La SF en France vue par Jeff Van VanderMeer

[jerome]

Jeff Van VanderMeer vient de publier sur son site le résultat d'un voyage l'été dernier en Europe. Il fait un petit état des lieux de la SF en Roumanie, République Tchèque, Portugal, Finland, France et Allemagne.

c'est plutôt intéressant : http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/2007/06/ ... s-article/

Je vous mets ce qu'il dit de la France :

"The situation in France and Germany is much different than in Romania, because of the relatively mature SF/F scene in both countries.

France has a long tradition of supporting SF/F (and, not unsurprisingly, fantastical comics and graphic novels), with one of the strongest European conventions, Utopiales. While traditional fantasy is alive and well and selling in great numbers, houses like Calmann-Levy are also trying their hand at cross-genre or “interstitial” books.

Calmann-Levy’s interstitial imprint is the brain child of Sebastien Guillot, a thirty-something editor who also oversees a line of traditional fantasy and of classics.

Guillot knows the point of such a line is to increase audience share, but these kinds of books also constitute his first love. He fears that if released as “fantasy” they would flounder. Like Haulica in Romania, Guillot feels he needs mainstream readers.

“Many mainstream authors are now bestsellers with fantastical books, but no one is saying they are fantasy,” Guillot says. Books like Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves and Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Norrell and Mr. Strange have done very well in the literary mainstream.

“So I am convinced that readers love these kinds of stories. We just have to find a way to market the books to a wider readership. We have the same problem here as in the United States-there’s no place for Slipstream or Interstitial.” (In fact, Guillot is good friends with Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman of the US-based Interstitial Institute.)

What books does he publish? Those that literally exist on a borderline: novels that readers will not discern as being too fantastical, but have a definite strangeness or magic realism element to them. Recent titles include Sean Stewart’s Mockingbird and my own City of Saints & Madmen.

Underlying all of this, of course, is the idea that in sales terms and artistic terms, SF/F is seen as a devolved kind of literature by French readers. Guillot himself told me that if I were ever published under a SF/F imprint, readers would never see me as anything but a SF/F writer, for better or worse."

[Eons]

Ça ressemble plus à une synthèse d'un entretien avec Sébastien Guillot qu'à un constat personnel.

[martlet]

ce n'est pas Jeff Van VanderMeer mais Jeff VanderMeer.