"Cory Doctorow - Eastern Standard Tribe" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dodd Christina)

about, but never what the story was. Stories are propaganda,
There are born assassins. Bred to kill, raised on cunning and
virii that slide past your critical immune system and insert
speed, they are the stuff of legend, remorseless and
themselves directly into your emotions. Kill them and cut them
unstoppable. There are born ballerinas, confectionery girls
open and they’re as naked as a nightclub in daylight.
whose parents subject them to rigors every bit as intense as the
tripwire and poison on which the assassins are reared. There
The theme. The first step in dissecting a story is euthanizing it:
are children born to practice medicine or law; children born to
“What is the theme of this story?”
serve their nations and die heroically in the noble tradition of
their forebears; children born to tread the boards or shred the
Let me kill my story before I start it, so that I can dissect it and
turf or leave smoking rubber on the racetrack.
understand it. The theme of this story is: “Would you rather be
smart or happy?”
Art’s earliest memory: a dream. He is stuck in the waiting
room of one of the innumerable doctors who attended him in
This is a work of propaganda. It’s a story about choosing
his infancy. He is perhaps three, and his attention span is
smarts over happiness. Except if I give the pencil a push: then
already as robust as it will ever be, and in his dream—which is
it’s a story about choosing happiness over smarts. It’s a
fast becoming a nightmare—he is bored silly.
morality play, and the first character is about to take the stage.
He’s a foil for the theme, so he’s drawn in simple lines. Here
The only adornment in the waiting room is an empty cylinder
he is:
that once held toy blocks. Its label colorfully illustrates the
blocks, which look like they’d be a hell of a lot of fun, if
someone hadn’t lost them all.

Near the cylinder is a trio of older children, infinitely
fascinating. They confer briefly, then do something to the
cylinder, and it unravels, extruding into the third dimension,
turning into a stack of blocks.
Cory Doctorow Eastern Standard Tribe 10




Aha! thinks Art, on waking. This is another piece of the secret work it into the thread of the sermon, but before he could go
knowledge that older people posses, the strange magic that is on, Art’s shrill little voice answered from within the
used to operate cars and elevators and shoelaces. congregation.

Art waits patiently over the next year for a grownup to show Amazingly, the six-year-old had managed to assimilate all of
him how the blocks-from-pictures trick works, but none ever Descartes’s fairly tricksy riddles in as long as it took to
does. Many other mysteries are revealed, each one more describe them, and then went on to use those same arguments