Bruce Sterling et le Steampunk

[jerome]

Le site matrix-online vient de faire une interview de Bruce Sterling. Le thème générale est le Steampunk et ils reviennent sur sa collaboration avec William Gibson sur La Machine à différences.

Voici ce que l'auteur de Gros Temps et Schismatrice + en dit :

"LC: Can you tell me how the collaboration with fellow author William Gibson came about? How did you guys come together to say, “Hey, let’s write this book together?”
BS: The topic of Babbage came up the first time we met. As writers seriously interested in computers, of course we were concerned with the origin of the phenomenon. The fact that computing began with a spectacular fiasco is of great literary interest. Computing as an enterprise is full of triumphalism and signally fails to count its dead.

It took seven years for a book project to emerge, after we'd had many discussions. It crawled from that compost-heap of autodidactic data that science fiction writers generate by their nature.

Difference Engine was too ambitious a world-building project to do alone. It's a very eclectic, encyclopaedic project, but you should have seen the reams of stuff we ‘omitted’.

Est-ce qu'il en refera du Steampunk ?
LC: Do you plan to write in the Steampunk genre again?

Well, I can promise you there will never be a Difference Engine sequel.

I'm not the kind of guy to repeat myself; I don't write trilogies, I rarely pick up my loose threads. Lately, I've gotten more interested in cross-cultural things rather than cross-temporal things. Some globally minded science fiction written from an Italian or a Serbian perspective, for instance; I could likely get into that.

My feeling about science fiction is that it ought to expand the scope of things that are possible to think. When Steampunk succeeded it did a little of that. If it's just costume-drama or a merchandising tag, that's not the end of the world, but it's not a pursuit of a lot of use to anybody. Wells’ War of the Worlds reads in a very Steampunk way now, but if you dote on that book because the technology clanks and clatters so much, you're not appreciating Wells; you don't understand the gift he offered us.

toute l'interview est là