Charles Stross parle des Princes Marchands

[jerome]

C'est en anglais et dans cette interview.


1. What do you enjoy most about the world you’ve created in the Merchant Princes books?
Charles Stross : The Merchant Princes series have their origin back in 2002, shortly after I’d sold my first SF novels to an American publisher, Ace. I’d already finished Singularity Sky, and as I was finishing up Iron Sunrise my agent made an interesting point. ‘Your US publisher has a right of first refusal on your next SF novel,’ she emailed, ‘but they won’t buy anything new from you until at least the first book has been in print for a year. Which means you can’t sell another SF novel for a couple of years. So how about writing a fantasy or alternate history series I can sell somewhere else and make us both lots of money?’ Which made sense to me, because I was living hand-to-mouth at the time. (And a magazine I was writing for was in the process of going bust, owing me for several months’ work.)

I mention this because it framed an interesting problem: how to write something completely different from my previous work. And also: is it possible to design a bestseller? On top of the requirement to be different enough not to annoy my primary publisher, and the goal of being a commercial success, it had to be something I could get my teeth into and enjoy writing — only a fool volunteers to spend years writing a multi-book series they don’t actually *like* — and something potentially open-ended.

So I sat down and wrote a bunch of pitches for different ideas. And my agent and I chewed them over and finally agreed to go with one in particular: a big, brassy, wide-screen tale of parallel universe hopping goodfellas and the spirited heroine — a long-lost cousin who stumbles across them. Our dimension-hopping traders come from a time line that is backward by our standards, where their activities translate into what passes for stupendous wealth: sumptuous clothes, armed retainers, drafty castles with no flushing toilets or electricity. So we can spin it as fantasy, or as a thriller, or as … well.

No plan survives contact with the enemy. Or Marketing. Or the imp of the author’s perverse imagination.