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

Certain qualities exist, that novelists are popularly supposed to possess.
Gifts, abilities, that win An Author respect, that cause folks to back off
and gape just a bit if they find one in a grocery line. Qualities like:
insight into modern culture. A broad sympathy for the manifold quirks of
human nature. A sharp eye for the defining detail. A quick ear for
language. A mastery of prose.

John Updike possesses these things. He is erudite. He has, for instance,
actually read Isak Dinesen, Wallace Stevens, Ciline, Jean Rhys, Gunter
Grass, Nabokov and Bellow. Not only has he read these obscure and
intimidating people, but he has publicly discussed the experience with
every sign of genuine enjoyment.

Updike is also enormously clever, clever to a point that approaches genius
through the sheer irrepressible business of its dexterity. Updike's
paragraphs are so brittle, so neatly nested in their comma'ed clauses, that
they seem to burst under the impact of the reader's gaze, like hyper-flaky
croissants.

Updike sees how things look, notices how people dress, hears how people
talk. His eye for the telling detail can make even golf and birdwatching,
the ultimate yawnable whitebread Anglo pastimes, more or less interesting.
(Okay - not very interesting, granted. But interesting for the sheer grace
of Updike's narrative technique. Like watching Fred Astaire take out the
garbage.)

It would be enlightening to compare John Updike to some paragon of science
fiction writing. Unfortunately no such paladin offers himself, so we'll
have to make do with a composite.

What qualities make a great science fiction writer? Let's look at it
objectively, putting aside all that comfortable bullshit about the virtues
authors are supposed to have. Let's look at the science fiction writer as
he is.

Modern culture, for instance. Our SF paladin is not even sure it exists,
except as a vaguely oppressive force he's evaded since childhood. He lives
in his own one-man splinter culture, and has ever since that crucial time
in childhood - when he was sick in bed for two years, or was held captive
in the Japanese prison camp, or lived in the Comoros Islands with monstrous
parents who were nuts on anthropology or astronomy or Trotsky or religion.

He's pretty much okay now, though, our science fiction author. He can feed
himself and sign checks, and he makes occasional supply trips into the
cultural anchorage of SF fandom, where he refreshes his soul by looking at
people far worse off than he is. But he dresses funny, and mumbles to
himself in the grocery line.

While standing there, he doesn't listen to the other folks and make
surreptitious authorly notes about dialogue. Far from it: he's too full of