Messages, Sages, and Ages, Vol. 3, No. 2, (2016) DOI: 10.1515/msas-2016-0013 36 * Daniela Petroșel Faculty of Letters and Communication Sciences, Ştefan cel Mare University of Suceava, 13 Universităţii Street, 720229 Suceava, Romania e-mail: danielapetrosel@yahoo.com FIVE STORIES ON LOVE AND TECHNOLOGY Abstract This paper analyses Florina Ilis’s novel Cinci nori colorați pe cerul de răsărit while including it in the wider context of posthumanities. Since the writer is also the author of a theoretical study on cyberpunk fiction, I thought it adequate to use posthumanities as a primary tool. Some of the prevalent themes in the text are: the primacy of information over matter, the alteration of social or personal practices and the humanisation of technology. Keywords: Florina Ilis, posthumanities/posthumanism, technology. Florina Ilis is one of the representative writers in the contemporary literary context; she is the author of several novels such as, Coborârea de pe cruce (Echinox, 2001), Chemarea lui Matei (Echinox, 2002), Cruciada copiilor (Cartea Românească, 2005) or Viețile paralele (Cartea Românească, 2012) and she has been standing out as a mature prose writer and a master of literary techniques. Accordingly, she was awarded the Book of the Year 2005, by România Literară and Fundația Anonimul, and the prise of Cuvântul Pentru Proză magazine for her novel Cruciada copiilor. Nevertheless, the Cinci nori colorați pe cerul de răsărit (Cartea Românească, 2006) novel passed rather unnoticed by literary critics 1 ; even these few reports and commentaries lack the proper reading tool, according to the author. In an interview with Horia Gârbea she mentions: I believe Cinci nori coloraţi pe cerul de răsărit was approached in a superficial manner on our side of the critics. It was not understood that beyond the exotic appearance of the Japanese world, there is a profoundity that we should reflect on. We only approach the posthuman theoretically and abstractly, but in Japan we have witnessed multiple manifestations of what Fukuyama called postumanity. In this novel I tried to capture the tangency points between the traditional world – strongly semiotized, and the contemporary world, in which high technology becomes man’s second nature. We will not take the writer’s statements as emblematic for the manner in which approximately all writers declare themselves displeased with the level/orientation/profoundness of their critical feedback; on the contrary, we will consider that in this case the criticism does indeed ignore the wider context in which the novel needs to be placed. A context emphasized by the author herself, this time through her research activities, for the author’s encounter with the complex territory * Daniela Petroşel is Assistant Professor at the Ștefan cel Mare University of Suceava, Romania; her fields of interest are Romanian literature, literary criticism, posthumanism, and theories of reading. She has published three books, The Rhetoric of Parody (2006), The Age of the Machine. About Posthumanism and Technological Imagery in Fiction (2014), and The Fiction of Criticism (2015), as well as over 50 articles in various scientific journals. 1 Except for commentaries made by Tudorel Urian in Un exotism postmodern (România Literară, no. 23/2006), and Carmen Mușat in Literatura română a câștigat un pariu pe termen lung (Observator Cultural, 18.05.2006) or by Alex Goldiș, Proza în formă fixă (Verso, no. 5/2006).