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

teenagers were invented (or, to be more accu-rate, invented themselves)
and proudly demonstrated that first tenet of capitalist philosophy: I spend,
therefore I am. The new species speedily adapted two existing genres for
their own specialised needs: rhythm-and-blues (the pop lingua franca of
black America) metamorphosed into rock and roll under the joint aegis of
Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard and countless others and the SF
and horror movie underwent similar transformations at the hands of Roger
Corman and the American-International crew. As John Cooper Clarke put it
twenty-odd (very odd) years later, ‘I was a teenage werewolf - or was I?’
The connection was made. Both rock and SF were tickets to elsewhere
(not to mention elsewhen); both were magical highways leading out of the
suburbs to new locations where things actually hap-pened. To the existing
practitioners of SF (particularly those tweedy types who hated aeroplanes
and refused to have a television set or, later, a computer in the house), rock
may simply have been another manifestation of the new barba-rism; to
many kids of the ‘fifties and ‘sixties (including your editors, the present
writer and the bulk of the contributors to this anthology) the two are
inextricably linked, both manifestations of that ‘intense adolescent
exploration’ to which Marc Laidlaw alludes in ‘Wunderkindergarten’.

The blues and jazz in which rock is rooted began as performance
musics capable of sustaining extended improvis-ations; but as recorded
musics both were initially forced to abide by the technological restrictions
imposed by the three-minutes-maximum-per-side duration of the 78rpm
single record. The legends which form the basis of all modern fantastic
literature were great sprawling sagas which went on, like, forever,
duuuuuude; but modem SF has its origins in short fiction. The kind of
elephantiasis which brings us concept double albums and ‘major’ trilogies
(or, worse still, linked suites of trilogies) can be interpreted, according to
taste, as either terminal decadence or as definitive proof of the form’s
maturity. The end results can be either mind-numbing pap or a
mind-expanding stimulus; a ‘smart drug’ or - like a musical equivalent of
crack or barbiturates - a dumb drug. But SF and rock and roll are both
drugs, after all, and they’re both still legal.

So here you’ll find the kid who wanted to kill Mick Jagger and the
derelict who was John Lennon. It’s interesting that so many of the SF
writers who have used rock as a subject betray their origins as ‘fifties and
‘sixties kids by harking back to Lennon, Elvis and other iconic myth-figures
of their youth when we are, after all, living in an era when the mainstream
pop of the moment is itself science fiction. Ballard’s Sound-Sweep would
be more at home in the world of sequencers, samples and robot drummers
than would Delany’s raggedy-ass cosmic poet; silvery little CDs - sterile,
digital, laser-read gizmos that they are - are so much more SF than black
vinyl discs. But then, as Bayley and Watson remind us, part of SF’s function
is sometimes to use the distant future or a far-flung planet or a hidden
dimension as a platform from which to re-examine our present or recent
past, or to reawaken the wonderful from its slumbering concealment in the
commonplace.