"Intoduction and Foreword by Poul Anderson" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nebula Awards)

choice was both difficult and easy to understand. Rite of
Passage is, on one hand, banal, at least to this reader. On the
other hand, it is well constructed, smooth, slick, thoroughly
professional. Unquestionably the writers who named Rite of
Passage were responding to the professionalism everywhere
evident in the novel, the tight plotting, the crisp transitions,
the clear statement of a problem that, if minor, was none-
theless intriguing. In the last analysis, the votes for Rite of
Passage were a tribute to the writer from whom Panshin had
learned so much and to whom he owed so much, Robert A.
Heinlein.
Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar, the Nebula third-place win-
ner, is another matter indeed. It may be a non-novel or an
antinovel, it may be the ultimate "New Worlds" novel, the
Ulysses or Finnegans Wake of the New Wave, but one can
hardly be indifferent to it. Indeed, Stand on Zanzibar may be
the most important science fiction novel of the last decade.
Unfortunately, it may also be the most difficult. Stand on
Zanzibar requires a patience of eye and ear that many fans
will be unwilling or unable to give. After all, fans don't have
to read McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy or Joyce's Ulysses
to appreciate any of the other Nebula nominees, and none of
the others are even half the length of Zanzibar's 507 pages.
However, those who pay it the attention it deserves, who are
willing to follow Brunner through his maze of characters,
situations, typographical eccentricities, and triple or quadruple
levels of writing will find here both a richness of conception
and depth of execution rarely matched in contemporary fic-
tion. Stand on Zanzibar is no sterile, naturalistic-representa-
tional novel about people whose miseries are merely aching
groins and whose griefs, to quote William Faulkner, grieve
on no universal bones, who write not of the heart but of the
glands.
For all of his dazzling pyrotechniques, Brunner is neither
deliberately obscure nor obtusely difficult. To create his
twenty-first-century world where seven billion humans con-
sume mass-marketed psychedelics and otherwise sweat,
struggle, and die, Brunner writes a careful multidimensional
prose. The major clue to understanding the book is, curiously
enough, the seven-page table of contents. Here Brunner
leaves his clues: utilizing styles he calls "context," "the hap-
pening world," "track with closeups," and "continuity," he
builds a multilayered contrapuntal novel. These four fugal
styles interweave continually while each still maintains its
complete artistic integrity. The McLuhanesque quality of the
novel is everywhere evident. The four parts cannot simply
be considered as linear, independent developments, each
telling a simple beginning, middle, and end story. Instead, the
artistic construct becomes a single entity, an art object-as-
form, a medium whose message is its totality, Brunner