translated from the Catalan
Do we know everything about fire? After many years of studies and research, and the analysis of many fires, we think so. But this is not the case. There is another dimension to fire, another world, that our technological society does not know about. The Last Fire, which received an honourable mention in the Miquel Barceló UPC Science Fiction Award 2022, describes an enigmatic phenomenon that can appear in the flames, which the main characters investigate. Various disturbing events, first in Barcelona during research on fire protection and then in an ancient village right in the heart of the Karkas mountains in Iran, will confront them at the limits of fire and life.
Joaquim Casal (1948) is a professor emeritus at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. He has published many papers and two books in the field of technology risk analysis: fires, explosions and toxic leaks. He has been a visiting professor at universities in various countries, including the Sharif University of Technology (Teheran). In the area of fiction and science fiction, he has published several stories, such as Entropia minvant (Ictineu Award 2012) and those collected in the volume L’esperit de fum i altres relats (2012). He is also the author of the novels Una recerca en dos temps, which received special mention in the UPC Science Fiction Award 2010, and Tilepadeion: I know what’s in your mind, which won the Manuel de Pedrolo Narrative Award in 2014.
