"Edward L. Ferman - Best From F&SF, 23rd Edition" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ferman Edward L)

"How long?"
тАЬIтАЩm not sure. I've never been more than three days. I can't stand it any longer than that. He knew.
He always knew when I had to have it And he got it for me. I never helped him."
"Can you stay alive if you get regular transfusions?"
He looked at me sharply, fear creeping back. "Please. No!"
"But you'll stay alive."
"In a cage! Like a freak! I don't want to be a freak anymore. It's over. I want it to be over. Please."
"What do you want me to do?"
"I don't know. I don't want you to get in trouble."
I looked at him, at his face, at his eyes, at his soul. "There's a gun in the glove compartment," I said.
He sat for a moment then solemnly held out his hand. I took it He shook my hand, then opened the
glove compartment He removed the gun and slipped out of the car. He went down the hill into the brush.
I waited and waited and never did hear a shot.


Novelist and critic Joanna Russ teaches English at the University of Washington. When our
starting book reviewer, Algis Budrys, tires, our favorite relief reviewer is Ms. Russ. Here she offers
a fascinating article (in response to some critical letters) which tells why critics are such snobs
and are so vitriolic, among many other things.

Books: In Defense of Criticism
JOANNA RUSS

Critics seem to find it necessary, at least once in a career, to write a statement defending criticism per
se. Shaw, Pauline Kael, Eric Bentley, and James Blish have all done it. That I'm doing it too, doesn't
prove I'm in the same league, but it does indicate the persistence of the issues involved and that they
occur outside, as well as inside, science fiction.
I have tried to speak to general issues rather than "defend" my own criticism. Issues are, in any case,
more important than personalities, although there is a (small) section of fandom which sees in aesthetic or
political disagreement nothing but personal squabbling motivated by envy. It's not for me to judge how
good my criticism is; if enough readers think it's bad, and the editor thinks so too, presumably hell stop
printing it although writing book reviews (except for places like the New York Times) is underpaid,
overworked, and a labor of love. The problem is usually to recruit reviewers, not discourage them.
Here are some of the complaints that keep coming up.
1. Don't shove your politics into your reviews. Just review the books.
I willтАФwhen the authors keep politics out of their stories. But they never do; in fact, it seems
absolutely impossible to write anything without immediately making all sorts of assumptions about what
human nature is, what good and bad behavior consists of, what men ought to be, what women ought to
be, which states of mind and character are valuable, which are the opposite, and so on. Once fiction gets
beyond the level of minimal technical competence, a reviewer must address these judgments of value.
Generally, readers don't notice the presence of familiar value judgments in stories, but do notice (and
object to) unfamiliar ones as "political." Hence arises the insistence (in itself a very vehement, political
judgment) that art and politics have nothing to do with one another, that artists ought to be "above"
politics, and that a critic making political comments about fiction is importing something foreign into an
essentially neutral area. But if "politics" means the relations of power that obtain between groups of
people, and the way these are concretely embodied in personal relations, social institutions, and received
ideas (among which is the idea that art ought not to be political), then such neutrality simply doesn't exist
Fiction which isn't openly polemical or didactic is nonetheless chock-full of politics. If beauty in fiction
bears any relation to truth (as Matthew Arnold thought), then the human (including social and political)
truth of a piece of fiction matters, for aesthetic reasons. To apply rigid, stupid, narrow, political standards