Des news de Robert Silverberg

[jerome]

Robert Silverberg bosse sur une nouvelle pour le 60ème anniversaire du magazine Fantasy & Science Fiction. Il le dit dans une interview sur conceptscifi.com. Il donne aussi son avis sur l'évolution de la SF.

Toute l'interview est ici.

Voici un extrait :
"
What are you currently working on?
Robert Silverberg : I'll be doing a short story for Fantasy & Science Fiction's 60th anniversary issue this fall. Otherwise there's nothing much on my schedule. After having been such a busy writer for more than half a century, I don't feel like writing any more novels, and these days I'm doing short stories only for specific projects and upon direct editorial request. Call it semi-retirement. I doubt that I'll ever quit writing entirely, but I don't expect to be particularly active as a writer in the years ahead. There are plenty of writers half my age to take up the slack.

You've been writing for a long time. How do you think that the genre of science fiction has changed over the years?
Robert Silverberg : When I began reading it more than sixty years ago, it was pretty much a pulp-magazine genre, centered in magazines named Amazing Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories. John Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction was the only magazine that attempted in format and narrative technique to escape from the pulp stereotypes. But by the time I was seriously thinking about a writing career, new magazines like Galaxy and Fantasy & Science Fiction had upped the literary ante considerably, and many of the old pulp magazines had cast off their action-adventure-formula
identities, so it seemed to me that the best writers of the day (Sturgeon, Leiber, Blish, Kornbluth, Vance, etc.) were the models to follow, and, to the best of my abilities, I did.

When the shift from magazine-centered fiction to paperback-centered fiction got under way in the 70s, we saw publishing companies reaching out to the largest possible audiences, which meant a lowering of literary standards, and today, I'm afraid, we are pretty much back to the old pulp formulas (with certain honorable exceptions, of course.)

I find I read very little science fiction nowadays and get very little pleasure from most of what I do attempt. My discomfort with what I read these days is one factor in my current inactivity as a writer. I don't think that I could ever return to a central position in the field as it is now constituted, and I don't feel like occupying a peripheral one. It's far more pleasing to sit back and play the elder-statesman role without actually doing very much, since I feel like a stranger in a strange land whenever I get very near the current publishing scene."

[Fredericque]

Héhé, c'est intéressant ça