"James Morrow - Veritas" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morrow James)

James Morrow

James Morrow (1947- ) is one of the leading literary satirists today, who
chooses to work in the science fiction and fantasy mode. He is particularly
notable for his willingness to take on large intellectual and metaphysical
challenges, and for his accomplished prose style. He has often, and with
some justice, been compared to Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. He is a moralist and an
allegorist. He has never been comfortable with the conventions and literary
habits of the SF field, and occasionally breaks them, sometimes to good
effect. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction says Morrow “has great
difficulty giving credence to the artifices of fiction. This may be the price
paid for passion and clarity of mind; and it may be a price worth paying.” His
major novels include Only Begotten Daughter{1990), in which God’s
daughter is born in New Jersey in the closing years of this century. Towing
Jehovah (1994), in which God is dead and his corpse, about the size of a
small city, is found floating in the Atlantic Ocean and must be towed to the
Antarctic to be preserved; and its sequel, Blameless in Abaddon (1996),
in which the corpse is sold.

“Veritas” is a satirical Utopia. Kathryn Cramer, in “Sincerity and
Doom,” her long essay on Morrow and science fiction, says, “Beyond
defrocking Utopia, the story hits you in the face with the uncomfortable
relationship between Art (particularly fiction) and the Lie.” She also
suggests that this story may be in opposition to Orson Scott Card’s popular
Ender series of SF novels, which aspire to a Utopia in which everyone tells
the truth. Morrow address the question: Will the truth set you free?

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VERITAS


P
igs have wings…

Rats chase cats…

Snow is hot…
 Even now the old lies ring through the charred interior of my skull. I
cannot speak them. I shall never be able to speak them - not without being
dropped from here to hell in a bucket of pain. But they still inhabit me, just
as they did on that momentous day when the city began to fall.

Grass is purple…

Two and two make five…

I awoke aggressively that morning, tearing the blankets away as if
they were all that stood between myself and total alertness. Yawning