Optimism and pessimism - d'Alastair Reynolds

[jerome]

Alastair Reynolds vient de signer l'article Optimism and pessimism - where did it all go right?.

Il est à lire sur le net ici :

Voici le début :

First, it’s great to be here. Many thanks to Terry and Don for inviting me to blog at Babel Clash - I’ll try not to let the side down too much.

I wanted to kickoff with some discussion about optimism and pessimism in SF/F (mostly SF, since that’s what I do) because it’s a topic that’s been much on my mind of late, and not least in the last couple of weeks. But let’s go back a bit further than that to begin with. When I set out with the ambition of becoming an SF writer, I didn’t go into it with any preconceived notions about writing “dark” fiction. The SF that I was reading at the time - we’re going back thirty years here - was certainly varied in tone and content, but very little of it was overtly pessimistic. Asimov’s novels might have toyed with grand, century-spanning notions like the fall and rise of galactic civilisation, but the mere existence of such a civilisation was a kind of optimistic statement in the ability of the human species to weather its current atomic-age difficulties and spread beyond the Earth, ultimately into the stars. Larry Niven’s Known Space stories had their share of wars and villainy, but by the time of Ringworld that milieu seemed like a fundamentally attractive place to live in. James White’s Sector General stories envisioned a universe of cooperating alien species, allied by an underlying adherence to rational pacifism - humanity was just one part in this essentially utopian mosaic. Even more strikingly, Arthur C Clarke’s fiction was almost entirely bereft of war and violence, but nonetheless managed to be compulsively readable - if there was an antagonist, it was space itself, the ultimate unknown.