28 de fevereiro de 2013

Lois McMaster Bujold: There’s no reason to believe that we will ever have cheap, easy interstellar travel

A "Lightspeed Magazine" publicou há dias um excerto da entrevista concedida por Lois McMaster Bujold em Dezembro último ao podcast Geek's Guide to the Galaxy da "Wired". Bujold é uma das autoras mais premiadas da ficção científica - venceu quatro prémios Hugo na categoria de "Best Novel", algo que apenas Robert A. Heinlein conseguiu. O seu mais recente livro de ficção científica, Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, foi publicado no ano passado e alargou um pouco mais a já longa Vorkosigan Saga

Na entrevista, Lois McMaster Bujold fala da entrada do seu último livro na lista de best sellers do "New York Times", das personagens da Vorkosigan Saga, do carácter premonitório da ficção científica, do mercado editorial e de livros em geral. Dois excertos: 


So your new book is called Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance. You want to tell us about that?
This is book fourteen—depending on how you count it, or sixteen—in the Vorkosigan Series, and it concerns the adventures of Ivan Vorpatril, the titular character. He’s been a long-running character in the series. He got his start back in The Warrior’s Apprentice, which was published in 1986. The series and the characters have grown pretty much in real time. He’s now 35 in this book. I guess the mode of the book is the easiest to describe—it’s a romantic comedy and caper novel.

(...)

To what extent do you think the future depicted in the Vorkosigan Saga might actually come true?
In bits and pieces, I think it will. The space travel part I think is entirely bogus at this time. There’s no reason to believe that we will ever have cheap, easy interstellar travel. Other parts of it—usually the parts that I concentrate my plots on—are more realistic: the biology, the biotechnology, the genetics, and the genetic engineering, they’re more grounded. And I’m also very interested in the impact of biotechnology on the way people could live. The most obvious ongoing thing being the uterine replicator, the idea of extra-uterine gestation of human beings—and anything else you wanted to do with it—which is a technology that is perfectly possible and will come.

It’s an interesting technology because it totally changes women’s lives, and yet doesn’t make that much difference to guys, which is why I think it doesn’t turn up in science fiction written by men very much. Although the first place I ran across it was in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which was written and published in the early 1930s. Huxley used the idea as a metaphor for the British class system, as near as I remember. It’s been a long time since I reread that book. But my exploration of technologies has always been how many things can I do with it, not what is the most dire thing I can do with it.

A entrevista pode ser lida na "Lightspeed Magazine" e o podcast pode ser ouvido na página do Geek's Guide to the Galaxy, na "Wired".


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