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

Strzybisz." But here Lem has found literary structures - not "stories" -
but assemblages of prose, familiar and comfortable to the reader.

Of course, it takes a certain aridity of taste to read a book composed of
"introductions," traditionally a kind of flaky appetizer before the main
course. But it's worth it for the author's sense of freedom, his manifest
delight in finally ridding himself of that thorny fictive thicket that
stands between him and his Grail. These are charming pieces, witty,
ingenious, highly thought-provoking, utterly devoid of human interest.
People will be reading these for decades to come. Not because they work as
fiction, but because their form follows function with the sinister elegance
of an automatic rifle.

Here Lem has finessed an irrevocable choice. It is a choice every science
fiction writer faces. Is the writer to write Real Novels which "only happen
to be" science fiction - or create knobby and irreducible SF artifacts
which are not true "stories," but visionary texts? The argument in favor of
the first course is that Real Readers, i.e. mainstream ones, refuse to
notice the nakedly science-fictional. How Lem must chuckle as he collects
his lavish blurbs from _Time_ and _Newsweek_ (not to mention an income
ranking as one of poor wretched Poland's best sources of foreign exchange)
. By disguising his work as the haute-lit exudations of a critic, he has
out-conjured the Yankee conjurers, had his cake and eaten it publicly, in
the hallowed pages of the _NY Review of Books_.

It's a good trick, hard to pull off, requiring ideas that burn so
brilliantly that their glare is overwhelming. That ability alone is worthy
of a certain writhing envy from the local Writers' Union. But it's still a
trick, and the central question is still unresolved. What is "science
fiction," anyway? And what's it there for? Bruce Sterling





CATSCAN 3 "Updike's Version"



John Updike has got to be the epitome of everything that SF readers love to
hate. Those slim, clever, etiolated mainstream novels about well-to-do _New
Yorker_ subscribers, who sip white wine and contemplate adultery . . .
Novels stuffed like Christmas geese with hi-falutin' literary values . . .
Mention Updike at a SFWA gig, and you get yawns, shudders, shakings of the
head . . His work affects science fiction writers like cayenne pepper
affects a pack of bloodhounds.

Why? Because John Updike has everything SF writers don't. He is, in some
very real sense, everything SF writers aren't.