Une interview de Neal Stephenson

[jerome]

Neal Stephenson est en interview dans le journal Locus qui en a mis des extraits sur son site internet. Il y est question de son dernier roman Anathem.

“I was interested in our concept of 'news.' At the end of the year, every year, the newspapers publish a roundup of the best in the news. When I started thinking of Anathem, they were also publishing their end-of-decade news roundups; some were publishing end-of-century and end-of millennium roundups. Every morning I'd sit and read all this stuff that I wouldn't remember the next day. Why was I spending all that time reading the news every day, when I could just wait until the end of the year and read the summary and get the important stuff?

“I thought, 'OK, so there's a monastery devoted to maintaining a clock. The clock is going to have a wall around it, and the wall is going have a gate -- just like the door on a cuckoo clock. It's connected to the clock mechanism, and once every certain span of time that door is going to open up, and stay open for a little while. And while it's open, anybody who wants can go in and out freely, but after it closes if you're on the inside it means you've made a commitment to stay there until the next time it opens. During that time, you're not going to have informational contact with the outside world.'

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