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Why did you choose to set this story in Africa?

It’s part of much bigger sequence that began way back in a novella for Asimov’s in 1990 called “Towards Kilimanjaro,” known informally as the “Chaga Saga”—the alien visitation that seems to be terraforming the southern hemisphere into someone else’s terra. All the works are set in East Africa, a part of the world I have been to often and that I love very much. It’s a cliché that when the aliens arrive, they appear over the White House, or Tiananmen Square. But why shouldn’t they arrive in the developing world? Why should they not appear in East Africa—why shouldn’t they land on Kilimanjaro? Kenya is a robust and inventive culture—they made the jump from an essentially iron age society to a mechanised one in two generations—I thought it would be interesting to seem them bring that same attitude to the jump from an industrial society to a nanotechnological one—which is what the Chaga brings, albeit at a high price.

bormandg a écrit :Je rappelle que si la nouvelle Tendeleo's story est parue dans l'anthologie Faux rêveur de Bragelonne, les romans Chaga et Kirinya ne sont toujours pas traduits. mais, apparemment, Ian McDonald n'en a pas fini avec cette histoire passionnante....