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Alain Semmel - Travels

Alain Semmel


Born on December 2, 1943, eight days premature, my mother having slipped on a patch of black ice while fleeing the hunt for Jews. Ironically, a Gestapo car escorted the ambulance that was taking my mother to the hospital in Moutiers. First miracle. My father was a prisoner, my uncle was called to help me find my identity, and I was baptized in the church in Moutiers. As a child, my hero was Surcouf. I dreamed of adventures on my three-masted schooner, heading towards the great south, chasing the horizon. Of this three-masted ship, I built cardboard models in my father's back room, after school. "No, my son," my mother would say, "the Naval School is not for you. It's a very anti-Semitic environment. You will be an engineer, like your cousin Serge, and you will have a sailboat for your leisure, with two masts and two sailors. " Engineer. I didn't want to. Fortunately, I met my second hero while reading Ayn Rand's The Living Spring , found by chance in my grandmother's closet. Howard Roark, an uncompromising architect, became my horizon. "Fine, agreed my parents, you will study Fine Arts." I became an architect, I had my sailboat, but with only one mast, and the two sailors were replaced by friends. Not having an architect father, I began my career, unlike Howard, by compromising myself with developers, out of financial necessity. Gaining experience, I ended up imposing my style and acquiring, in the absence of fortune, the respect of my clients. At the municipal council of Biot, where I was, for twenty-four years, deputy mayor delegated to culture, I met the wife of the director of Marineland in Antibes. He trusted me, even though I knew nothing about marine biology. My professional life changed. I was able to combine my passion for the sea with that of my job. For thirteen years, I was able to develop and modernize the park, by building the shark pool, the pools and stands for the orcas and dolphins, the lagoon, the restaurants and shops. And I sailed the seas on my sailboat. Not all of them, for lack of time, I would have loved to! But arriving in Rio, all sails out, at night under a black storm, is still a nice adventure.

Alain Semmel - Travels

  • Four friends leave Antibes to reach Brazil by sailboat. Soon fiction enters and takes precedence over reality, which sometimes reappears, but which is once again invaded by the imagination. On its way, the sailboat meets the first Earth spaceship that is preparing to fly off to conquer a planet, to build a new world, fraternal and free. The ship will leave, but without its captain, Noah. This enigmatic character, accompanied by his daughter, will continue with our four friends the journey to Brazil to accomplish a mission on Earth. During the journey, the crew of the sailboat will be faced with pirates, then terrorists in pursuit of Noah, a former member of the Mossad, wanted by an Al-Qaeda movement with the aim of seizing the spaceship, and selling it to a power wanting to dominate the world. The attack organized on the ship by infiltrated terrorists will fail, but its sponsors, furious, decide to seize the secret base where the ship was built. Noah will organize a mock relocation of the base to a submerged volcano in Bermuda, will attract the men of Al-Qaeda to liquidate them and make believe in his own loss in the explosion of the pseudo base. Noah's Ark will continue its course in the sidereal night, for a journey of three centuries.

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