"Bruce Sterling - Updike's Version" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

to some paragon of science fiction writing.
Unfortunately no such paladin offers himself, so we'll
have to make do with a composite.
What qualities make a great science fiction
writer? Let's look at it objectively, putting aside
all that comfortable bullshit about the virtues
authors are supposed to have. Let's look at the
science fiction writer as he is.
Modern culture, for instance. Our SF paladin is
not even sure it exists, except as a vaguely
oppressive force he's evaded since childhood. He lives
in his own one-man splinter culture, and has ever
since that crucial time in childhood--when he was sick
in bed for two years, or was held captive in the
Japanese prison camp, or lived in the Comoros Islands
with monstrous parents who were nuts on anthropology
or astronomy or Trotsky or religion.
He's pretty much okay now, though, our science
fiction author. He can feed himself and sign checks,
and he makes occasional supply trips into the cultural
anchorage of SF fandom, where he refreshes his soul by
looking at people far worse off than he is. But he
dresses funny, and mumbles to himself in the grocery
line.
While standing there, he doesn't listen to the
other folks and make surreptitious authorly notes
about dialogue. Far from it: he's too full of unholy
fire to pay much attention to mere human beings. And
anyway, his characters generally talk about stuff like
neutrinos or Taoism.
His eyes are glazed, cut off at the optic nerve
while he watches brain-movies. Too many nights in too
many cheap con hotels have blunted his sense of
aesthetics; his characters live in geodomes or
efficiencies or yurts. They wear one-piece jumpsuits
because jumpsuits make people one monotonous color
from throat to foot, which allows our attention to
return to the neutrinos--of which, incidentally,
ninety percent of the universe consists, so that the
entire visible world of matter is a mere *froth*, if
we

only knew.
But he's learned his craft, our science fiction
paladin. The real nutcases don't have enough mental
horsepower to go where he's gone. He works hard and he
thinks hard and he knows what he's doing. He's read
Kuttner and Kornbluth and Blish and Knight, and he
knows how to Develop an Idea entertainingly and
rigorously, and how to keep pages turning meanwhile,