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

examined by a classic devotee of lit-think.
It's all there, quite upfront and nakedly
science fictional. It puzzles mainstream commentators.
"It's as though Updike had challenged himself to
convert into the flow of his novel the most resistant
stuff he could think of," marvels the _Christian
Science Monitor_, alarmed to find a Real Novel that
actually deals straightforwardly with real ideas. "The
aggressiveness of Updike's imagination is often a
marvel," says _People_, a mag whose utter lack of
imagination is probably its premier selling point.
And look at this list of author's credits: Fred
Hoyle, Martin Gardner, Gerald Feinberg, Robert
Jastrow. Don't tell me Updike's taken the *science*
seriously. But he has--he's not the man to deny the
devil his due, especially after writing _Witches of
Eastwick_, which would have been called a fantasy
novel if it had been written badly by a nobody.
But enough of this high-flown abstraction--let's
get to grips with the book. There's these two guys,
see. There's Roger Lambert, a middle-aged professor of
theology, a white-wine-sipping adultery-contemplating
intellectual New Englander who probably isn't eighty
light-years removed from John Updike. Roger's a nasty
piece of business, mostly, lecherous, dishonest and
petty

-minded, and obsessed with a kind of free-
floating Hawthornian Protestant guilt that has been
passed down for twenty generations up Boston way and
hasn't gotten a bit more specific in the meantime.
And then there's Roger Lambert's antagonist,
Dale Kohler. Dale's a young computer hacker with
pimples and an obnoxious cocksure attitude. If Dale
were just a little more hip about it, he'd be a
cyberpunk, but for thematic reasons Updike chose to
make Dale a born-again Christian. We never really
believe this, though, because Dale almost never talks
Jesus. He talks AND-OR circuits, and megabytes, and
Mandelbrot sets, with all the techspeak fluency Updike
can manage, which is considerable. Dale talks God on a
microchip, technological transcendence, and he was
last seen in Greg Bear's _Blood Music_ where his name
was different but his motive and character were
identical. Dale is a type. Not just a science
fictional type, but the type that *creates* science
fiction, who talks God for the same reason Philip K.
Dick talked God. Because it comes with the territory.
Oh yeah, and then we've got some women. They
don't amount to much. They're not people, exactly.