"Agberg Ideology, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

and stagger, awed and shaken, into a bewildering new
world of ideas and images, which is exactly the place
you've been hoping to find all your life."
If this paragraph speaks to your very soul with
the tongue of angels, then you need this anthology.
Buy it immediately, read it carefully. It's full of
home truths you won't find anywhere else.
This book is Silverberg's vicarious gift to his
younger self, the teenager described in his
autobiographical introduction: an itchy, over-bright
kid, filled with the feverish conviction that to
become a Science Fiction Writer must surely be the
moral pinnacle of the human condition.
And Silverberg knows very well that the kids are
still out there, and that the virus still spreads. He
can feel their hot little hands reaching out
plaintively in the dark. And he's willing, with a very
genuine magnanimity, to help these sufferers out. Just
as he himself was helped by an earlier SF generation,
by Mr. Kornbluth, and Mr. Knight, and Mr. and Mrs.
Kuttner, and all those other rad folks with names full
of consonants.
Silverberg explains his motives clearly, early
on. Then he discusses his qualifications to teach the
SF craft. He mentions his many awards, his fine
reviews, his length of service in the SF field, and,
especially, his success at earning a living. It's a
very down-home, pragmatic argument, with an aw-shucks,
workin'-guy, just-folks attitude very typical of the
American SF milieu. Silverberg doesn't claim superior
knowledge of writerly principle (as he might well). He
doesn't openly pose as a theorist or ideologue, but as
a modest craftsman, offering rules of thumb.
I certainly don't scorn this offer, but I do
wonder at it. Such modesty may well seem laudable, but
its unspoken implications are unsettling. It seems to
show an unwillingness to tackle SF's basic roots, to
est

ablish a solid conceptual grounding. SF remains
pitchforked mercury, jelly nailed to a tree; there are
ways to strain a living out of this ichor, but very
few solid islands of theory.
Silverberg's proffered definition of science
fiction shows the gooeyness immediately. The
definition is rather long, and comes in four points:

1. An underlying speculative concept,
systematically developed in a way that amounts to an
exploration of the consequences of allowing such a