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

and by Christ those are no easy things. So there, Mr.
John Updike with your highflown talk of aht and
beautieh. That may be okay for you Ivy League pinky-
lifters with your sissy bemoaning about the Crisis of
Culture . . . As if there was going to be a culture
after the millennial advent of (Biotech) (Cybernetics)
(Space Travel) (Robots) (Atomic Energy) (General
Semantics) (Dean Drive) (Dianetics) . . .
So--there's the difference. It exists, for
better or worse. None of this is lost on John Updike.
He knows about science fiction, not a hell of a lot,
but probably vastly more than most science fiction
writers know about John Updike. He recognizes that it
requires specialized expertise to write good SF, and
that there are vast rustling crowds of us on the other
side of the cultural spacewarp, writing for Ace Books
and _Amazing Stories_. Updike reads Vonnegut and Le
Guin and Calvino and Lem and Wells and Borges, and
would probably read anybody else whose prose didn't
cause him physical pain. And from this reading, he
knows that the worldview is different in SFville . . .
that writers think literature, and that SF writers
think SF.
And he knows, too, that it's not T.S. Eliot's
world any more, if indeed it ever was T.S. Eliot's
world. He knows we live in a world that loves to think
SF, and has thought SF ever since Hiroshima, which was
the ne plus ultra of Millennial Technological Advents,
which really and truly did change the world forever.
So Updike has rolled up his pinstriped sleeves
and bent his formidable intelligence in our direction,
and lo we have a science fiction novel, _Roger's
Version_ by John Updike.


Of course it's not *called* a science fiction
novel. Updike has seen Le Guin and Lem and Vonnegut
crawl through the spacewarp into his world. He's seen
them wriggle out, somehow, barely, gasping and
stinking of rocket fuel. Updike has no reason to place
himself in a position they went to great pains to
escape. But _Roger's Version_ does feature a computer
on its cover, if not a rocketship or a babe in a
bubble helmet, and by heaven it is a science fiction
novel--and a very good one.
_Roger's Version_ is Updike's version of what SF
should be on about. It deals with SF's native
conceptual underpinnings: the impact of technology on
society. The book is about technolatry, about
millennial visionary thinking. This is SF-think as