creveuil who accumulated and collected an almost exhaustive source of documents and founded an association.