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

demanded its full use within SF. And in _Worlds of
Wonder_, Silverberg does his level best lo convey the
basic mechanics. Definitions fly, helpful hints
abound. A story is "the working out of a conflict." A
story "has to be built around a pattern of
oppositions." Storytelling can be summed up in a
three-word formula: "purpose, passion, perception."
And on and on.
But where are we to find the craft of the
"something more"? What in hell *is* the "something
more"? "Ideas" hardly begins to describe it. Is it
"wonder"? Is it "transcendence"? Is it "visionary
drive," or "conceptual novelty," or even "cosmic
fear"? Here is Silverberg, at the very end of his
book:
"It was that exhilaration and excitement that
drew us to science fiction in the first place, almost
invariably when we were very young; it was for the
sake of that exhilaration and excitement that we took
up the writing of it, and it was to facilitate the
expression of our visions and fantasies that we
devoted ourselves with such zeal to the study of the
art and

craft of writing."
Very well put, but the dichotomy lurches up
again. The art and craft of writing *what*, exactly?
In this paragraph, the "visions and fantasies" briefly
seize the driver's seat of the Kessel Toyota. But they
soon dissipate into phantoms again. Because they are
so ill-defined, so mercurial, so desperately lacking
in basic conceptual soundness. They are our stock in
trade, our raison d'etre, and we still don't know what
to make of them.
_Worlds of Wonder_ may well be the best book
ever published about the craft of science fiction.
Silverberg works nobly, and he deserves great credit.
The unspoken pain that lies beneath the surface of his
book is something with which the genre has never
successfully come to terms. The argument is as fresh
today as it was in the days of _Science Wonder
Stories_.
This conflict goes very deep indeed. It is not a
problem confined to the craft of writing SF. It seems
to me to be a schism of the modern Western mindset, a
basic lack of cultural integration between what we
feel, and what we know. It is an inability to speak
naturally, with conviction from the heart, of the
things that Western rationality has taught us. This is
a profound problem, and the fact that science fiction