Voici un extrait de l'interview en langue anglaise accordée par Allen Steele (La Complainte de l'Araignée, La Mort du Capitaine Futur) à John Scalzi pour sa série d'interviews et d'articles intitulée The Big Idea : 

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I’ve made no secret of the fact that Allen Steele is one of my favorite science fiction writers and has been for some time (he was the first author I ever sent fan mail to! True fact!), and his excellent new novel Hex shows one of the reasons why: The dude thinks big. Like, really big. We’re talking Dyson Sphere big. But Allen’s not content to just take received wisdom about what science fiction has already said about things like the Dyson Sphere — no, he’s going to put his own spin on it. How so? Allen reveals all, in its Brobdingnagian splendor.  ALLEN STEELE:  So you want to talk about big ideas, do you? Try this one for size…  Imagine a world one AU in radius – that’s 93 million miles – and 186 million miles in diameter, with a circumference of 584,336,233.568 miles. Since this world is hollow, with a G-class sun at its center, it has an estimated volume of 1.086×1017 miles (I don’t think there’s a word for a number that big). Its surface isn’t solid, though, but instead is comprised of approximately six trillion open-center hexagons, each having a perimeter of 6,000 miles. Every hexagon has six cylindrical habitats 1,000 miles long and 100 miles wide. Most, if not all, of these “biopods” are inhabited by one alien race or another, and no one knows for sure how many live here … except perhaps the danui, the ones who built this place, and they’re not telling.  That’s Hex.  I’ve been fascinated by Dyson spheres ever since I read Bob Shaw’s Orbitsville, the first novel to deal with Freeman Dyson’s concept (yes, I know all about Larry Niven’s Ringworld … but that isn’t a sphere, is it?). Since then, I’ve read or seen other treatments of the same idea – notably the shellworlds of Iain Banks’s Culture novels, and “Relics”, one of the better episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation – and have generally enjoyed them all.

Pour plus de détails et lire la suite, c'est ici