Une interview de Larry Niven

[jerome]

Le magazine Locus a interviewé Larry Niven. Il y a des extraits sur leur site. En voici quelques-uns :

“I try to be versatile. I'm in awe of other people's versatility. Silverberg, for instance, has done everything. I've reached as far as I could in every direction I could see. (Isaac Asimov once called me his 'spiritual son,' and I refrained from telling him I'm everybody's spiritual son.) Also, there are benchmarks that probably wouldn't be visible to a younger writer but were topics that everybody touched on when I was a kid. I've done my solipsism story. I've done time travel: the traveler from the Institute for Temporal Research who keeps finding fantasy creatures. First man on the moon. There are a few I haven't tried -- it's hard to believe in an invisible man, for instance. But interstellar war? Sure."

“Hard SF is not basically funny until you look deep into it -- or maybe I should say, you have to be either very shallow or very deep to find the funny spots in hard science fiction. Once you understand enough about Known Space, you reach the point at which Earth is so crowded that picking pockets has become a sport, and your wallet always has a stamp on it.”

“John Campbell turned down every one of my stories, except maybe the last one. (Given the timing, it's hard to know -- he may have accepted 'Cloak of Anarchy'.) But I got a letter from him for the first version of a story called 'Arm', 12 pages of detailed work on what's wrong with it and how to rethink it. And I used it very extensively and rewrote it. Campbell was everybody's editor! But Analog never published me until after his death."