Qui se souvient de Judith Tarr et de son cycle de fantasy L'Aube d'Avaryan chez Pocket ?

Elle vient de sortir Bring Down the Sun en mai dernier, un roman de fantasy. Elle est en interview sur Amazon. Petit extrait :

Amazon.com: Your novel combines a historical (Greek/Macedonian) setting with a fantastical element, and yet doesn’t get bogged down in endless description. Is this a skill that comes naturally to you? How hard is it to get the “mix” right?
Judith Tarr: Oh, good question. The short answer is, I like writing spare--less is more--so if I can get a lot across in a few words, I'm there. Mixing historical and fantasy is more of a lifestyle choice. My personal rule is, if people of the time believed in it, it's real. I'll write accordingly. I think the academic background (aka combat training in research methods) helps quite a bit, but there's a substantial amount of seat of the pants to it, too. Probably the most important influence was the indomitable Betty Nye Quinn in the Classics Department at Mount Holyoke, who taught all her students to look at a historical era as it saw itself. We were trained to set aside our modern viewpoint and examine our assumptions, and to get inside the heads of the authors we read. Later on at Cambridge under Prof. Crook, I did a Tripos section on historiography that revisited this: we read Latin and Greek historians not only for what they had to say about the periods they wrote about, but for what their histories said about their own periods. While we did that, we are also encouraged to consider our own biases and the biases of our own era, and to take those into account when evaluating the works we read. If you're living inside the period, I think you describe less and feel more. Then there's the element of skill: what Harry Turtledove refers to as "knowing 500 details and mentioning five--and they have to be the right five." The more you know, the more likely you are to know which details to include. That takes practice, but it also takes something I call "period sense"--an in-depth sense of how people thought and felt and acted. Of course there's also the accessibility problem. Most historical and fantasy bestsellers have little or none. They write about modern Americans in fancy dress. This is successful because it speaks directly to the attitudes of the readers. They're not specialists; they don't know if it's wrong. They do know if the story works, and if there are characters they can identify with. For the writer who has more of a sense of period, there's a challenge to present period attitudes while also making them credible to the contemporary reader. I had my first exposure to this with my second novel, when my editor said, "No one will ever buy your medieval monk not getting it on with the sexy girl who's following him around." In fact, in period, he would have made a huge martyrdom out of it and never so much as touched her--but in order to sell the book, I had to compromise. I tried to do it believably in context, but I never was totally happy with that. Since then of course I've learned to cope better, and to find ways to juggle modern and historical without completely losing the latter. The "five salient details" rule is one of the ways.

toute l'interview est ici