"Avram Davidson - The Odd Old_Bird" - читать интересную книгу автора (Davidson Avram)

THE ODD OLD BIRD
Avram Davidson

If there is a make-believe world to rival Terry Pratchett’s Ankh-Morpork then it is
the American writer Avram Davidson’s Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania, where
the Emperor’s wizard, Dr Engelbert Eszterhazy, performs his heroic tasks.
Davidson has been writing about this comic fantasy land since 1975 and his
inventive imagina-tion shows no sign of drying up. In an article, “The Inchoation
of Eszterhazy’, written in 1988, he explained that the inspiration for the series had
come from the arcane symbols seen in the classic German movie, The Cabinet of
Dr Caligari, which he had never been able to get out of his mind. ‘Gradually it
came to me that there had been an empire in Eastern Europe which had been so
completely destroyed that we no longer even remembered it like the Dual
Monarchy of Austria-Hungary; that being an empire, it had an emperor; that the
emperor had a wizard; the wizard drove about the streets of Bella
(BELgrade/ViennA) in a steam runabout; that the emperor’s name was Ignats
Louis and the wizard’s name was Engelbert Eszterhazy.’
The concept so fired Davidson’s imagination that he wrote the first eight
stories in just six weeks, developing an entire world of bizarre people, curious
customs and extraordinary events that instantly grabbed the attention of fantasy
readers. The success of Doctor Eszterhazy’s exploits in succeeding stories has
generated a fan club in the USA, a detailed map of
Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania by John Westfall, and the plaudits of SF writer
John Clute, who has described Davidson as one of America’s foremost
contemporary writers of ‘obtrusive literacy and wit’.
Avram Davidson (1923—) was born in New York and, according to his own
account, ‘educated in the local schools, a process which nearly unfitted me forever
for participation in any useful functions whatsoever.’ After serving with the US
Navy in World War Two, he had a series of jobs, including sheep-herding,
tomato-picking and inspecting fish-livers, before selling his first story, ‘My Boy
Friend‘s Name is Jello’, to Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1954. Another story, ‘Or
All the Seas with Oysters’, won him a Hugo Award in 1958, and a string of
collections in the following years established him as a uniquely comic voice in
fantasy fiction.
‘The Odd Old Bird’ is one of the most recent Eszterhazy stories and was first
published in the revived Weird Tales magazine Winter issue of 1988-9. Those
encountering the allusive Doctor for the first time will probably need no further
encouragement to seek out his other exploits once they have finished the next few
pages. . .

****

‘But why a canal?’
‘Cheaper, more, and better victuals.’
‘Oh.’
 Prince Roldran Vlox (to cut his titles quite short, and never mind about his
being a Von Stuart y Fitz-Guelf) had ‘just dropped in’ to talk to Doctor Engelbert
Eszterhazy about the Proposed Canal connecting the Ister and the Danube…there
were, in fact, several proposed canals and each one contained several
sub-propositions: should it go right through the entirely Vlox-held Fens (‘The Mud,’