🗿👽 🛸 И правда, зачем разглагольствовать об условности художественного языка, о способах репрезентации и так далее, когда можно сказать, что

They [sic!] most peculiar characteristics are the unearthly eyes with two perfectly concentric circles that oddly resemble the Star Wars robot, C3PO. But what makes these statues so mysterious is their strange faces that could be described as having robot face features. Seems that these statues represent archers, warriors, and boxers, like they belong to a kind of army. An army of robots. The evidence from Monte Prama suggests that the giants mentioned in antiquity were not humans. Mainstream biblical scholars think that the Nephilim, and Goliath, mentioned in the hebrew text were humans. But based on Monte Prama's evidence, giants in the ancient world were robots from extraterrestial origins.

😶‍🌫️ Бывают странные сближения: кашель в интро

1959 и 1971 гг.

🛸 Тревожка + сбитый режим сна + диктофон = сай-фай

Выдержки из интервью с А.Э. ван Вогтом о его творческом методе:

"In science fiction you have to have a little bit of a `hang-up' in each sentence. Let's suppose, for example: The hero looks up toward the door." Van Vogt gestures toward the sunlit screen door of his living room, leading out onto the veranda. "He hears a sound over there. And something comes in. It looks like a man wearing a cloak. You don't quite know what's going on. Then, you realize this is not a human being. This creature or this being, whoever it is, has a sort of manlike shape. And this creature reaches into what now looks like a fold of its skin. It draws out a gleaming metal object. It points it at you. Is this a weapon? It looks like a weapon, but you don't know that for sure. It's a "hang-up", you see. The author furnishes the information, but each sentence in itself has a little "hang-up" in it."

As he has been talking, almost hypnotically, with an eerie gleam in his eye, he has created such a mood of menace that, for a moment, the California sunshine seems less bright and the dreamlike description is nibbling at the edges of reality. He would say, perhaps, that this is through the power of his system, but I think it has more to do with the power of his personality and his intuitively shrewd choice of words and images. A system on its own is dull and mechanical, without inspiration to fuel it. Van Vogt goes on to describe how he realized his source for this inspiration:

"I didn't notice, right away, what I was doing. In science fiction I was writing for only one cent a word, so because I work slowly I would wake up anxious, thinking, "work out my story". I'd go back to sleep, wake up anxious, each time thinking about my story. Then in 1943 in Toronto I suddenly realized. It took me all that time to realize what I'd been doing all those years. Had I been Cyril Kornbluth [who died aged thirty-five] I might never have found out how I wrote. It's a good thing my life went past a certain point!

"I took the family alarm clock and went into the spare bedroom that night, and set it for an hour and a half. And thereafter, when I was working on a story, I would waken myself every hour and a half, through the night--force myself to wake up, think of the story, try to solve it, and even as I was thinking about it I would fall back asleep. And in the morning, there would be a solution, for that particular story problem. Now, that's penetrating the subconscious, in my opinion. It's penetrating it in a way that I don't think they'll be able to do any better, thirty centuries from now."

(Цитаты большие, можно развернуть)

И далее (после знакомства с Хаббардом, дианетикой и погружения во всякое психологическое:

At one point he realized that his system of tapping the subconscious, in order to write science fiction, could also be used as a kind of therapy. "If you take an incident of severe, traumatic emotion, and wake yourself up every hour and a half, and think about it, go through it in your mind, and fall back asleep while you're doing that, it takes about two weeks, for a severe incident, before it fades.

<...>

"The effectiveness of it is not easy to prove, but here's what happened when I was reading up on the background of Naples for a novel I wrote called _The Darkness of Diamondia_. I had a planet many light-years distant, called Diamondia, which had been settled by Italians, and they had sort of rebuilt Italy there. There was a place called New Naples, and they build it right under Vesuvius II, that kind of thing. So I read up on the history of Naples. It's a history of massacres, assassinations, murders, horrible continuous killing. It didn't bother me because I'd been reading before about human nature. But I ran across one incident that bothered me. Two fourteen-year-old boys turned in as traitors and beheaded. For some reason or other that disturbed me. The next day, I couldn't seem to write, I felt distracted. And the next day, and the next. Two weeks went by, and I thought, my God, this thing is still running around--vivid images, running through my head. And so I thought, Why don't I try the dream therapy on that?

"By this time, I was using an industrial timer and a cassette recorder, not an alarm clock. An alarm clock you have to rewind and reset, whereas this works automatically every hour and a half."

I interrupt to ask him what the tape recorder says, when the timer turns it on.

"First of all it says "Wake up" a few times, and, "Remember, you're doing dream therapy--on this subject!"--because I could wake up with the alarm clock and not know what I was dealing with; completely blank.

"Anyway, so I put the memory of those two executions through my mind, went back to sleep; and again; and by six o'clock the feeling had faded. And it never came back. This was a small example of the effectiveness of the system. It's purely my own system. A complete invention of my own."

У ван Вогта я читал только две вещи. Рассказ «Черный разрушитель» (где впервые появляется прототип displacer beast, в свою очередь тотемного монстра approximate knowledge). И цикл из пяти рассказов 1946–1947 гг., превращенных в fix-up роман «Империя атома» в 1957 г. Как часто отмечается, это по сути переложение «Я, Клавдий» Грейвса в далекое будущее. Поздняя Республика, ранняя империя, только в далеком будущем, после ядреной катаклизмы. Вместо Клавдия — мутант Клейн, вместо коварной Ливии — коварная Лидия, и т.п. Сюжетная часть и персонажи у ван Вогта сделаны топорно, описание военных кампаний скучные. Так себе рассказы/роман, на самом деле. Но есть интересные моменты, напр. то, что пост-апокалиптические римляне поклоняются четырем атомным богам — «Урану, Радию, Плутонию и Эксу», их храмы — это явно какие-то древние ядерные электростанции, а культовые объекты, используемые в обрядах — «частицы богов» — соответствующие радиоактивные металлы. Такое я всегда люблю. Равно как и смешение артефактов «древней» высокой технологии с примитивной: см. теглайн “they ruled the stars – yet knew not how”, или момент, когда марсиане атакуют с помощью летательных устройств и стрел: “a small fleet of enemy attack ships whisked over the hill, and discharged a shower of arrows at the group on the hill, wounding nearly four dozen soldiers”.

🏛🐕 А вот лучший рассказ про «Римскую Империю… в космосе!» — это, однозначно, “Ears Prick Up” Лэрда Баррона (2015 г., включен в сборник Swift to Chase, кину в комментарии). Гражданские войны, кризис (тридцать)третьего века, солдатские императоры, дворцовые перевороты, «история упадка и разрушения» и все это.

НО.

Рассказ от лица Рекса, робо-собаки, легионера, ближайшего соратника и лучшего друга командира, который и совершает все эти перевороты. Контраст гипермаскулинного-палп-абсурда и какой-то трогательной искренности. У Баррона это очень хорошо получается.

⏰ У тебя всего 70 секунд свободного времени, но хочется отдохнуть и послушать много хорошей музыки?