"Bruce Sterling - Sneaking For Jesus 2001" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

Bruce Sterling
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Literary Freeware -- Not for Commercial Use

From SF EYE #11 Dec 1992
Science Fiction Eye, P. O. Box 18539, Asheville NC 28814 (USA$10.yr $15
global)

SF EYE CATSCAN #11: "Sneaking For Jesus 2001"

Conspiracy fiction. I've come across a pair of especially remarkable
works in this odd subgenre lately.

Paul Di Filippo's treatment of the conspiracy subgenre, " My Brain
Feels Like A Bomb" in SF EYE 8, collected some fine, colorful
specimens. Di Filippo theorizes that the conspiracy subgenre, anchored
at its high end by GRAVITY'S RAINBOW and FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM and at
its low end by quite a lot of cheesy sci-fi and gooofy spy thrillers,
is unique to the twentieth-century, and bred by our modern
(postmodern?) inability to make sense of an overwhelming flow of
high-velocity information.

This may be true. I'm not inclined to challenge that sociological
assessment, and can even offer some backup evidence. Where is that
postmodern flow of information more intense, and less basically
comprehensible, than in the world of computing? Thus is bred the
interesting sub-subgenre of computer paranoia fiction -- hacker
conspiracy! I now propose to examine two such works: the movie (and
book) SNEAKERS, and the novel (and prophesy?) THE ILLUMINATI.

Let's take the second item first, as it's much the more remarkable of
the two. The ILLUMINATI in question today has nothing to do with the
Robert Anton Wilson ILLUMINATI series; in fact, its weltanschauung is
utterly at odds with Wilson's books. Wilson's paranoid yarn is
basically a long, rambling, crypto-erudite hipster rap-session, but
Larry Burkett's ILLUMINATI is a fictional work of evangelical Christian
exegesis, in which lesbians, leftists, dope addicts and other tools of
Satan establish a gigantic government computer network in the year
2001, with which to exterminate all Southern Baptists.

I recommend this novel highly. Larry Burkett's ILLUMINATI has already
sold some 100,000 copies through Christian bookstores, and it

seems to
me to have tremendous crossover potential for hundreds of chuckling
cyberpunk cynics. To my eye it's a lot more mind-blowing than any of
Wilson's books.

The Robert Anton Wilson oeuvre is perenially in print in New Age