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

greybearded paterfamilias, the conservative Catholic hardware-nut, the guy
who made technical forecasts that Really Came True if you squint real hard
and ignore most of his work.

Jules Verne never knew he was "inventing science fiction," in the
felicitous phrase of Peter Costello's insightful 1978 biography. He knew he
was on to something hot, but he stepped onto a commercial treadmill that he
didn't understand, and the money and the fame got to him. The early
artistic failures, the romantic rejections, had softened him up, and when
the public finally Recognized His Genius he was grateful, and fell into
line with their wishes.

Jules had rejected respectability early on, when it was offered to him on a
plate. But when he had earned it on his own, everyone around him swore that
respectability was dandy, and he didn't dare face them down. Wanting the
moon, he ended up with a hatchbattened one-man submarine in an upstairs
room. Somewhere along the line his goals were lost, and he fell into a role
his father might almost have picked for him: a well-to-do provincial city
councilman. The garlands disguised the reins, and the streetcorner radical
with a headful of visions became a dusty pillar of society.

This is not what the world calls a tragedy; nor is it any small thing to
have books in print after 125 years. But the path Young Jules blazed, and
the path Old Jules was gently led down, are still well-trampled streets
here in SFville. If you stand by his statue at midnight, you can still see
Old Jules limping home, over the cobblestones. Or so they say.




CATSCAN 2 "The Spearhead of Cognition"



You're a kid from some podunk burg in Alabama.

From childhood you've been gnawed by vague numinous sensations and a moody
sense of your own potential, but you've never pinned it down.

Then one joyful day you discover the work of a couple of writers. They're
pretty well-known (for foreigners), so their books are available even in
your little town. Their names are "Tolstoy" and "Dostoevsky." Reading them,
you realize: This is it! It's the sign you've been waiting for! This is
your destiny - to become a *Russian Novelist*!

Fired with inspiration, you study the pair of 'em up and down, till you
figure you've got a solid grasp of what they're up to. You hear they're
pretty well-known back in Russia, but to your confident eye they don't seem
like so much. (Luckily, thanks to some stunt of genetics, you happen to be
a genius.) For you, following their outline seems simple enough - in a more