Des nouvelles de Charles Stross (encore)

[jerome]

Charles Stross a évoqué dans une nouvelle interview sa série des Princes Marchands

Voici une de ses réponses :

"SM : In your Merchant Princes series you have engaged with a number of ideas from development economics but we’ve yet to see a single magical sword or talking horse. Do you still think of that series as being fantasy or are you doing something similar to what MacLeod and Grimwood did with The Execution Channel and End of the World Blues, namely writing SF under the trappings of a more commercially successful genre?

CS : It’s definitely SF, as book #4, The Merchants’ War, should make obvious when it comes out in November. In fact, it’s been based on a science fictional premise all along — just one that wasn’t made obvious — and the methods of its heroine, Miriam Beckstein, are those of a rationalist technocrat. For a variety of reasons (more concerned with marketing than anything else) Tor packaged the books as fantasy at the outset, but if you want a historic genre reference point, they’ve got more in common with H. Beam Piper’s Paratime books than with, say, Zelazny’s Amber.

In retrospect, the confusion is understandable. In the first book, The Family Trade (published in two volumes as The Family Trade and The Hidden Family) I introduced a clan of somewhat mediaeval world-walkers, a family who could travel between alternate worlds. They come from a marcher kingdom offshoot of a highly developed mediaevalesque society, in a time line where Judaism went extinct circa 200BC and Christianity and Islam never developed; the castles and horses and swords are the furnishings of a primitive society, not signifiers of fantasy. Nevertheless, broad hints are dropped quite early on — their ability is linked to a recessive gene, after all, and their political and economic predicament mirrors the third world development traps that have become all too familiar today.

I don’t want to give away too much about where the series is heading, but if you approach it expecting a traditional fantasy saga you’re going to get a big surprise …"

Toute l'interview est ici : http://scalpel-magazine.com/blog/2007/0 ... ie-stross/