"GL2" - читать интересную книгу автора (vol09)

returned. 'I'm talking about credibility. I don't like heroic
warriors, but I can bear stories about them. I believe they exist,
or could. I don't think space-ships do, or could. And anyway, if
you pretend that they do, and use them for space-journeys in the
flesh, they'll land you in space-ship sort of adventures. If you're
spaceship-minded and scientifictitious, or even if you let your
characters be so, it's likely enough that you'll find things of that
order in your new world, or only see sights that interest such
folk.'
'But that isn't true,' Frankley objected. 'It's not true of this
story of Ramer's.'
'It's generally true, all too ghastly true.' said Guildford. 'But

of course there is a way of escape: into inconsistency, discord.
Ramer takes that way, like Lindsay,(8) or Lewis, and the better
post-Lewis writers of this sort of thing. You can land on another
world in a space-ship and then drop that nonsense, if you've got
something better to do there than most of the earlier writers
had. But personally I dislike that acutely. It makes the scien-
tifictitious bunkum all the worse by contrast. Crystal torpedoes,
and "back-rays", and levers for full speed-ahead (faster than
light, mark you), are bad enough inside one of those hideous
magazines - Dead Sea fruit with gaudy rinds; but in, say,
A Voyage to Arcturus * they are simply shocking. All the more
so for being unnecessary. David Lindsay had at least two other
better methods up his sleeve: the seance connexion; or the
suggestion of the dark tower at the end. Thank goodness, there
was at any rate no return by crystal torpedo in that tale!'(9)
'But the trick in Out of the Silent Planet, getting the hero
kidnapped by space-ship villains, so as to explain how an
interesting man ever got inside one, was not bad,' said Frankley.
'And the stupid villainy of the space-ship folk was essential.
They behaved as such people would, and the plot depends on
that.'
'Not bad, I agree,' said Guildford. 'Still it was, as you say, a
trick. And not first rate, not if you want sheer literary credibility,
the pure thing, rather than an alloy with allegory and satire.
Ramer is not after any such Lewisite alloy; and I think his device
of letting an intelligent artist get into a contraption by accident,
not knowing what it is, is a mere trick. But what I really object
to, in any such tale, however tinged, is the pretence that these
contraptions could exist or function at all. They're indefinitely
less probable - as the carriers of living, undamaged, human
bodies and minds - than the wilder things in fairy-stories; but
they pretend to be probable on a more material mechanical
level. It's like having to take Heath-Robinsons seriously.'
'But you've got to have some kind of removal van,' said
Frankley, 'or else do without this kind of story. They may not be

(* This book had recently been rescued from oblivion by Jeremy's