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

created to burn mental holes with pitiless coherent
light. How can one do this and still produce a product
resembling "literature?" Lem tried novels. Novels,
alas, look odd without genuine characters in them.
Then he hit on it: a stroke of genius.
The collections _A Perfect Vacuum_ and
_Imaginary Magnitudes_ are Lem's masterworks. The
first contains book reviews, the second, introductions
to various learned tomes. The "books" discussed or
reviewed do not actually exist, and have archly
humorous titles, like "Necrobes" by "Cezary
Strzybisz." But here Lem has found literary
structures--not "stories"--but assemblages of prose,
familiar and comfortable to the reader.
Of course, it takes a certain aridity of taste
to read a book composed of "introductions,"
traditionally a kind of flaky appetizer before the
main course. But it's worth it for the

author's sense
of freedom, his manifest delight in finally ridding
himself of that thorny fictive thicket that stands
between him and his Grail. These are charming pieces,
witty, ingenious, highly thought-provoking, utterly
devoid of human interest. People will be reading these
for decades to come. Not because they work as fiction,
but because their form follows function with the
sinister elegance of an automatic rifle.
Here Lem has finessed an irrevocable choice. It
is a choice every science fiction writer faces. Is
the writer to write Real Novels which "only happen to
be" science fiction--or create knobby and irreducible
SF artifacts which are not true "stories," but
visionary texts? The argument in favor of the first
course is that Real Readers, i.e. mainstream ones,
refuse to notice the nakedly science-fictional. How
Lem must chuckle as he collects his lavish blurbs from
_Time_ and _Newsweek_ (not to mention an income
ranking as one of poor wretched Poland's best sources
of foreign exchange) . By disguising his work as the
haute-lit exudations of a critic, he has out-conjured
the Yankee conjurers, had his cake and eaten it
publicly, in the hallowed pages of the _NY Review of
Books_.
It's a good trick, hard to pull off, requiring
ideas that burn so brilliantly that their glare is
overwhelming. That ability alone is worthy of a
certain writhing envy from the local Writers' Union.
But it's still a trick, and the central question is
still unresolved. What is "science fiction," anyway?