Michael Swanwick et ses débuts

[jerome]

Michael Swanwick est en interview en anglais ici.

Il revient sur ses débuts :
"You began writing science fiction in the 1970's, with the New Wave, and were in the vicinity of the cyberpunks as well; since then we've seen others come and go. How do these groups of writers and their manifestos, speeches, anthologies, magazines, conventions and works inform you as a writer?
Michael Swanwick :The apparatus of literary movements can be a terrible distraction for a young writer and a great temptation to sink time and energy into irrelevancies at a moment when all your best effort should go into writing fiction.

What is valuable is the presence of other writers of your same generation who are doing the same sort of thing you are, and writing the kind of stories that you aspire to write. When “Hardfought” by Greg Bear or “Hive” by Bruce Sterling or “My Brother's Keeper” by Pat Cadigan, or “Black Air” by Kim Stanley Robinson first appeared, they all sent me straight to the typewriter to prove that I could do that too. Not the specifics of the story, of course, but something that cool, that sharp, that innovative, that literary. Thy pushed me into new areas. They showed by example exactly how good you have to be to avoid being an also-ran.

When I collaborated on “Dogfight” with William Gibson, we were both unknowns. I told him I liked the image he’d mentioned to a friend of rednecks fighting with miniature WWI airplanes over a pool table and, being a shrewd guy, Bill saw immediately that I had a story in mind. He generously offered to let me have the idea, or else to collaborate with me, whichever I chose. I went with the collaboration because everyone in our cohort was excited about his writing, and I wanted to see up close what kind of chops he had. Gibson is particularly good down on the sentence-and-paragraph level, and the lessons I learned working that closely with him were worth any number of anthologies and manifestoes."