"The Time of Chimeras" by Bernard Werber, summary

The French writer returns the reader to his recurring idea of the species reorganization of Earthlings through the genetic crossbreeding of intelligent beings with fauna. The concept is based on an unpublished journalistic report on biological chimeras, which the author had been pondering since his 1998 novel "The Father of Our Fathers." The French publisher Albin Michel released the original book in 2023, and the Russian translation was published in 2025.

Act I. Grain

Journalist Diego Martinez sneaks into the basements of the Paris Museum of Natural History at night. In a locked room, number 103, he finds papers labeled "Project Metamorphosis" and photographs an algae aquarium, from which a living creature with a human face and webbed hands stares back at him. The next morning, Minister Benjamin Wells calls a conference to stop a newspaper scandal. Thirty-year-old biologist Alice Kammerer announces to the press a plan to create three hybrids: flying humans (Ariels), burrowing humans (Diggers), and water-dwelling humans (Nautiluses). Right during her presentation, a fanatic shoots her in the shoulder with a revolver.

The minister takes his surviving friend to the lab. Kammerer shows him the fruits of his secret labors: the dolphin monkey Eugène, the mole monkey Marie Antoinette, and the winged Josephine with hollow bones. Josephine sinks her teeth into the official’s hand. The terrified minister decides to destroy the biomaterial and sends Alice herself to the ISS via the Kourou spaceport.

At the station, she is met by Scott Bradley, Kevin Hurt, Simon Stieglitz, and Commander Pierre Cuvier. In the morning, Alice discovers her test tubes broken in the Columbus module. She accuses Simon, but Commander Cuvier is revealed to be the culprit. Cornered, the pilot draws a Russian pistol, wounds Stieglitz, and shoots off the Kibo module, throwing the two Americans into outer space to their inevitable deaths. Alice and the wounded Simon trap the killer in the Soviet segment of the Zvezda module.

An attempt to communicate with Control Center results in shock. An engineer from Kourou reports that the arrest of a young woman in Tehran for wearing a hijab has triggered a nuclear duel engulfing the superpowers. Communication is lost. From orbit, researchers see nuclear flares erupting across the continents. A Chinese torpedo strikes the Zvezda module, releasing Cuvier; the trio miraculously fires back their torpedo and remains trapped above the extinct planet.

Act II. Roots

After a year of starving and weightless existence, Alice and Simon manage to grow three living embryos in incubators. They name them after Greek gods: Hermes, Hades, and Poseidon. The ISS loses altitude due to fuel shortages. The Centaur shuttle crashes directly into the square in front of Notre Dame Cathedral. The craft bursts into flames. Cuvier pulls the container containing the embryos from the blazing wreckage, receives a lethal dose of 120 millisieverts of radiation, and dies from the bullets Alice uses to end his agony.

Simon, armed with a Geiger counter, and the pregnant Alice descend into the dungeons of the Forum des Halles shopping mall. On the fourth level of the underground parking lot, they stumble upon a wild party playing Daft Punk. The 695-member community is led by former DJ Franchi. The survivors espouse hedonism, forbid childbearing, and call their camp "New Ibiza." In a former trade union hall, the hybrids are born one after another. Alice, unanesthetized, gives birth to a human girl, Ophelia.

The laboratory produces the second generation of chimeras — 144 individuals of each breed. Fifteen years pass. 435 hybrids and 124 sapiens mature in the School of Relative and Absolute Knowledge.

The world collapses after a teenage fight in a gymnasium and young Ariel’s subsequent attempt to kiss a human girl in a tunnel. The girl’s enraged father, Toma, demands the mutant’s expulsion. The jury acquits the flyer, after which Toma shoots in the hall, fatally wounding Simon Stieglitz, who shielded the hybrid, and killing the defendant. A massacre ensues. The frenzied crowd tramples the wounded under the howl of the fire extinguisher system. The next morning, Frankie orders the chimeras to retreat to the surface.

Act III. The Trunk

A column of 419 mutants ascends the stairs of the Rambuteau metro station. Radiation has dropped to 30 millisieverts, and their modified bodies tolerate it without spacesuits. Mutated fauna has overrun the city: three-eyed boars and turquoise deer roam the ruins. Ophelia and Alice lead the squad to the Seine, where Nautiluses are pushing an abandoned barge forward.

Having overcome a log blockage near the bridge, the fugitives find shelter near a pond in the Kukufas forest. The radiation level here drops to a safe 10 millisieverts. Three communities establish separate towns: the Diggers construct a pyramid of soil, the Nautiluses build log stilt houses on the water, and the Ariels hang round wicker baskets from the tops of oak trees. Soon, the first Digger babies are born in an underground burrow, proving the ability of the artificial species to reproduce.

Act IV. Branches

Within five years, the colony’s population exceeds two and a half thousand souls. The community structure fragments: the underground dwellers build a culture around root extraction, the Nautiluses listen to harps and imitate dolphins, and the Ariels indulge in seasonal mating flights.

On the settlement’s fifth anniversary, a relay race turns into a massacre. Someone slits the throat of a Digger runner right at the exit of an underground tunnel. Burrowing chimeras fell the oak trees housing the Ariels and saw through the piles of the Nautilus houses; flyers shower the pyramid with boulders from above. After a night of fighting, the leaders refuse to live together. Poseidon leads the people west to the ocean, Hades locks himself underground, and Hermes takes his tribesmen to the Alps. Ophelia and Alice fly with him.

En route, the swarm makes a stop in Chalon-sur-Saône, sheltering from the wind in an empty shopping mall. Upon reaching the Val Thorens ski resort, the flock comes under rifle fire from the log walls. Three hybrids fall dead. Alice goes to negotiate under a white flag and meets the surviving officials, led by an aged President Legitimus and an aged Benjamin Wells. The authorities had been hiding in the Jupiter bunker beneath the Élysée Palace and then moved into the mountains in army helicopters. The scientist bluffs, threatening to blow up the local hydroelectric power station with non-existent dynamite, and secures permission to house the flyers in a sports complex.

Act V. Flowers

The Ariels replace broken cable cars, carrying tourists to the peaks on their own two feet. For their services, the government grants them citizenship and parliamentary seats. Alice meets Benjamin Wells. Ophelia conceives twins with Hermes, but her joy is dashed by the arrival of a bloodied messenger from Paris: Hades and Poseidon have unleashed a war of annihilation.

Kammerer flies on the back of Ariel Solange to Cucuphas. The lake is illuminated by thousands of lamps, and the obese Hades rules over his people in the manner of Louis XIV. Alice, horrified, sees a camp of degenerate sapiens bartering alcohol for handicrafts behind barbed wire.

An even more grim order reigns in Deauville, Normandy. Poseidon’s son Alexander has cut off his father’s head, declaring the old man a traitor, and has imprisoned the surviving humans in cages in the paleontology museum. Diego Martinez and the elderly woman Francine sit behind glass under the museum’s glaring spotlights. The nautiluses toss Alice into the same display case as a third exhibit.

That night, the building catches fire. Axel, the salamander girl created by Alice in the Alps from the biomaterial of a Mexican axolotl to harness the element of fire, breaks the locks and leads the captives out. In the empty hangar, the fugitives are attacked by guards. One of them manages to cut Axel in half with a machete. Nautilus dies at Alice’s hand. Axel, painless in the upper half of his body, orders his mother to drop his immobile legs and fly away on Solange, who has arrived just in time.

Act VI. Fruits

Ten years pass. Twenty-year-old Axel, who has completely regained the lost lower half of her body thanks to neoteny, is celebrating her anniversary with the Wells family. Her half-brother, Zachariah, Ophelia’s son with Jonathan, presents his sister with a cake.

The Ariels have settled the Alpine valleys in harmony with humans, the Diggers control the lowland mines, and the Nautiluses reign supreme along the coast. Realizing the limits of her interference in the destinies of others, gray-haired Alice goes out into the garden and watches as a butterfly emerges from its chrysalis, spreads its wings, and flies away into the thicket.