C'est la question posée par le site SF Signal à un panel d'auteurs. Voici la réponse de David Anthony Durham.

Citation:

Q: Who are the best female characters in Science Fiction/Fantasy and/or Horror? What makes them the best? David Anthony Durham : I think what makes a character great for each of us has a lot to do with timing. Characters strike us not just because of who they are, but because it's the right moment for us to encounter them. For me, meeting Tenar from Ursula K LeGuin's The Tombs of Atuan was one such encounter. I must have been twelve or thirteen. I'd just fallen in love with fantasy because of Tolkein and Lewis, and I was on the hunt for something more. I picked up The Tombs of Atuan at a library in Annapolis. It was the wrong place to start a series - the second book, and with the focus on a character other than the real star - but I had to grab what I could. A few pages in I knew I was in territory I hadn't explored before. The Tombs of Atuan is quiet, somber, frighteningly focused on ritual and religion, much of it going on in underground labyrinths. The main character isn't a man. She isn't even boy! Fortunately, I was ready for something that was different in all these ways, and I found connections with Tenar quite readily. Here was a child separated from her parents (I'd been separated from my dad), in the care of powerful, self-important adults (am I wrong for being reminded of school?), with religious dogma pressed heavily upon her (I'll leave that one without further comment). Her life was not her own. She was the Eaten One. She was important, and yet for reasons she had no control over. She had a domain all her own, labyrinths that she knew more intimately than anyone else, but she had to explore them blindly. That's how I felt about a lot of things at the time. When she did come into the power of her position... nothing much happened, which is what I feared I had ahead of me too. When Ged arrives to introduce her to a larger world I was right there with her, ready for whatever was to come. I left the book having been intimate friends with a girl finding her identity as she became a woman. I also left knowing that I could have relationships in books that didn't come so easily in real life - and that fantasy could be about a lot more than battling evil sorcerers. I was a different reader by the end of the book than I'd been going in. LeGuin's Tenar had a lot to do with that.