Une interview de Stephen Deas

[jerome]

Stephen Deas est l'auteur chez Pygmalion du Palais Adamantin dont le premier tome est sorti en juin dernier.

Il est en interview sur le net en anglais ici.

Extrait :
"JO: In your article “Where be Dragons?” you state that “We have emasculated our dragons. We give them traits that are recognizable as human. We try to explain how they work, how they live, what they eat, how they came to be. We steadily bring them within the circle of our understanding. In the end, we make them like us.” Why is this a bad thing, and how are the dragons of The Adamantine Palace different from the sissy dragons of other literature?

Stephen Deas : Look, the world already has My-Little-Pony. I’m not sure what My-Little-Firebreathing-Pony-With-Wings adds. It was a nice idea once, but now it’s gone mainstream. Like A-Little-Bit-Dangerous-But-Ultimately-Highly-Honorable-And-Very-Safe vampires. You know, sometimes I’m tempted to put all this epic fantasy away and write something where the world is secretly populated by a race of benevolent yet edgy carnivorous shapeshifting horses that can talk and fly and breath fire and and and…

(OK, actually I’m rather addicted to Tru Blood. But apart from that).

Dragons are monsters. We made them up to be exactly that. What purpose does the monster serve in a story? The hero is defined by the monster. The bigger the monster, the bigger the hero. No monster, no hero. And if there’s no one in stories showing us how to be a hero and almost every single real-world potential hero is shown to be as human as the rest of us, I think we lose track of what heroism is. Without that, what do we become? Without a concept of self-sacrifice and acting for the greater good, there’s not much left to write home about. More and more, the monsters become the heroes and people become the monsters, and that troubles me. Turning dragons into cuddle-pets is just one tip of a very big iceberg, but it happens to be one that I can do something about.

So, the dragons of The Adamantine Palace. Well, they’re not cuddly. They’re monsters. Doped and pliant monsters to begin with, but if and when they wake up (and of course they do otherwise there wouldn’t be much of a story), all we are to them is food. We simply have nothing to offer them except calories. They’re at least as intelligent as us, they co-operate and even if you manage to somehow kill one, they don’t stay dead.

And before you bring it up, no, in The Adamantine Palace, there aren’t any heroes to fight the monsters (yet). We’ll see how well that works out, shall we…? "