"Mike Resnick & David Gerrold - Jellyfish" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

He paced for awhile, ate some noodles from a Styrofoam cup, paced
some more, and realized that what he hated the most was pretension.

Science fiction was a gutter literature, the bas-tard child of Thirties-era
pulp magazines and Saturday matinee serials. The postwar era had
infected more than a few authors with delusions of relevance. They started
showing off for each other. It evolved inevitably to a community of
cancerous self-indulgence and an annual cycle of tawdry cer-emonies
where people in blue jeans handed each other awards. As opposed to the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, where people in tuxedos
handed each other awards. And every time, the winners would stand up and
talk about the higher aspirations of writing—to seek out new worlds and all
that shit and what does it mean to be a human being?

No, decided Filk.

The purpose of science fiction is not out there. It’s down here. In the
gut. It’s about naming the nameless horrors. All that other crap was just
wallpaper. This thing we really do at the type-writer, at the keyboard, or even
with pad and pencil—it’s about giving voice to all that malignant malevolent
festering stuff that lurks in the under-neath and mutters, like the undigested
detritus of last night’s falafel, making its presence known with
uncomfortable rumblings and occasional bad smells. Forget about the top
of tomorrow. This is about the bottom of today and the nightmares that
creep out when you stop pasting illusions all over everything like
bunny-rabbit wallpaper in a slaughterhouse.

Under all those self-indulgent euphemisms and sick civility were the
flashing teeth and claws of bloody truth, violent, unforgiving,
heart-pounding, adrenaline-flushed, enraged, muscle-tautening, scraped
and scarred, the unspeakable need to battle and rage and conquer and
mate and fill oneself with raw organic sensation, all those turbulent storms
that we politely call emotion—all the cumulative capacity for violence of a
million years of DNA scrabbling to assemble itself into ever-more
aggressive combinations, each one more cunning than the last, so it can
repeat the process over and over again, each time in a more ferocious
form.

That’s all it was, all it ever would be, and everything else was
pretension. And the best that any human being could ever hope to achieve
wasn’t escape, but merely respite from the relentless struggle. That’s what
was under all that crap all those people kept shilling. Vision, my fat flabby
white ass, Filk thought. It’s all about the next big paycheck. That’s what
we’ve transmuted the killing field into—a banquet. Instead of gutting one’s
enemies with stainless steel, you do it with words, leaving them smiling and
applauding while you walk up to the podi-um to grab the Lucite, and then
you return to the arena to do it all again in time for next year’s phony
potlatch.

Of course.