Lois McMaster Bujold et ses débuts de lectrice

[jerome]

Lois McMaster Bujold revient sur ses débuts de lectrice de science fiction dans cette interview

"Q1: What draws you to speculative fiction?
LMB: I’ve been reading the stuff since I was nine years old, and found the magazines and books my engineering professor father left lying around — he used to buy SF to read on the plane during consulting trips. I of course read the children’s versions found in my school library, when I ran out of horse stories — I find I’m by no means the only SF writer of my generation with fond memories of Eleanor Cameron’s The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet — but my dad’s discards were the first fiction aimed at adults that I’d read.

What drew me was the adventure and the humor I occasionally found. One of the earliest hits for me was Eric Frank Russell’s Men, Martians, and Machines, which had it all, and L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt’s The Incomplete Enchanter on the fantasy side. (Which actually inspired me at age 15 to read Spenser’s entire epic poem The Faerie Queene, although probably not in the mode Spenser’d had in mind. But no writer can imagine all their readers.) William Tenn and Robert Sheckley, I dimly recall, also had occasional humorous short stories. James Schmitz’s The Witches of Karres — I own a Chilton first printing, bought new. I first encountered Bradbury about then, too. I don’t note him for humor, but he did have some upbeat tales like “A Medicine for Melancholy” that kept me coming back. When I had a subscription to Analog Magazine back in the 60s, I would always open it up and read the stories illustrated by Kelly Freas first, in the hopes that they would be funny. Randall Garrett was always a good bet. Adventure was offered by too many writers to name, but then as now, smart humor was thin on the ground

My current favorite fantasy writer is Terry Pratchett, so my hunger for humor seems not to have shifted much over the decades."