La question a été posée a un auteur américain, Alexei Panshin, par le site sfsignal. Il a publié plusieurs romans et glané au passage deux prix Hugo.

Voici sa réponse.


"CT: In your opinion, how has science fiction changed, especially with the emergence of the Internet, eBooks, etc.?

AP: To the extent that science fiction today is imitative, repetitious and unoriginal, it's no longer doing the work it once did for young readers, and young readers are no longer reading it the way they formerly did. Science fiction conventions these days seem to be mostly attended by older folks.

At the same time, science fiction magazines have all but disappeared and conventional consignment book publishing is failing along with newspapers and CD sales.

Science fiction as it used to be is dying. On the other hand, the function of SF in the larger sense to tell stories to young contrarians about events and conditions beyond our present limitations remains.

If The World Beyond the Hill has a message for a contemporary audience, it's to say that this is the way things were done the last time. And -- as the song has it -- we need to do once again what has never been done before.

New forms of publication are in order. POD and ebooks may be intimations of that. But we also need new expressions of SF as different from science-fiction-as-it-has-been as science fiction was from the utopian SF that came before it."

(Une info transmise par Ugo Bellagamba)