"Paul J. McAuley & Kim Newman - In Dreams" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

roll under the working title of Planet Rock (Don’t Stop). Being a cheap
bastard - not to mention a cheap, lazy bastard - my intention was to work
with existing stories, including Norman Spinrad’s The Big Flash’ (the
ultimate rock apocalypse story), J. G. Ballard’s ‘The Sound-Sweep’ (which
concerns itself with opera rather than rock, but in terms of the impact of the
kind of music technology which rock has traditionally embraced so
wholeheartedly), Samuel R. Delany’s ‘Time Considered as a Helix of
Semi-Precious Stones’ (whose protagonist is as-near-as-dammit a rock
star, though in an informal rather than formal sense), Lewis Shiner’s ‘Jeff
Beck’, Shiner and Bruce Sterling’s ‘Mozart in Mirrorshades’, Sterling’s ‘Don
Bangs’, Pat Cadigan’s ‘Pretty Boy Crossover’, and various others.

I abandoned the idea for a variety of excellent reasons: one being
that a third of the stories would have had to have come straight from
Sterling’s Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology and most of the rest
would have been by Howard Waldrop (what is it with these goddam
Texans, anyway?). Another that Paul J. McAuley and Kim Newman, not
being cheap lazy bastards, have actually gone ahead and done the thing
(with all-original stories, to boot) and here it is. All that remains for me to do
is to congratulate them (and the authors whom they have induced to step
forward and do the Martian Hop and the Planet Rock) on a good job
excellently done (bastards!); and to offer a few thoughts on the twisted
relationship between two art forms which have fascinated me since my
teens.

SF and rock and roll are both Big Fun because each is determinedly
and delightedly larger (not to mention louder and weirder) than life. The
electric boogie enables three, four or five suitably equipped humans (a
personnel in single figures, anyway) to produce a bigger noise than a jazz
big band or a symphony orchestra. Science fiction hauls the reader, in
Cordwainer Smith’s felicitous phrase, into the Up-and-Out’: how far up and
how far out is constrained only by the author’s imagination (prose fiction,
after all, permits its creator an unlimited special-effects budget).

Moreover, both rock and SF are bastard arts which, despite intense
parental disapproval, can boast both illustrious pedi-grees and extensive
prehistories. Rockers point proudly to their music’s roots in jazz, blues,
gospel and country music, just as SF is happy to cite its origins in the
undeniably respectable and impeccably literary works of Mary Shelley,
Jules Verne or H. G. Wells, all of whom were fortunate enough to have got
their best and most influential work done before the imaginative and
fantastic were evicted from the mainstream of European literature and
exiled to the warm, frowsy environment of juvenile fiction and the pulps.
Jazz eventually became accepted as an art music because even the most
devout Eurocentrics were forced to concede that considerable intelligence
was required in order to play it; country blues was undoubtedly a folk music
of immense historical value and emotional power, but R&B and rock and
roll were trashy commercial musics unfit for the attention of civilised adults.

Nevertheless, both underwent crucial mutations in the 1950s, when