Interview Daniel Abraham

[Priscilla]

Le site Suduvu.com a interrogé Daniel Abraham, l'auteur de The Dragon's Path, (qui sortira en langue anglaise le 7 Avril), dans sa série intitulée Take Five (qui consiste en une série de cinq questions révélant cinq faits marquants sur l'oeuvre de l'auteur interrogé).




En voici un extrait, qui présente le nouveau roman de l'auteur, ainsi que les deux premières révélations de l'auteur :

Summer is the season of war in the Free Cities.

Marcus wants to get out before the fighting starts. His hero days are behind him and simple caravan duty is better than getting pressed into service by the local gentry. Even a small war can get you killed. But a captain needs men to lead — and his have been summarily arrested and recruited for their swords.

Cithrin has a job to do — move the wealth of a nation across a war zone. An orphan raised by the bank, she is their last hope of keeping the bank’s wealth out of the hands of the invaders. But she’s just a girl and knows little of caravans, war, and danger. She knows money and she knows secrets, but will that be enough to save her in the coming months?

Geder, the only son of a noble house is more interested in philosophy than swordplay. He is a poor excuse for a soldier and little more than a pawn in these games of war. But not even he knows what he will become of the fires of battle. Hero or villain? Small men have achieved greater things and Geder is no small man.

Falling pebbles can start a landslide. What should have been a small summer spat between gentlemen is spiraling out of control. Dark forces are at work, fanning the flames that will sweep the entire region onto The Dragon’s Path — the path of war.

Daniel Abraham:

1) The big dark magic looming at the back of The Dragon’s Path came out of a conversation I had with Ty Franck (my co-writer on Leviathan Wakes and the other books in The Expanse series) about the Nazgul from The Lord of the Rings. Ty pointed out that the Nazgul didn’t shoot fireballs or make earthquakes or anything obvious like that. They just showed up and the enemy armies were demoralized and fearful. The most convincing dark magic is like that, I think It doesn’t have a physical manifestation.

2) One of the main characters — Cithrin bel Sarcour — is what happened when Beth Harmon from Walter Tevis’ The Queen’s Gambit ran into Tim Park’s book-length essay Medici Money in the back of my head.

Plus de détails ici

[Priscilla]

Le blog Aidanmoher.com publie une interview plus longue de Daniel Abraham, dans la catégorie A Dribble of Ink, également à l'occasion de la sortie de son Dragon's Path. L'auteur y revient sur des sujets aussi divers qu'éloignés : ses progrès depuis sa dernière publication, le changement de son style de vie, la manière de prononcer les noms dans son nouvel opus...

Extrait :

Daniel! Welcome back to A Dribble of Ink! It’s been a few years since we last worked together on an interview!

It has. Hope the world’s been treating you gently in the meantime.

How’s life as a writer changed since then?

Actually things have shifted around a lot. I’m doing a lot of projects right now. I’ve got an urban fantasy series I’m writing as MLN Hanover and I’ve got a gig co-authoring a space opera series with Ty Frank as James Corey, and there’s the comic book adaptation of A Game of Thrones. So in that sense, everything’s going pretty well.

Also, I think I’ve sort of learned how to write books, which is nice.

One of the aspects I most enjoy about The Long Price Quartet is that though there’s a defined, over-arching plot to the series, each novel is also built to stand on its own, to tell a complete story with just a few overlapping characters.

What drove you away from the more typical Fantasy structure that sees many novelists writing what amounts to one long novel broken into several (dozen) volumes?

Will we see more of this style of storytelling in The Dagger and the Coin ?

One of the things that drove the Long Price Quartet’s structure was a set of books by Lawrence Durell called the Alexandria Quartet and (probably even more) Robinson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. Not that they did the same thing with time that the Long Price did, but they both have novels that can be read alone that add up to something. That worked really well for that project.

I’m not aiming for that in the same way with The Dagger and the Coin. The books in this one are more traditional in the Lord of the Rings one-big-story-in-several-volumes way. If things go well, I would like to set other stories in the same world, though. I think Robin Hobb and Terry Pratchett were very wise to set things up so that you could have different characters and stories that all touched at the edges. After the Dagger & Coin books, I’d like to keep playing in different parts of this same world.

So eventually we’ll see Marcus Wester, one of the main characters in The Dragon’s Path set sail across the sea and stumble across Khaiem (from The Long Price Quartet)?

Heh. No. The Long Price Quartet was its own world, and I’m never going back there. That story ended.

Okay, Daniel, let’s play a game. It’s called ‘How the heck to you pronounce that!’

We’ll start with ‘Geder’. Hard ‘g’? Soft ‘g’?

I’ve pronounced it with the hard g, and he hasn’t corrected me.

How about ‘Qahaur’?

ka-HAR

Plus de détails ici