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

mothers giving sons to the Fatherland, and fathers
giving sons to the Motherland

. . . Swallowing bile,
you pore through a few more at random--oh God, it's
awful.
Then the _Literary Gazette_ calls from Moscow,
and asks if you'd like to make a few comments about
the work of your new comrades. "Why sure!" you drawl
helpfully. "It's clear as beer-piss that y'all have
gotten onto the wrong track entirely! This isn't
literature--this is just a lot of repetitive agitprop
crap, dictated by your stupid oppressive publishers!
If Tolstoy was alive today, he'd kick your numb
Marxist butts! All this lame bullshit about commie
heroes storming Berlin and workers breaking production
records--those are stupid power-fantasies that
wouldn't fool a ten-year-old! You wanna know the true
modern potential of Russian novels? Read some of my
stuff, if you can do it without your lips moving! Then
call me back."
And sure enough, they do call you back. But
gosh--some of the hardliners in the Writers' Union
have gone and drummed you out of the regiment. Called
you all kinds of names . . . said you're stuck-up, a
tool of capitalism, a no-talent running-dog egghead.
After that, you go right on writing, even criticism,
sometimes. Of course, after that you start to get
MEAN.
This really happened.
Except that it wasn't Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. It
was H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon. It wasn't Russian
novels, it was science fiction, and the Writers' Union
was really the SFWA. And Alabama was Poland.
And you were Stanislaw Lem.
Lem was surgically excised from the bosom of
American SF back in 1976. Since then plenty of other
writers have quit SFWA, but those flung out for the
crime of being a commie rat-bastard have remained
remarkably few. Lem, of course, has continued to
garner widespread acclaim, much of it from hifalutin'
mainstream critics who would not be caught dead in a
bookstore's skiffy section. Recently a collection of

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Lem's critical essays, _Macroworlds_, has appeared in
paperback. For those of us not privy to the squabble