"Agberg Ideology, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

Bruce Sterling
[email protected]
CATSCAN 4 "The Agberg Ideology"

To speak with precision about the fantastic is
like loading mercury with a pitchfork. Yet some are
driven to confront this challenge. On occasion, a
veteran SF writer will seriously and directly discuss
the craft of writing science fiction.
A few have risked doing this in cold print.
Damon Knight, for instance. James Blish (under a
pseudonym.) Now Robert Silverberg steps deliberately
into their shoes, with _Robert Silverberg's Worlds of
Wonder: Exploring the Craft of Science Fiction_
(Warner Books, 1987, $17.95).
Here are thirteen classic SF stories by well-
known genre authors. Most first appeared in genre
magazines during the 1950s. These are stories which
impressed Silverberg mightily as he began his career.
They are stories whose values he tried hard to
understand and assimilate. Each story is followed by
Silverberg's careful, analytical notes.
And this stuff, ladies and gents, is the SF
McCoy. It's all shirtsleeve, street-level science
fiction; every story in here is thoroughly crash-
tested and cruises like a vintage Chevy.
_Worlds of Wonder_ is remarkable for its sober
lack of pretension. There's no high-tone guff here
about how SF should claim royal descent from Lucian,
or Cyrano de Bergerac, or Mary Shelley. Credit is
given where credit is due. The genre's real founders
were twentieth-century weirdos, whacking away at their
manual typewriters, with amazing persistence and
energy, for sweatshop pay.
They had a definite commonality of interest.
Something more than a mere professional fraternity.
Kind of like a disease.
In a long, revelatory introduction, Silverberg
describes his own first exposure to the vectors of the
cultural virus: SF books.
"I think I was eleven, maybe twelve . . . [The]
impact on me was overwhelming. I can still taste and
feel the extraordinary sensations they awakened in me:
it was a physiological thing, a distinct excitement, a
certain metabolic quickening at the mere thought

of
handling them, let alone reading them. It must be like
that for every new reader--apocalyptic thunderbolts
and eerie unfamiliar music accompany you as you lurch