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

demands sensory involvement on all levels, from the thematic
to the stylistic, as he searches for "retribalization" in the
midst of sterile linearity. All in all, Stand on Zanzibar is a
dexterous performance, at once as facile as a Bach motet
and as gripping as one of the German master's chorales.
One of the most conspicuous, as well as one of the most
interesting, trends in many of the science fiction novels
written during the last dozen years is the emergence of the
so-called "soft" sciences as thematic material. Among these
are anthropology, sociology, psychology, semantics, and re-
cently, religion or theology. Once the enemy of knowledge
in such works as Raymond F. Jones's Renaissance, religion
has recently become primary source material, used sympa-
thetically and provocatively by many different sf authors.
Recall, for a moment, A Canticle for Leibowitz, considered
by many critics to be one of the two or three best science
fiction novels ever written. Miller's novel untilizes the struc-
ture, mystique, language, and theology of Roman Catholicism.
Remove the Roman Catholic Church from its pages, and
Canticle is nothing, mere vapidity unredeemable even by
Miller's flashing word magic. Also religiously oriented are
James Blish's A Case of Conscience, Roger Zeiazny's Lord of
Light, Herbert's Dune, and Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange
Land, to cite only a few. It matters little whether the religious
constructs and background be Catholicism, Hinduism, Islam,
or pantheism. What is important is that these writers, all
skilled craftsmen, felt impelled to utilize religious themes as
artistic material and to utilize them so profoundly that their
novels would not otherwise be complete. Moreover, each of
these writers has handled the religious symbols as if they
were standard science fiction devices.
Yet the nature of the material has seemingly forced the
writers to consider some genuine problems, problems as real
as violence in Chicago or dangling bodies in Iraq. Suppose,
asks Herbert, we have a genuine avatar, a messiah, a true
manifestation of the Deity who is forced by the incredible
horror of living conditions to choose violence, not love or
charity, as his method of redeeming Arrakis and the Fremen.
So Paul Atreides' internal sufferings, the clash of love with
violence, become a crucial ethical problem that would be
essentially trivial without the religious background against
which the ethics can be weighed.
No author has explored these theological implications as
consistently, or as profoundly, as James Blish. Beginning with
the Hugo-winning A Case of Conscience and continuing with
Doctor Mirabilis, the second book in the trilogy, which has
been published only in England, Blish has pursued the rami-
fications of evil as has no writer since the late Charles
Williams. The final volume of Blish's sequence, Black Easter,
another Nebula finalist, is perhaps the most frightening novel