"Bruce Sterling - The Wonderful Power of Storytelling" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

literary arts go, but it labors under the curse of three
thousand years of literacy. In some weird sense I'm in direct
competition with Homer and Euripides. I mean, these guys aren't
in the SFWA, but their product is still taking up valuable
rack-space. You guys on the other hand get to reinvent
everything every time a new platform takes over the field. This
is your advantage and your glory. This is also your curse. It's
a terrible kind of curse really.

This is a lesson about cultural expression nowadays that has
applications to everybody. This is part of living in the
Information Society. Here we are in the 90s, we have these
tremendous information-handling, information-producing
technologies. We think it's really great that we can have groovy
unleashed access to all these different kinds of data, we can
own books, we can own movies on tape, we can access databanks,
we can buy computer-games, records, music, art.... A lot of our
art aspires to the condition of software, our art today wants to
be digital... But our riches of information are in some deep and
perverse sense a terrible burden to us. They're like a cognitive
load. As a digitized information-rich culture nowadays, we have
to artificially invent ways to forget stuff. I think this is the
real explanation for the triumph of compact disks.

Compact disks aren't really all that much better than vinyl
records. What they make up in fidelity they lose in groovy cover
art. What they gain in playability they lose in presentation.
The real advantage of CDs is that they allow you to forget all
your vinyl records. You think you love this record collection
that you've amassed over the years. But really the sheer choice,
the volume, the load of memory there is secretly weighing you
down. You're never going to play those Alice Cooper albums
again, but you can't just throw them away, because you're a
culture nut.

But if you buy a CD player you can bundle up all those records
and put them in attic boxes without so much guilt. You can
pretend that you've stepped up a level, that now you're even
more intensely into music than you ever were; but on a practical
level what you're really doing is weeding this junk out of your
life. By dumping the platform you dump everything attached to
the platform and my god what a blessed secret relief. What a
relief not to remember it, not to think about it, not to have it
take up disk-space in your head.

Computer games are especially vulnerable to this because they
live and breathe through the platform. But something rather
similar is happening today to fiction as well.... What you see
in science fiction nowadays is an amazing tonnage of product
that is shuffled through the racks faster and faster.... If a