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

"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
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.

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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