" Essay by Richard Finhold" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

In The Patchwork Girl (1980) Hamilton solves a murder mystery on Earch's moon colony. The plot is shaped by two propositions that are quintessential Niven. The first proposition is that the capability to rebuild humans with organ transplants will create a need to supply the organ banks, and that this in turn will necessitate capital punishment, even for minor offenses. (See also Niven's 1967 short story "The Jigsaw Man," collected in All the Myriad Ways, 1971.) The second proposition is that the human species will differentiate in terms of both physique and value systems as various colonizing groups adapt to the harsh, demanding environments of the solar system. Niven's portrayal of our near future is tantalizingly real, and he gives us convincing impressions of everything from the way asteroid-belt miners decorate their pressure suits to the trials and triumphs of low-gravity sex. Basically, though, The Patchwork Girl is an interesting refinement of an old story form, not a work in which Niven breaks any new ground.

By contrast, Dream Park (1981), coauthored with Steven Barnes, is a novel that might be described as science fiction wrapped around a fantasy. it mixes the Infernoland concept of Inferno with the proposition of Ringworld that any sufficiently advanced technology is not only indistinguishable from magic but also, and more important, from nature. Dream Park is set in a southern California amusement park sometime in the middle of the twenty-first century. Each of the park's "games" immerses its players in imaginary settings taken from literature, myth, and history. The use of holograms, human actors, computerized robots, and full-scale sets offers an almost perfect illusion of reality. The Dream Park is a Disneyland raised to the nth power, with a technology closer co our own than that of the ringworld Builders, though no less magical.

Each game tests the skills of the players in ; roleplaying situation, usually a romantic quest against high odds and in an exotic setting. The games themselves are part improvisational drama, part sensory illusion, and part intellectual puzzle. Regular players soon become fantasy junkies; in fact, to be good at a game, a player most accept the fantasy as real.

When one of the park's security guards is murdered by a deranged game player, the park's security chief, Alex Griffin, goes undercover as a player of the South Seas Treasure Game, which is set amidst the Cargo cult of New Guinea in the 1950's. This is a primitive, brutal world in which native magic works and the monsters of Melanesian mythology are real and dangerous. A tough, emotionally restrained cop, Griffin is nevertheless finally hooked by the emotional intensity and the physical and intellectual challenges of his game. The highly charged action of the fantasy makes his everyday life seem by comparison pale, unsatisfactory, and ultimately unreal. His intellectual struggle to keep things in perspective exhausts him more than the physical obstacles of the game, but although he knows the game is just a cunning illusion, he also knows that it stimulates his imagination and purges his repressed emotions in a way that nothing in the highly regulated real world ever could.

The novel's theme is reinforced by its story-within-a-story structure, and most sympathetic readers will have as much trouble as Alex remembering that the engrossing life-and-death struggles of the South Seas Treasure adventure are just elaborate illusions. Niven and Barnes wish to demonstrate that we read their novel for much the same reason that the players play the games; we are drawn into it by something inside ourselves, something primitive and powerful, something balancing on the thin edge between terror and exhilaration. Thus we cannot help but identify with Griffin's reaction when he is placed face to face with a projection from our own nightmares, a fearsome mechanical zombie: "Once again, something within Griffin, something logical and cool, died without protest. In its place rose a red shadow that yearned to kill" (chapter 27). And it is this red shadow, a Pandora's box of unconscious fears and desires, that we ought not to tease and bait with advanced technology, at least not for the sake of mere amusement.

Niven's theme in such works as Ringworld and Dream Park is not the evil of technology but the misuse of technology, not the inevitable clash of technology with nature but the need to harmonize them by bringing human aspirations back into balance with natural imperatives. This is also the theme of Niven's lyrical fantasy novel The Magic Goes Away.

In The Magic Goes Away the great magician Warlock enlists the aid of other great magicians and of a nonmagical warrior, Orolandes, in his quest to find enough mana to make magic the ruling force on Earth again. The time is 12,000 B.C., magic is fast dying out, and Warlock knows that he will have to kill one of the last of the sleeping gods (most have become "mythical") to get the mana they need. But Warlock realizes at last that the maintenance of his own power has become more important to him than the issue of how best to use it for the preservation of Earth and its people. And in a noble act of self-sacrifice he destroys the god's power rather than steal it. In so doing, Warlock implicitly turns over the maintenance and potential exploitation of nature to the emerging warrior civilization - our civilization - represented by the heroic Orolandes, and fated to dominate Earth someday by force of technology rather than magic.

Niven's thematic point here is that it does not matter finally which of the two forces we use as a mediator between ourselves and out environment, since magic and technology, ritual and experimentation, religion and science are simply different means to the same end. The only important thing is that we use with care and humility whatever force nature cares to lend us. Like most science fiction writers, Larry Niven would remind us that, as Warlock puts it, the world either "belongs to the gods or it belongs to men" - which means that no human being can back away from the moral responsibility assumed when our ancestors chose to live with and by technology, rather than solely at the whims of the perverse ghost in nature's imponderable machine.

- Richard Finholt

- John Carr