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

these essays caused in the '70s, it makes some eye-
op

ening reading.
Lem compares himself to Crusoe, stating
(accurately) that he had to erect his entire structure
of "science fiction" essentially from scratch. He did
have the ancient shipwrecked hulls of Wells and
Stapledon at hand, but he raided them for tools years
ago. (We owe the collected essays to the beachcombing
of his Man Friday, Austrian critic Franz
Rottensteiner.)
These essays are the work of a lonely man. We
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 . . .

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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