"Peter Watts - Atwood" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watts Peter)

It was not an isolated slip. Atwood has also characterised science
fiction as the stuff that involves "monsters and spaceships", and
"Beam me up, Scotty".

Atwood claims to write something entirely different:
speculative fiction, she calls it, the difference being that it is based
on rigorously-researched science, extrapolating real technological
and social trends into the future (as opposed to that escapist
nonsense about fictitious things like chemicals and rockets,
presumably). The irony, of course, is that Atwood's very
explanation as to why she doesn't write science fiction not only
places Oryx and Crake squarely in the science fiction realm, but at
the least respectable end of that realmтАФthe hard, extrapolative
depths of the deep infrared.

Whenever Atwood makes such remarksтАФshe trotted out the
same horseshit for The Handmaid's Tale back in the eightiesтАФI
suffer mixed reactions. Sheer dumbfounded awe, for oneтАФthat
this bloody tourist could blow into town and presume to lecture the
world on the geography of the ghetto, blithely contradicting
generations of real geographers who've spent their whole lives
there. It stirs something violent in me. And yet, above the gut I
just can't believe that Atwood could possibly be that stupid. She
can tell Wyndham from Gibson, she reads them both. She's
certainly not an idiot. She may not even be a liar. But I suspect
that a terrible truth lurks in the back of her mind, a dark,
commonsensical thing barely repressed by literary peer pressure
and the rearguard efforts of marketing gurus. She can feel it deep
Peter Watts 3 Hierarchy of Contempt

in the id, gnawing towards the light; should it ever escape the very
world of OprahLit would fall, the peaceful sanctimony of its
inhabitants laid forever waste.

Here is the unbearable truth that Margaret Atwood struggles so
heroically to deny: science fiction has become more relevant than
"Literature".

It could hardly be otherwise. Here in the real world, people run
software with their brainwaves. Robot dogs are pass├й.
Teleportation is a fact. It has become routine to genetically cross
goats with spiders, fish with tomatoes. Every week seems to
herald the arrival of some new and virulent plague. What has
stronger resonance in such a world: a story about the ramifications
of human cloning, or a memoir about growing up poor in post-
WWII Ireland?

Atwood must know this, on some level. She knows she can't
stay relevant by ignoring world-changing events. She knows that
many of those events are rooted in science and technology, so her