"Peter F. Hamilton, Baxter, McAuley & McDonald - Futures" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Peter F)

Do you remember who first took you into space? Because, let's face it, we've all been up there, either via
the printed page, the movie theater or the TV set. So who was that person into whose care you entrusted
your imagination ... saying, albeit silently, "Here I am ... make my senses spin and my jaw drop .. .feed
me Wonder!"?
If it was by the printed page then maybe it was in the capable hands of H. G. Wells or Jules Verne, with
their futuristic visions of space travel, in cumbersome rockets whose viii trajectory and power source
were a little shaky even then, around about a century ago for most of those marvelous tales. Or maybe it
was the pulp-fictioneers, those penny-a- word scribes who filled page after page of exotic planetary
locations usually populated by scantily-clad females and horrible monsters (boy, it must have been tough
being a girl on some of those orbiting rocks ... at least until the torn- suited Earth astronaut crash-landed
to save the day).
Maybe it was the likes of the "serious" writers ... guys like Isaac Asimov, with his agoraphobic
investigator, his robotic hordes and the mind-boggling read that were the Foundation books; and Ray
Bradbury, with his homespun humanistic homilies of interstellar needles descending onto the Martian
quilt and poverty-line families constructing soapbox rockets in their back yards; and Arthur C. Clarke,
with his barroom fables from the White Hart and the short story "The Sentinel" that became 2001: A
Space Odyssey.
In fact, maybe it was film-the sight of Spielberg's mother ship descending onto the mountain-top or the
spectacle of the alien toddler bursting out of John Hurt's stomach -or TV (Joseph Stefano's insectoid
Zanti misfits from The Outer Limits, perhaps ... or the scene when one of the folks in Rod Serling's
Twilight Zone diner reveals he's a Martian) that lit the fire in your soul and set you dreaming about out
there.
There are so many writers and artists and directors who, year upon year, decade upon decade, have
continued the craft, fashioning their own voices and their own ideologies, that it's a genre in which, no
matter where you start into it, it's eminently possible-and frequently essential-to travel back to earlier
works for further entertainment and enlightenment. ix nMfc»*. .--«Mti*£$lsBii»
As we've been told through our TV sets for more than 30 years, space may well be the final frontier.
Of course there's Time to be unraveled yet, and Immortality, but the vastness of space-with its seemingly
infinite possibilities of worlds, cultures, environments, eco structures and so on-invariably strikes the
loudest chord in the minds of fiction readers and mo vie-watchers the world over. And no matter how far
we manage to progress into the void, that frontier will still be there... the line just being constantly
rubbed out and redrawn again and again, each time a little further away.
Although I've spent much of the last 10 or 12 years involved with horror, dark fantasy and even crime-
both writing it and editing anthologies of the stuff-science fiction (or, more specifically, space fiction)
was my first love ... fed from the British black and white reprints of full-color American comic books
such as Mystery In Space or curled up on a sofa listening to the BBC's radio renditions of Charles
Chilton's Journey Into Space.
But it was Patrick Moore who first took me into space via a book.
The year was 1958, and it was probably my first hardcover ... bought by my parents for Christmas (it's
neatly inscribed in my mother's handwriting, penned, I'm sure, little realizing the effect such a gift was
to have on her son) a book entitled Peril on Mars, written by the great astronomer himself. It was
wonderful stuff and I had no hesitation in scribbling down the titles of the three earlier adventures of
Maurice Gray and his friends on the Red Planet. I've since had the opportunity of acknowledging that

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formative experience by commissioning an Introduction from Patrick for Mars Probes, an anthology of
new stories about our closest x planetary neighbor to be published in the US in late 2001- it's always