Brandon Sanderson parle de Steelheart

[jerome]

Steelheart est le nouveau roman de Brandon Sanderson. Il s'agirait plutôt d'un roman Young Adult. Il en parle ici. Il sortira en anglais en septembre 2013.


Steelheart is intended for a younger audience. If and how does this affect your writing process?

For teens the main thing I change is, I tend to focus on one character or two characters instead of a very large cast. And I make the pacing a bit faster.

The characters in Steelheart are reminiscent of superheroes. What made you go this route? It's a new diretion for you.

This is all just part of the collective unconscious of pop and nerd culture that I’m a part of, that I grew up with. Certain things fascinate me that I just couldn’t do in an epic fantasy in the same way. At the same time I don’t want people to look at Steelheart and say, "Oh, this is a superhero book." I wrote it as an action adventure story and it certainly is taking from some of those themes, but the idea is, what if people really started gaining superpowers, what would happen? My immediate thought was, people would abuse them. It would be awful. What would we do if there was someone who was so powerful we couldn’t throw them in prison, we couldn’t punish them? So the story of there being no heroes, of there only being villains is what inspired me.

[jerome]

Autre interview de Brandon Sanderson à propos de Steelheart :

Steelheart is your latest published work. It’s a young adult novel that features a hero that is normal, without any extraordinary powers. Joel, the protagonist of The Rithmatist was also unable to use the magic of that world. What are the benefits of writing a story from the viewpoint of someone removed from such an important part of the setting and why did you choose to do this?

Basically this is me reacting against myself. The biggest benefit for me is that I get to try something different. Whenever I notice a theme—something I feel like I’m doing a little too often—I will say, “How can I approach this from a different perspective and try a different type of story?” I did this for two very different reasons in those two books.

Steelheart (cover)In The Rithmatist it helps cement Joel as an outsider. It helps that feeling of distance. He desperately wants to be in, but through a quirk of birth, he is not in, and that’s part of the story. For David in Steelheart, it’s less about being an outsider and more about the story being more interesting for me because it’s about a normal person fighting back against basically a supervillain, and what you do when you don’t have the power to bring someone like that down. That makes an interesting conflict for me. So I’m approaching it from two different directions, but it is me trying to explore something that I haven’t done as much.