"Colin Wilson - The Philospher's Stone" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson Colin)

Now no one has a profounder respect for the critics than I, or strives more constantly to sound like a
paid-up member of the literary establishment. But I enjoy ideas. And this seems to give me a rather odd
perspective on modern literature. I suspect that H. G. Wells is probably the greatest novelist of the
twentieth century, and that his most interesting novels - if not necessarily the best - are the later ones. I
am completely unable to be objective about Shaw; he seems to me simply to be the greatest European
writer since Dante. And I completely lack sympathy for the emotional and personal problems that seem
to be the necessary subject of a contemporary play or novel. Mr Osborne once said his aim was to make
people feel. I think they feel too much. IтАЩd like to make them stop feeling and start thinking.
Fortunately for me, I am neither original nor creative, so I can afford to ignore the contemporary rules.
And there is another factor in my favour. Since Shaw wrote Back to Methuselah, science fiction has
become an established genre, and it has even become quite respectable. And in recent years, I have
stumbled accidentally into the writing of a few modest works of science fiction.
I must explain how this came about. In 1961, I wrote a book called The Strength to Dream, a study of
the creative imagination, particularly in writers of fantasy and horror stories. A large part of the book was
inevitably devoted to the work of H. P. Lovecraft, the recluse of Providence, Rhode Island, Who died of
malnutrition and a cancer of the intestine in 1937. I pointed out that although Lovecraft possesses a
gloomy imaginative power that compares with Poe, he is basically an atrocious writer - most of his work
was written for Weird Tales, a pulp magazine - and his work is finally interesting as case history rather
than as literature.
In due course, a copy of my book fell into the hands of LovecraftтАЩs old friend - and publisher - August
Derleth. And Derleth wrote to me, protesting that my judgement on Lovecraft was too harsh, and asking
me why, if I was all that good, I didnтАЩt try writing a тАШLovecraftтАЩ novel myself. And the answer to this
question is that I never write purely for the fun of it. I write as a mathematician uses a sheet of paper for
doing calculations: because I think better that way. And LovecraftтАЩs novels are not about ideas, but about
an emotion - an emotion of violent and total rejection of our civilisation, which I, being rather cheerful by
temperament, do not happen to share.
But a couple of years later, an analogy thrown out in my Introduction to the New Existentialism
became the seed of a science fiction parable about тАШoriginal sinтАЩ - manтАЩs strange inability to get the best
out of his consciousness. I cast it in the Lovecraft tradition, and it became The Mind Parasites, which
was published in due course by August Derleth. Its reception by English critics was unexpectedly good; I
suspect this is because I didnтАЩt sound as if I was serious.
And so when, two years ago, I became interested in questions of brain physiology - as a by-product of a
novel about sensory deprivation - it seemed natural to develop some of these ideas in another тАШLovecraftтАЩ
novel. Besides, ever since, reading WellsтАЩs Time Machine at the age of eleven, it has always been a
daydream of mine to write the definitive novel about time travel. Time travel is a perpetually alluring idea,
but it always sounds so preposterous. Even when my friend Van Vogt - the contemporary SF writer I
enjoy most - uses it, he makes it sound a joke. The question of how to make it sound plausible is quite a
challenge.
It sounds a vertiginous mixture - Shaw, Lovecraft and Wells - but itтАЩs the kind of thing I enjoy doing. In
fact, I got quite carried away until this novel became twice as long as originally intended. Even so, I had
to write part of it as a separate short novel, which August Derleth has published.
A final word. It is part of the game in a Lovecraft novel to stick as far as possible to actual sources, and
never to invent a fact when you can dig one out of some obscure work of scholarship. I would modestly
claim to have surpassed Lovecraft in this particular department. Nearly all the тАШsourcesтАЩ quoted are
genuine, the major exception being the Vatican Codex; even so, there is a fair amount of archaeological
authority for the hypothetical contents of this codex. The Voynich manuscript does, of course, exist, and
is still untranslated.
Seattle-Cornwall November 1968
PART ONE