"Paul Di Filippo - It's All Goodkind" - читать интересную книгу автора (Di Filippo Paul)

It’s All Goodkind
by Paul Di Filippo

“[Terry] Goodkind’s books are popular in part because, in a complicated world, he
boils things down to stark contrasts—good is good, evil is evil, and heroes are
studly, hyper-rational armies of one.... In a speech he delivered a few years ago at a
bookstore in Virginia ... he jumped all over an unnamed novel (and the critic who
praised it) because it featured a protagonist involved in a drug deal in Southeast
Asia. ‘The author and the reviewer are saying that a drug dealer is a normative
value,’ Goodkind said. ‘That is assigning value to the destruction of life. I instead
write about people being the best they can be.’“

—Dwight Garner, “Inside the List,” The New York Times, August 6, 2006.
****
I was dreading my appointment with Commissioner Goodkine, but there was
simply no avoiding it. If I wanted my novel published, the manuscript would have to
clear the Federal Board of Literary Normative Values. And the fact that the
Commissioner himself had demanded a meeting with me, I believed, did not bode
well.
So I dressed as conservatively as possible, affixing to the bosom of my suit
jacket a cheap tin lapel pin that represented the image of the FBLNV’s “Sword of
Truth” (a broad Crusader’s blade gripped by a studly hand and slicing off a
turbaned heathen’s head). Then I stuffed my manuscript in a battered satchel and
headed downtown.
The fat, heavy manuscript dragged my arm down and I grew even more
depressed, if that were possible. I had never written overstuffed books this big, back
before the establishment of the FBLNV. I had been something of a miniaturist, a
composer of slim modern fables and surreal allegories. But such forms were
proscribed nowadays, and the only acceptable fictions were uplifting paeans to
man’s nobility.
The FBLNV was housed in a magnificent classical-style marble structure only
a few years old. Occupying an entire square city block, it boasted enormous
domineering columns at its portico. Inscribed on the lintel above the entrance was
the First Rule of the FBLNV, adapted from Goodkine’s own fiction, where it had
been known as “Wizard’s First Rule.”
PEOPLE ARE STUPID.
I stared at the inscription, shaking my head in ironic bemusement. Then I
realized that several video cameras were aimed at me, and that ironic bemusement
was not an approved reaction to Federal institutions. So I straightened my shoulders
and went inside.
 Displaying the official letter demanding my presence to several functionaries
quickly earned me passage straight through the vast warren of busy clerks vetting the
recreational prose of the nation and into the anteroom of Commissioner Goodkine’s
office. I sat alone there in a fairly comfortable chair, heavy satchel in my lap, with
nothing to look at but a large wall plaque bearing the other nine Rules of the FBLNV,
also borrowed from Goodkine’s enormous “moral and philosophical” saga. I
admired them for one reason: they packed more sententious twaddle into fewer
words than any prose I had ever seen.
After half an hour, the inner door to the Commissioner’s sanctum swung
soundlessly open of its own accord. The manly and assured albeit somewhat Mister