SF Signal a demandé à plusieurs auteurs de répondre à la question suivante : What are the most interesting societies, alien or otherwise, in SF/F? 

Voici la réponse de Sam Sykes, l'auteur du Livre des Abysses : 

Citation:

A society can only ever be as good as the characters it's reflecting. Through the character, and whether the reflection is a simple, mirror-like image or twisted and odd like a funhouse mirror, something is said about the society. It becomes something of a cyclical and symbiotic relationship: society shapes the character, the character reflects society, the society's conflicts tend to feed the character's conflicts (in good stories, anyway). Thus, the most interesting society are the most interesting characters.  Do societies portrayed in television count? I don't know if anyone else watched Avatar: The Last Airbender as ardently as I did, but it was one of the few shows (and one made for children, at that) that tended to capture this idea of characters reflecting society perfectly. In the portrayal of the Fire Nation as a fiercely proud society who turned their determination and passion to the pursuit of conquest, we were given two separate reflections of it in the form of its crown princess and prince. Azula was the perfect reflection of the Fire Nation: aggressive, prideful and unrelenting. Zuko was a twisted version: someone who was passionate and stubborn, but wasn't sure about what. I thought it was a brilliant portrayal in that typically, the heroes tend to be the certain, the absolute, the sure (and anyone who has actually seen the show knows that Azula was no hero) while the villains tend to be the twisted ones. Avatar did something that a lot of stories still have trouble with today and presented doubt, aimlessness and worry as positive traits. Not necessarily to be admired, but to be expanded and expounded upon. The end result was a deeply troubled character who was also very deep stacked against a very certain character who was infinitely more disturbed. And as a result, we saw a society that had a hard time figuring out just what kind of purpose it could serve when its power was drawn from the ability to destroy.  I'd go on about the other societies in that show and how their decision to divide themselves along definitive lines ultimately contributed to the war that savaged their land, but I made a promise to myself to only spend a paragraph ranting about children's cartoons after the Spongebob incident that got me arrested in Kyoto.  Turning to more literary pursuits, the concept holds true and I think it's pretty well-demonstrated in the Northmen of Joe Abercrombie's The First Law trilogy. At a glance, they might seem like your typical barbarian subculture loosely based on every other Norse concept you've ever seen, but that's a short and fleeting glance. Looking deeper, there's not so much an "honor" that the Northmen address each other with as there is a very casual politeness. They kill each other, frequently. They maim each other. They murder each other in cold blood. But you very rarely see them hate each other. To them, killing is just something they do. It's nature. You see this reflected in Logen Ninefingers of The First Law and in Caul Shivers of Best Served Cold. Ultimately, they're kind of a depressing tale as they're Northmen who try and fail to escape their natures, just as the North rises from and collapses back into war time and time again. It's simply how it goes.

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