"Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Roadside Picnic (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Roadside Picnic

(‘) Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
(‘) Translated from Russian by Antonina W. Bouis
(‘) MacMillan Publishing Co., Inc, New York
Arkadij i Boris Strugackie "Piknik na obochine"

INTRODUCTION

Good science fiction is good fiction
This assertion is one which must be made again, and over again, until
the general reader and the "serious" critic cease to associate science
fiction solely with girls in brass brassieres being rescued from the
advances of bug-eyed monsters by zap-gun-toting heroes in space armor. There
is as much of a spectrum of excellence in science fiction as there is in any
other field. Mickey Spillane is not Dorothy Sayers or Ngaio Marsh. Hopalong
Cassidy is not Shane or True Grit. And the best of science fiction is quite
as good as the best of any literature.
It happens also to be the most explosively popular genre on the current
scene. American and English science fiction is widely read in France, Italy,
and Scandinavia, increasingly in Spain, Portugal, and Latin America, and is
attaining new peaks in Germany and the Netherlands. New writers are
appearing in Europe, especially in France and Italy, and the translations
are beginning to Bow the other way into the English-speaking world. And the
rise in printed science fiction is reflected in the increasing number of
cinema and television productions in the field
There are several reasons--and a great many more hypotheses-- for this
upsurge, but they are not within the purview of these remarks and can be
left to the dozens of postgraduate theses being written on the subject and
to the teachers of high-school and college courses in science fiction (of
which there are, at this writing, over 1,500 in the U.S.A. alone). Suffice
it to say that there has never been a field of literature so limitless, so
flexible, so able to evoke astonishment and wonder, so free of the
boundaries of time and space and that arbitrary fantasy we call reality, as
science fiction. Not since the invention of poetry.
What is not generally known to the readers of science fiction in
English is that the most widely read science-fiction writer in the world is
not Heinlein or Bradbury or Clarke, but Stanislaw Lem, a Pole; that the
largest science-fiction section of a writers' union is in Hungary; that
excellent science fiction is being produced in East Germany, Czechoslovakia,
and especially in the Soviet Union. Some Of this--far too little--is
beginning to trickle into the English-speak- ing world, and, sad to say, a
certain portion suffers from execrable translation. Some works have had the
hazards of translation more than doubled by passing from the original to a
second language before being rendered from that into English, a process in
which the style and character of even a laundry list could hardly be
expected to survive. Keeping that in mind, however, the discerning reader
will find, even in the most brutalized of translations, a strength and
inventiveness marvelous to behold.
In the highest echelon of Soviet science-fiction writers stand the