Alastair Reynolds parle de House of Suns

[jerome]

Voici une interview d'Alastair Reynolds.

Il parle notamment de House of Suns

"What gave you the idea for House of Suns?
Alastair Reynolds : A deep affection for far future SF, such as Clarke's The City and the Stars and Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun. Also, an abiding love for SF artwork, especially the paperback illustrations of the seventies, by artists like Chris Moore and Chris Foss. Often, you'd read the books and wonder what relationship the cover had to the text. I quite fancied writing a book which seemed to fit all those huge, epic covers, with their vast machines and alien landscapes. Adam Roberts rightly identified this impulse in his review. "

Et il parle du marché de la SF :

"What changes have you seen in the science fiction market since you started writing, and do you think things have evolved for the better?
Alastair Reynolds : I'm sure there have been sweeping changes, but I feel largely immune to them. I'm still basically following the same creative impulse that made me start writing an SF novel at 16: I don't feel that I've tailored my work for the market in any significant way. I basically just follow my nose and figure that if I find something potentially interesting, there must be a core of readers out there who share my fascination. I'm aware that the popularity of SF has declined in comparison to fantasy, but, again, it's not really impacted on me to any tangible extent.

One thing I regard as very positive is that the internet has fostered a renewed enthusiasm for the short story, which can only be for the good. When I first started publishing in Interzone, back in the early nineties, it was like throwing stones into a lake. Splash, and that was it. The only feedback you might get was a comment in the letters page some months later, and even that wasn't guaranteed. Whereas now there are many online venues willing to discuss new anthologies, collections, magazine editions etc. The quality of the criticism can be varied, but it's still good to see people taking this stuff seriously again."