Joe Haldeman et son roman Starbound

[jerome]

Joe Haldeman parle de son dernier roman Starbound ici dans une interview en anglais.


Voici un extrait :

"SciFiBookshelf.com: Marsbound was met with some great reviews, and Starbound is in stores now. Was there any particular idea that inspired this series? And can you tell us anything about the upcoming book, Earthbound?
Joe Haldeman: MARSBOUND started off as a stand-alone novel. I'd written the novella "The Mars Girl" for a Dozois/Dann anthology of Young Adult sf stories, and I wrote it with the idea of expanding it into a YA novel. I used the novella to pitch the story to a YA editor, and she said no, thanks. (Later she told me she'd been wrong; her daughter read the novella and loved it.)

Anyhow, that made me think. I'm not a YA author anyhow. So why not make the protagonist a bit older and write it as a regular novel, sex and all. So that became MARSBOUND.

I was literally a few days from the end of the novel when it occurred to me that it needed a sequel, with the two main characters upping the ante and going off to the stars. I wrote an outline pitching that book, STARBOUND, to sell it to my publisher. But in writing the outline, I saw it required a third book, EARTHBOUND.

So what started out as a novella became a trilogy. Trilogies do sell better than stand-alone novels, but that wasn't my motivation, at least consciously.

The books follow the same characters in an unbroken series of events, but I tried to make each one enjoyable as a stand-alone novel. It was a challenge to write the second and third books so they would work both for a reader who was following the series and for one who had picked up the book without preparation. Background information has to be presented in a way that's not boring to the reader who's seen it before.

I started EARTHBOUND with a literary problem in mind. I'd just taught Cormack McCarthy's THE ROAD, which was well written but mindnumbingly depressing, and I wondered (since EARTHBOUND had a similar opening situation) whether I could make my book work without it being so psychologically painful. I don't know whether I'm succeeding; I'm only halfway through the book."