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

sophisticated vein, of course, and for a modern audience. So you write a
few such books, you publish 'em, and people adore them. The folks in 'Bama
are fit to bust with pride, and say you've got Tolstoy beat all hollow.

Then, after years of steadily growing success, strange mail arrives. It's
from Russia! They've been reading your stuff in translation, and you've
been chosen to join the Soviet Writers' Union! Swell! you think. Of course,
living in backwoods Alabama, it's been a little tough finding editions of
contemporary Russian novelists. But heck, Tolstoy did his writing years
ago! By now those Russians must be writing like nobody's business!

Then a shipment of modern Russian novels arrives, a scattering of various
stuff that has managed to elude the redtape. You open 'em up and - ohmiGod!
It's . . . it's COMMUNISM! All this stupid stereotyped garbage! About Red
heroes ten feet tall, and sturdy peasants cheering about their tractors,
and mothers giving sons to the Fatherland, and fathers giving sons to the
Motherland . . . Swallowing bile, you pore through a few more at random -
oh God, it's awful.

Then the _Literary Gazette_ calls from Moscow, and asks if you'd like to
make a few comments about the work of your new comrades. "Why sure!" you
drawl helpfully. "It's clear as beer-piss that y'all have gotten onto the
wrong track entirely! This isn't literature - this is just a lot of
repetitive agitprop crap, dictated by your stupid oppressive publishers! If
Tolstoy was alive today, he'd kick your numb Marxist butts! All this lame
bullshit about commie heroes storming Berlin and workers breaking
production records - those are stupid power-fantasies that wouldn't fool a
ten-year-old! You wanna know the true modern potential of Russian novels?
Read some of my stuff, if you can do it without your lips moving! Then call
me back."

And sure enough, they do call you back. But gosh - some of the hardliners
in the Writers' Union have gone and drummed you out of the regiment. Called
you all kinds of names . . . said you're stuck-up, a tool of capitalism, a
no-talent running-dog egghead. After that, you go right on writing, even
criticism, sometimes. Of course, after that you start to get MEAN.

This really happened.

Except that it wasn't Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. It was H.G. Wells and Olaf
Stapledon. It wasn't Russian novels, it was science fiction, and the
Writers' Union was really the SFWA. And Alabama was Poland.

And you were Stanislaw Lem.

Lem was surgically excised from the bosom of American SF back in 1976.
Since then plenty of other writers have quit SFWA, but those flung out for
the crime of being a commie rat-bastard have remained remarkably few. Lem,
of course, has continued to garner widespread acclaim, much of it from
hifalutin' mainstream critics who would not be caught dead in a bookstore's