Sur Chiang : OK, j'enregistre la façon dont il classe l'histoire.
Mais ce fait (que j'ignorais) n'est pas contradictoire avec cet autre fait : comme MF avec
La saison de la sorcière, on peut lire
L'Enfer… comme un texte de SF et ça n'a vraiment rien d'un scandale.
Robert Merle dit dans la préface d'
Un animal doué de raison que son roman ne relève pas de la SF. Est-ce le dernier mot à ce sujet ?
Robbe-Grillet n'a pas écrit
La maison de rendez-vous comme un roman de SF mais GK a autrefois publié dans Fiction un papier resté célèbre pour défendre cette lecture. Est-ce contradictoire ?
Pas du tout. Ça prouve simplement que la SF est un phénomène subjectif et que
L'Enfer…, est l'un de ces textes-limites qu'on peut lire comme ça aussi. Que Chiang juge bon de classer le texte en dehors ne dit qu'une chose : ce qu'est pour lui la SF. Et chacun se coordonne sur sa position ou non. En attendant, la SF en tant qu'entité éditoriale continue de faire ce qu'elle a toujours fait : accueillir des textes qui peuvent être lus de différentes manière.
Par exemple, le chapeau de l'itw de Chiang ne distingue pas
L'Enfer… du reste de son recueil :
All science fiction is fundamentally post-religious literature. For those whose minds are shaped by science and technology, the universe is fundamentally knowable. Faith dissolves, replaced by a sense of wonder at the complexity of creation.
This is the perspective explored in Ted Chiang's first collection, Stories of Your Life and Others (Tor, 2002). Born in 1967 in Port Jefferson, New York, Chiang has published eight breathtakingly good stories in the past twelve years. He has yet to publish -- or even try to write -- a novel. Despite his limited number of publications, however, Chiang has exerted a quiet influence in the genre. A five-time Hugo nominee, Chiang has won nearly every major science fiction award, including the Nebula (twice in 1990 and 1999), John W. Campbell Award (1992); Asimov's Reader's Choice Award (1992); and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award (1999). Most recently, Chiang won the 2001 Sidewise Award for "Seventy-Two Letters," and the Locus Award for "Hell is the Absence of God," which has also been nominated for a Hugo this year.
Chiang's primary method is to change underlying natural laws or symbolic systems, creating worlds and situations that are fantastic to us but utterly rational to the characters that must live with them. In the beautiful "Story of Your Life," learning an alien language allows a linguist to experience past, present and future simultaneously, while the mathematician in "Division by Zero" manages to prove that any two numbers are equal to each other and that mathematics itself is inconsistent. In "Tower of Babylon," a group of miners climb until they reach the vault of heaven, hoping to find God on the other side of the carapace of granite that enfolds their world. "Hell is the Absence of God" tells the tale of one Neil Fisk, whose wife is killed in a visitation by the angel Nathanael to a downtown shopping district. In Neil's thoroughly contemporary world, God exists beyond a doubt. Angels behave like weather phenomena, the miracle of their appearances tracked, quantified, and reported on the nightly news.
Par ailleurs, dans une autre itw donnée à Locus, Chiang dit ceci sur le sow :
‘‘Everyone refers to science fiction's ability to evoke a sense of wonder. That is definitely a goal of mine, because I remember the sense of wonder I experienced when I read science fiction when I was younger. I would like to be able to evoke that in other people. 'Tower of Babylon' and 'Seventy-Two Letters' both seem to take place in a fantasy universe, yet they ultimately refer to scientific principles in our world. I didn't specifically set out to achieve this effect, but I suspect readers who like those stories like them because the characters achieve an insight at the end of the story. They basically discover for themselves scientific concepts that we're all familiar with in our world, but in this fantasy universe these concepts are novel. It creates some of the feel of the sense of wonder associated with the thrill of discovery – one which is harder to achieve in a story set in our universe, where these scientific principles are so familiar. John Crowley has said one of the things the 'Aegypt' books are about is times when the world changes. The insights achieved by the characters in 'Tower of Babylon' and 'Seventy-Two Letters' are likewise insights that will change the worldview of the people in those worlds. They're making conceptual breakthroughs which are new to that universe, but because those breakthroughs are more familiar in our universe, that makes theirs seem more similar to ours, even if only in a metaphorical sense.’’
La dernière phrase réconcilie potentiellement la plupart des positions exprimées ici.
