"Bruce Sterling - Spearhead of Cognition, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

can judge the fervor of Lem's attempt to reach out by
a piece like "On the Structural Analysis of Science
Fiction:" a Pole, writing in German, to an Austrian,
about French semantic theory. The mind reels. After
this superhuman effort to communicate, you'd think the
folks would cut Lem some slack--from pure human pity,
if nothing else.
But Lem's ideology--both political and literary-
-is simply too threatening. The stuff Lem calls
science fiction looks a bit like American SF--about
the way a dolphin looks like a mosasaur. A certain
amount of competitive gnawing and thrashing was
inevitable. The water roiled ten years ago, and the
judgement of evolution is still out. The smart money
might be on Lem. The smarter money yet, on some
judicious hybridization. In any case we would do well
to try to understand him.
Lem shows little interest in "fiction" per se.
He's interested in science: the structure of the
world. A brief autobiographical piece, "Reflections on
My Life," makes it clear that Lem has been this way
from the beginning. The sparkplug of his literary
career was not fiction, but his father's medical
texts: to little Stanislaw, a magic world of skeletons
and severed brains and colorful pickled guts. Lem's
earliest "writings," in high school, were not
"stories," but an elaborate series of imaginary forged
documents: "certificates, passports, diplomas . . .
coded proofs and cryptograms . . ."
For Lem, science fiction is a documented form of
thought-experiment: a spearhead of cognition.
All else is secondary, and it is this singleness
of aim that gives his wo

rk its driving power. This is
truly "a literature of ideas," dismissing the heart as
trivial, but piercing the skull like an ice-pick.
Given his predilections, Lem would probably
never have written "people stories." But his rationale
for avoiding this is astounding. The mass slaughters
during the Nazi occupation of Poland, Lem says, drove
him to the literary depiction of humanity as a
species. "Those days have pulverized and exploded all
narrative conventions that had previously been used in
literature. The unfathomable futility of human life
under the sway of mass murder cannot be conveyed by
literary techniques in which individuals or small
groups of persons form the core of the narrative."
A horrifying statement, and one that people in
happier countries would do well to ponder. The