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

science fiction paperback stays available for six weeks, it's a
miracle. Gross sales are up, but individual sales are off...
Science fiction didn't even used to be *published* in book form,
when a science fiction *book* came out it would be in an edition
of maybe five hundred copies and these weirdo Golden Age SF fans
would cling on to every copy as if it were made of platinum....
But now they come out and they are made to vanish as soon as
possible. In fact to a great extent they're designed by their
lame hack authors to vanish as soon as possible. They're cliches
because cliches are less of a cognitive load. You can write a
whole trilogy instead, bet you can't eat just one...
Nevertheless they're still objects in the medium of print. They
still have the cultural properties of print.

Culturally speaking they're capable of lasting a long time
because they can be replicated faithfully in new editions that
have all the same properties as the old ones. Books are
independent of the machineries of book production, the platforms
of publishing. Books don't lose anything by being reprinted by a
new machine, books are stubborn, they remain the same work of
art, they carry the same cultural aura. Books are hard to kill.
MOBY DICK for instance bombed when it came out, it wasn't until
the 1920s that MOBY DICK was proclaimed a masterpiece, and then
it got printed in millions. Emily Dickinson didn't even publish
books, she just wrote these demented little poems with a quill
pen and hid them in her desk, but they still fought their way
into the world, and lasted on and on and on. It's damned hard to
get rid of Emily Dickinson, she hangs on like a tick in a dog's
ear. And everybody who writes from then on in some sense has to
measure up to this woman. In the art of book-writing the
classics are still living competition, they tend to elevate the
entire art-form by their persistent presence.

I've noticed though that computer game designers don't look much
to the past. All their idealized classics tend to be in reverse,
they're projected into the future. When you're a game designer
and you're waxing very creative and arty, you tend to measure
your work by stuff that doesn't exist yet. Like now we only have
floppies, but wait till we get CD-ROM. Like now we can't have
compelling lifelike artificial characters in the game, but wait
till we get AI. Like now we waste time porting games between
platforms, but wait till there's just one standard. Like now
we're just starting with huge multiplayer games, but wait till
the modem networks are a happening thing. And I -- as a game
designer artiste -- it's my solemn duty to carry us that much
farther forward toward the beckoning grail....

For a novelist like myself this is a completely alien paradigm.
I can see that it's very seductive, but at the same time I can't
help but see that the ground is crumbling under your feet. Every