JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 295 из 359The science in The Shrinking Manis strictly gobbledegook. Well, I did .come asking around and reading but I hardly had a great rationale for Scott Carey's shrinking. And I wince daily . . . that I made him shrink 1/7" a day instead of geometrically and that I had him worry about falling from heights when it wouldn't have hurt him. Well, to hell with it. I wouldn't have written `Born of Man and Woman' a few years later either because it is so illogical. What difference does it make really?
"As I said, I enjoyed writing the book . . . because I was like Scott Carey's Boswell, watching him each day as he made his way around the cellar. I had a piece of cake with my coffee the first few days of writing and I laid it on the shelf and soon it became a part of the story. I think that some of the incidents during his shrinking period are pretty good-the man who picks him up when he hitchhikes, the midget, the boys chasing him, his deteriorating marriage relationship.” A summary of The Shrinking Man is easy to render if we view it in the linear fashion Matheson suggests. After going through the sparkling cloud of radioactivity, Carey begins to lose a seventh of an inch a day, or roughly one foot per season. As Matheson suggests, this smacks of expediency, but as he also suggests, what does it matter as long as we realize that this is not hard science fiction and that it bears no resemblance to novels and stories by writers such as Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, or Larry Niven? It is not exactly sensible that the children in the C. S. Lewis tale should be able to reach another world by going through a bedroom closet, either, but that is exactly what happens in the Narnia stories. It is not the technicalities of shrinking that we are interested in, and the inch-per-week pattern at least enables us to keep our own mental yardstick on Scott Carey.
We are given Scott's adventures in flashbacks as his shrinks; the main action takes place in what Scott assumes is his last week of life, as he shrinks from one inch down to nothing. He has gotten trapped in the cellar while trying to escape his own housecat and a garden sparrow.
There's something particularly chilling in Scott's desperate duel with Puss; does anyone have the slightest doubt about what would happen if we were suddenly changed to a height of seven inches tall by malign magic and yon kitty curled up by the fire woke up and happened to see us skittering across the floor? Cats, those amoral gunslingers of the animal world, are maybe the scariest mammals going. I wouldn't want to be up against one in a situation like that.
"As I said, I enjoyed writing the book . . . because I was like Scott Carey's Boswell, watching him each day as he made his way around the cellar. I had a piece of cake with my coffee the first few days of writing and I laid it on the shelf and soon it became a part of the story. I think that some of the incidents during his shrinking period are pretty good-the man who picks him up when he hitchhikes, the midget, the boys chasing him, his deteriorating marriage relationship.” A summary of The Shrinking Man is easy to render if we view it in the linear fashion Matheson suggests. After going through the sparkling cloud of radioactivity, Carey begins to lose a seventh of an inch a day, or roughly one foot per season. As Matheson suggests, this smacks of expediency, but as he also suggests, what does it matter as long as we realize that this is not hard science fiction and that it bears no resemblance to novels and stories by writers such as Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, or Larry Niven? It is not exactly sensible that the children in the C. S. Lewis tale should be able to reach another world by going through a bedroom closet, either, but that is exactly what happens in the Narnia stories. It is not the technicalities of shrinking that we are interested in, and the inch-per-week pattern at least enables us to keep our own mental yardstick on Scott Carey.
We are given Scott's adventures in flashbacks as his shrinks; the main action takes place in what Scott assumes is his last week of life, as he shrinks from one inch down to nothing. He has gotten trapped in the cellar while trying to escape his own housecat and a garden sparrow.
There's something particularly chilling in Scott's desperate duel with Puss; does anyone have the slightest doubt about what would happen if we were suddenly changed to a height of seven inches tall by malign magic and yon kitty curled up by the fire woke up and happened to see us skittering across the floor? Cats, those amoral gunslingers of the animal world, are maybe the scariest mammals going. I wouldn't want to be up against one in a situation like that.