Charles Stross vient de publier sur le site des éditions Tor un article intitulé : “Where do you get your ideas?”

Voici le début :

"One of the questions that every SF author gets asked sooner or later is “where do you get your ideas?” For better or worse, I seem to get a double dose of it; ideas are my particular speciality, or so it said in the last fortune cookie I opened. So I thought I’d give the game away by explaining just where they come from.

Unlike Roger Zelazny I don’t leave a glass of milk and a plate of cookies out by the door; unlike Harlan Ellison I don’t use a mail order supplier in Poughkeepsie. (Or is it the other way around?) I don’t invent invent neat new ideas at all. Instead, I trip over them—because they’re lying around in heaps. The trick is to pick several up at the same time and smush them together until some of them stick to each other—creating something new and interesting.

Generating ideas isn’t some mystical talent that you have to be born with: it’s a skill you can develop. The first step is to throw your net far and wide, and see what comes back to you. I spend a couple of hours every day skimming news sources (most of them on the web, this century): everything from the daily newspapers and New Scientist to The Register by way of places like Hacker News and Slashdot and BoingBoing and then to more recondite islands in the sea of blogspace."

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