"Bruce Sterling. Catscan {angl., new}" - читать интересную книгу автора

A horrifying statement, and one that people in happier countries would do
well to ponder. The implications of this literary conviction are, of
course, extreme. Lem's work is marked by unflinching extremities. He fights
through ideas with all the convulsive drive of a drowning man fighting for
air. Story structure, plot, human values, characterization, dramatic
tension, all are ruthlessly trudgeon-kicked aside.

In criticism, however, Lem has his breath, and can examine the trampled
flotsam with a cynical eye. American SF, he says, is hopelessly
compromised, because its narrative structure is trash: detective stories,
pulp thrillers, fairy-tales, bastardized myths. Such outworn and kitschy
devices are totally unsuited to the majestic scale of science fiction's
natural thematics, and reduce it to the cheap tricks of a vaudeville
conjurer.

Lem holds this in contempt, for he is not a man to find entertainment in
sideshow magic. Stanislaw Lem is not a good-time guy. Oddly, for a science
fiction writer, he seems to have very little interest in the intrinsically
weird. He shows no natural appetite for the arcane, the offbeat, the
outre.. He is colorblind to fantasy. This leads him to dismiss much of the
work of Borges, for example. Lem claims that "Borges' best stories are
constructed as tightly as mathematical proofs." This is a tautology of
taste, for, to Lem, mathematical proofs are the conditions to which the
"best" stories must necessarily aspire.

In a footnote to the Borges essay Lem makes the odd claim that "As soon as
nobody assents to it, a philosophy becomes automatically fantastic
literature." Lem's literature *is* philosophy; to veer from the path of
reason for the sake of mere sensation is fraudulent.

American SF, therefore, is a tissue of frauds, and its practicioners fools
at best, but mostly snakeoil salesmen. Lem's stern puritanism, however,
leaves him at sea when it comes to the work of Philip K. Dick: "A Visionary
Among the Charlatans." Lem's mind was clearly blown by reading Dick, and he
struggles to find some underlying weltanschauung that would reduce Dick's
ontological raving to a coherent floor-plan. It's a doomed effort, full of
condescension and confusion, like a ballet-master analyzing James Brown.

Fiction is written to charm, to entertain, to enlighten, to convey cultural
values, to analyze life and manners and morals and the nature of the human
heart. The stuff Stanislaw Lem writes, however, is created to burn mental
holes with pitiless coherent light. How can one do this and still produce a
product resembling "literature?" Lem tried novels. Novels, alas, look odd
without genuine characters in them. Then he hit on it: a stroke of genius.

The collections _A Perfect Vacuum_ and _Imaginary Magnitudes_ are Lem's
masterworks. The first contains book reviews, the second, introductions to
various learned tomes. The "books" discussed or reviewed do not actually
exist, and have archly humorous titles, like "Necrobes" by "Cezary