Une interview de Peter Watts

[jerome]

Voici une petite interview de Peter Watts.

Extrait :
When we speak of horror, science fiction doesn’t come up often (although there are clearly works where both overlap). What’s your opinion when it comes to horror and science fiction, or is it simply that we’re not looking hard enough?
Peter Watts : Unless you define horror as a genre that must explicitly contain some kind of supernatural element — which I don’t — I think the distinction is fairly meaningless. Science fiction plays with the ramifications of science and technology. Horror goes for the brain stem. There’s no reason why a piece of fiction can’t do both; certainly some of science’s recent findings about the human condition are plenty horrifying in an existential kinda way.

Cinematic cases in point are almost too numerous to mention: “The Thing” (of course), “Alien”, the various body snatcher movies all qualify as horrific sf. But there are plenty of literary examples as well: a lot of Stephen King, for example. Hell, even my own Blindsight gets described as horror — I’ve been surprised by how often the word “Lovecraftian” got attached to a work which, by all accounts, is pretty solidly hard-sf. (And speaking of Lovecraft, the whole Cthulhu mythos can be regarded as science fiction of an especially squicky sort). More recently, Dave Nickle’s marvelous “Eutopia” is being widely lauded as a masterwork of period horror — one critic compared it to early Stephen King — but nobody seems to have remarked on the fact that it is, in fact, a piece of science fiction that just happens to take place against the background of the Eugenics movement in 1911. While there is creepiness and horror galore in that novel, there is nothing supernatural about it; all its monsters and mayhem are grounded in basic (albeit speculative) biology.

So, yeah. Horror vs SF? It’s like asking whether there’s an overlap between plot and character development.