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

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
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

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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