"Bruce Sterling - Slipstream (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

contemporary Soviet Union; the sprawling possessor of
a dream that failed. Science fiction's official dogma,
which almos

t everybody ignores, is based on attitudes
toward science and technology which are bankrupt and
increasingly divorced from any kind of reality. "Hard-
SF," the genre's ideological core, is a joke today; in
terms of the social realities of high-tech post-
industrialism, it's about as relevant as hard-
Leninism.
Many of the best new SF writers seem openly
ashamed of their backward Skiffy nationality. "Ask not
what you can do for science fiction--ask how you can
edge away from it and still get paid there."
A blithely stateless cosmopolitanism is the
order of the day, even for an accredited Clarion grad
like Pat Murphy: "I'm not going to bother what camp
things fall into," she declares in a recent _Locus_
interview. "I'm going to write the book I want and see
what happens . . . If the markets run together, I
leave it to the critics." For Murphy, genre is a dead
issue, and she serenely wills the trash-mountain to
come to Mohammed.
And one has to sympathize. At one time, in its
clumsy way, Science Fiction offered some kind of
coherent social vision. SF may have been gaudy and
naive, and possessed by half-baked fantasies of power
and wish-fulfillment, but at least SF spoke a
contemporary language. Science Fiction did the job of
describing, in some eldritch way, what was actually
*happening*, at least in the popular imagination.
Maybe it wasn't for everybody, but if you were a
bright, unfastidious sort, you could read SF and feel,
in some satisfying and deeply unconscious way, that
you'd been given a real grip on the chrome-plated
handles of the Atomic Age.
But *now* look at it. Consider the repulsive
ghastliness of the SF category's Lovecraftian
inbreeding. People retched in the 60s when De Camp and
Carter skinned the corpse of Robert E. Howard for its
hide and tallow, but nowadays necrophilia is run on an
industrial basis. Shared-world anthologies. Braided

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meganovels. Role-playing tie-ins. Sharecropping books
written by pip-squeaks under the blazoned name of