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

deals with it so directly, is a sign of science
fiction's cultural importance.
We have no guarantee that this conflict will
*ever* be resolved. It may not be resolvable. SF
writers have begun careers, succeeded greatly, grown
old and honored, and died in the shadow of this
dissonance. We may forever have SF "stories" whose
narrative structure is buboed with expository lumps.
We may always have escapist pulp adventures that avoid
true imagination, substituting the bogus exoticism
that Blish defined as "calling a rabbit a `smeerp.'"
We may even have beautifully written, deeply
moving tales of classic human conflict--with only a
reluctant dab of genre flavor. Or we may have the
opposite: the legacy of Stapledon, Gernsback, and Lem,
those non-stories bereft of

emotional impact and human
interest, the constructions Silverberg rightly calls
"vignettes" and "reports."
I don't see any stories in _Worlds of Wonder_
that resolve this dichotomy. They're swell stories,
and they deliver the genre payoff in full. But many of
them contradict Silverberg's most basic assertions
about "storytelling." "Four in One" by Damon Knight is
a political parable whose hero is a rock-ribbed
Competent Man whose reactions are utterly nonhuman.
"Fondly Fahrenheit" by Alfred Bester is a one-shot
tour-de-force dependent on weird grammatical
manipulation. "Hothouse" by Brian Aldiss is a
visionary picaresque with almost no conventional
structure. "The New Prime" by Jack Vance is six
jampacked alien vignettes very loosely stitched
together. "Day Million" showcases Frederik Pohl
bluntly haranguing his readers. It's as if Silverberg
picked these stories deliberately to demonstrate a
deep distrust of his own advice.
But to learn to tell "good stories" is excellent
advice for any kind of writer, isn't it? Well-
constructed "stories" will certainly sell in science
fiction. They will win awards, and bring whatever fame
and wealth is locally available. Silverberg knows this
is true. His own career proves it. His work possesses
great technical facility. He writes stories with
compelling opening hooks, with no extraneous detail,
with paragraphs that mesh, with dialogue that advances
the plot, with neatly balanced beginnings, middles and
ends.
And yet, this ability has not been a total Royal
Road to success for him. Tactfully perhaps, but rather