Un article de Ben Bova sur les romans historiques

[jerome]

Voici un article de Ben Bova sur les romans historiques.

C'est à lire ici.

Je vous mets le début :
"It’s a story that has everything: romance, adventure, stirring battles, heroes who are larger than life, jealousy, greed, ambition and the most beautiful woman in the world.

The story is Homer’s “Iliad,” of course. The Trojan War. Beautiful Helen, with the “face that launched a thousand ships.” People have been telling it and re-telling it for 3,500 years.

I’ve just added my modest effort to this enduring tale with a novel titled “The Hittite.” You might wonder what a writer of science fiction is doing with an historical novel. Well, the two fields are not as far apart as you might think at first. In science fiction, the writer creates a world of the future in as realistic detail as he can. But no matter how exotic or strange the scenario, that world of tomorrow must hold true to the known facts of science.

You need the same kind of knowledge and understanding to re-create a lost world from bygone history. When I tackled the project of writing “The Hittite,” I was determined to tell the story of Helen and Troy as accurately as I could."