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

implications of this literary conviction are, of
course, extreme. Lem's work is marked by unflinching
extremities. He fights through ideas with all the
convulsive drive of a drowning man fighting for air.
Story structure, plot, human values, characterization,
dramatic tension, all are ruthlessly trudgeon-kicked
aside.
In criticism, however, Lem has his breath, and
can examine the trampled flotsam with a cynical eye.
American SF, he says, is hopelessly compromised,
because its narrative structure is trash: detective
stories, pulp thrillers, fairy-tales, bastardized
myths. Such outworn and kitschy devices are totally
unsuited to the majestic scale of science fiction's
natural thematics, and reduce it to the cheap tricks
of a vaudeville conjurer.
Lem holds this in contempt, for he is not a man
to find entertainment in sideshow magic. Stanislaw Lem
is not a good-time guy. Oddly, for a science fiction
writer, he seems to have very little interest in the
intrinsically weird. He shows no natural appetite for
the arcane, the offbeat, the outre.. He is colorblind
to fantasy. This leads him to dismiss much of the work
of Borges, for example. Lem claims that "Borges' best
stories are constructed as tight

ly as mathematical
proofs." This is a tautology of taste, for, to Lem,
mathematical proofs are the conditions to which the
"best" stories must necessarily aspire.
In a footnote to the Borges essay Lem makes the
odd claim that "As soon as nobody assents to it, a
philosophy becomes automatically fantastic
literature." Lem's literature *is* philosophy; to veer
from the path of reason for the sake of mere sensation
is fraudulent.
American SF, therefore, is a tissue of frauds,
and its practicioners fools at best, but mostly snake-
oil salesmen. Lem's stern puritanism, however, leaves
him at sea when it comes to the work of Philip K.
Dick: "A Visionary Among the Charlatans." Lem's mind
was clearly blown by reading Dick, and he struggles to
find some underlying weltanschauung that would reduce
Dick's ontological raving to a coherent floor-plan.
It's a doomed effort, full of condescension and
confusion, like a ballet-master analyzing James Brown.
Fiction is written to charm, to entertain, to
enlighten, to convey cultural values, to analyze life
and manners and morals and the nature of the human
heart. The stuff Stanislaw Lem writes, however, is