Starfish de Peter Watts

À paraitre le 09 septembre prochain, ce thriller SF de Peter Watts, Starfish, est traduit par Gilles Goullet.

Un huis-clos oppressant au fond des abysses, véritable thriller psychologique.

Peter Watts est né à Toronto au Canada où il vit toujours aujourd'hui. Biologiste marin de formation, il est aussi documentariste et écrivain. Il est l'auteur d'une dizaine de nouvelles et de cinq romans dont le dernier, Vision aveugle a été nominé dans tous les grands prix de SF. Un style, des obsessions sur l'humain d'aujourd'hui et une intelligence aiguë caractérisent les écrits de Peter Watts. Un auteur de SF à suivre de très près?

Et voici le résumé du livre en anglais :

Peter Watts's first novel explores the last mysterious place on earth--the floor of a deep sea rift. Channer Vent is a zone of freezing darkness that belongs to shellfish the size of boulders and crimson worms three meters long. It's the temporary home of the maintenance crew of a geothermal energy plant--a crew made up of the damaged and dysfunctional flotsam of an overpopulated near-future earth. The crew's reluctant leader, basket case Lenie Clarke, can barely survive in the upper world, but she quickly falls under the rift's spell, just as Watts's magical descriptions of it enchant the reader: "Steam never gets a chance to form at three hundred atmospheres, but thermal distortion turns the water into a column of writhing liquid prisms, hotter than molten glass." Watts is investigating monsters. Gigantic deep sea monsters, surgically-altered-from-human monsters, faceless jellied-brain computer monsters--which monsters are human, which are more than human, which are less? Watts keeps the story line stripped down to showcase the theme of dehumanization. The anonymous millions who live along the unstable shore of N'AmPac come under threat (a triggered earthquake, and perhaps a disaster that's slower but even more pitiless) from their own dehumanized creations. But Watts is less interested in whether Lenie can save the dry world as in whether she can save herself. In Starfish, Watts stretches the boundaries of humanity up, down, and sideways to see whether its dimensions reveal anything we'd be proud to be a part of. --Blaise Selby --

En ce qui me concerne, ça me fait baver...

Le site de l'éditeur : www.fleuvenoir.fr