Featured Interview With Sébastien Acacia
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I’m 44 years old and I grew up in the south of France, in the Pyrenees at the Spanish border in the medieval town of Foix, where I learned the taste and respect for nature. I live in the millennial city of Besançon, whose first foundations date back to the second century BC. I have a 6-year-old boy with a rare genetic disorder and autism. I have been leading technology and media production companies for more than 20 years before deciding to dedicate my life to my son who needs a lot of attention, but also to writing. I studied at the School of Fine Arts in Besançon with a specialization in history of ancient civilizations, as well as cultural anthropology at the PUC, Faculty of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil where I lived 12 years. I am passionate about the religious phenomenon as a whole, although I am a secularist. As far back as I can remember, I began to wonder about these issues at the age of seven. Since then, I have never stopped studying the major religious currents, sectarian phenomena and existing belief structures in the world. I am a great traveler, I lived in 3 countries, visited about thirty others and worked in a dozen. I firmly believe that traveling is the best way to marvel and understand humanity in all that is good and bad.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I remember creating my first comic story at the age of four. A story of cowboys and indians. I still remember the coarse brown adhesive I used to bind pages that were themselves slightly yellowed. Since then, I have never stopped imagining characters, situations, stories. at the age of 8, my parents had the great idea to buy a 30-volume encyclopedia from Larousse. I dived in without moderation. I read a lot to satisfy my curiosity about the world. I was a great comic book reader, and children’s science fiction novels. Later, I embarked on a career as a creator of educational CD-Roms and video games as a writer and designer. I then created my own production company and wrote and directed several series for children and for education. When Anthony was diagnosed with a genetic disease and I realized that my life as an entrepreneur would not be sustainable, I decided to make my old dream of writing sci-fi novels. I had written many synopsys since my teenage years. But, writing is a full-time job and I did not have that time. That’s when I got involved in the Ninth Planet trilogy.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I am a fan of science fiction since always. However, I read a lot of geopolitical, sociological, historical, theological or philosophical essays.
My favorite authors are:
Isaac Asimov, Kim Stanley Robinson, Poul Anderson, or Michael Crichton.
Asimov is my main source of inspiration in my writing.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
In fact, one day while listening to the radio in my car, I heard information about the discovery, at least mathematically, of a ninth planet in our solar system. When I got home, it made me feel like chocolate, I opened Word on my computer and wrote a synopsis based on this surprising information. And then, I had taken a course on novel writing a few years ago. This one said: do not ask yourself a question, if you want to write, start, improvise! That’s exactly what I did a few days later. I have engaged body and soul in this story. It took me a year and a half to write the 1200 pages of the Ninth Planet trilogy. Speaking in terms of page is also rather unclear on the work that this represents. The trilogy is about 300,000 words. It was a real challenge. On the one hand, I had to go back to the study of religions, and mainly in the theory of ancient astronauts, Islam, sectarian phenomena, on the other hand, I had to study the basics of the astrophysics. To do this, I enrolled in a MOOC astrophysics online. In total, Volume 1 of the trilogy took me about 400 hours of writing for 500 hours of documentary research. I validated the scientific information with an astrophysicist (who also made me change the end of volume 1) and a radio astronomer, because I wanted the data to be consistent with reality, especially since the story begins in 2020 and ends in 2043 in volume 3. Volume 2 and volume 3 were hardly faster to write. I called a very talented illustrator friend for the covers and we designed them together to make you want to dive into the story.
About the characters in the story, I wanted them to be complex and above all not Manichean. They evolve over the course of history, ask questions. I did not want to develop caricature characters, good ones and bad guys. This is reflected in the story. The characters evolve over the events. They are imperfect, and all do good and bad things. All defend their interests to a lesser extent. By the way, I wanted the story to unfold in more places of the world. In France, Germany, Japan, but in large part in the United States and Egypt. It was important that the characters come from different cultures and that this partly conditions their behavior and their respective visions of the world.
This feeds the narrative and it gives body and credibility to the story. Critics of some 2000 French readers also report this aspect very positively. The average of the notes of the 3 volumes on Amazon is close to the 4.8 stars. It’s very encouraging and, although the novel I’m working on at the moment is not science fiction, I’m starting in June in a post-cyberpunk dystopia based on a totalitarian religious order.
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Sébastien Acacia Facebook Page
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