victoria_vn: переводы

→What I did in creating the Orthogonal universe was make a single alteration in the basement of that structure, replacing the three dimensions of space and one of time with four essentially interchangeable dimensions. Mathematicians call this the “signature” of the geometry. Because we know how the usual “3+1” signature determines so much of the physics we’re familiar with, I could retrace all the standard connections and adapt them to the new signature. For example, if there is no real difference between space and time, there can’t be a special velocity built into the vacuum, any more than there is a “special direction” in empty space. That’s why there is no constant speed of light in the Orthogonal universe. And as I looked at the ramifications in more detail, all sorts of strange and wonderful things emerged. Perhaps the most bizarre is that, although light still carries energy, it comes with an opposite sign to kinetic energy or chemical energy, which means that plants can make food by emitting light rather than absorbing it.

→Greg Egan: Fashions in sub-genres ebb and flow, and there’s the perennial phenomenon of waves of authors and commentators bursting on stage, announcing that they’ve stormed the citadel of the despised old guard, and demanding to be fêted as the saviours of the genre. But in terms of publishing itself, I’d say the slide towards e-books is a trend that is probably not going to be undone. I recently brought out my own e-book editions of all of my earlier books that had gone out of print in the US, which was an interesting exercise. I spent a couple of months creating a special multimedia version of Diaspora for the iPad, but the ordinary, plain-text version for the Kindle outsold it about twenty-to-one, even though both versions were priced identically. So at least for the foreseeable future, I’ll probably keep doing what I’ve been doing since the late 90s, which is to put all the interactive bells and whistles on my web site rather than trying to incorporate them into the books themselves — even when the books are purely digital.

→Greg Egan: I used to have a strong preference for first-person writing, and one of my novels,Quarantine, was even written in first-person, present tense. There were good reasons for that, but it might be a spoiler to reveal them. Some people are positively allergic to first-person and claim it’s psychologically unrealistic or interferes with suspension of disbelief, but I don’t accept either position: there are times when we really do feel as if we’re narrating our own lives moment by moment, but there are also cases when this is simply the most powerful way to frame the events of a story, even if it’s not how the characters were likely to have experienced them at the time.

→Greg Egan: The real trick is to take it for granted that the reader is intelligent, engaged and curious, and would be bitterly disappointed if a story contained an amazing idea but then dumbed it down or glossed over the details. The only reason humans have anything close to an understanding of who and what we are, and the only reason we have a substantial intellectual and material culture, is because we’re capable of handling the details. When I write about science, real or imaginary, it’s through the eyes of characters who understand that discovering how their universe works is by far the most important story in history.

→Q: You are known for writing extremely dense hard science novels and short stories. Writing wise, what’s the trick to including so much technical information into the prose without losing the reader?

→I spent about six months working through the consequences for different phenomena, tracing the effects on electromagnetism, thermodynamics, general relativity and quantum mechanics. But once you reach the level of complex chemistry and biology, even in our own universe it takes teams of specialists with supercomputers to make predictions grounded in fundamental physics, so dealing with those things in the Orthogonal universe was a matter of developing an intuitive sense of what was possible under the new rules.

→Q: As part of the Modern Masters of Science Fiction series, Karen Burnham recently authored a study of your career. Do you see yourself as a Master of Science Fiction? What do you think of Karen’s book?

→Q: What authors inspired you to start writing, or more specifically, to write science fiction?

→Q: How has your own writing evolved over your career? Have you found yourself drawn towards different story structures, character types, philosophies, or writing styles over the years?

→Q: You’ve been publishing science fiction for over 30 years, with your first novel, An Unusual Angle, being published in 1983. What changes have you seen in the science fiction publishing community over the last thirty years?

→Greg Egan: I’ve been writing a few short stories and thinking about the next novel, but I haven’t committed myself to a definite plan yet.