Un article de Paul J.McAuley sur James Blish

[jerome]

Paul J.McAuley a écrit un article sur James Blish. C'est en anglais. Il se lit ici.

Voici le début :
If history teaches us one thing, it’s that almost all authors writing now will be forgotten in a hundred years time, and even if their books linger in some vast long-tail electronic library, few will read them. Most authors, and most books, achieve obscurity far sooner than that, of course, but best-selling status is no guarantee of long-term survival. A hundred years ago, Marie Correlli was the most widely-read author of her time, so wealthy that she paid for restoration of many properties in her adopted home of Stratford-upon-Avon and imported a gondola and a gondolier from Venice, so that she could be poled about the Avon. But who now reads A Mighty Atom or The Sorrows of Satan?

Every author knows this, but most nuture a frail but stubborn fantasy that they’ll somehow dodge the bullet. Even those who don’t trouble the bestselling charts (ie most of us) hope that they will, like Herman Melville, who barely earned $10,000 from his books during his lifetime, achieve posthumous recognition. A vain and foolish hope, of course, but apart from the very few pragmatic authors who write only to pay the electricity bill it’s one most cling to. So it’s always a salutary lesson to discover that a favourite writer is slipping away into obscurity, which brings me to one of my favourite science-fiction authors, James Blish.