"James Patrick Kelly - Unique Visitor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kelly James Patrick)

Jim Kelly has done everything before me—he was born a year before me, got married before I did, and s
publishing before I did, after we both (along with Bruce Sterling, William Wu, P. C. Hodgell, and a bunch of o
attended the 1974 Clarion Writers Workshop at Michigan State University.
Which means I've know Jim for twenty-seven years—which is amazing, because we both still look so young
While I wandered off into the horror field for fifteen years or so, Jim pretty much stayed in the sf field—garn
a couple of Hugos (for wonderful stories like "Think Like a Dinosaur") and pretty much staying on the path h
out for himself so long ago.
And as I said, we still both look young.


Unique Visitors
James Patrick Kelly

It's strange, but when I woke up just now, I had the theme song to The Beverly Hillbillie
my head. You don't remember The Beverly Hill-billies, do you? But then you probably don
remember television. Television was the great-great-grandmother of media: a scheduled an
sequential entertainment stream. You had to sit in front of the set at a certain time, and you
to watch the program straight through. The programs were too narrow-minded to branch of
into other plot lines, too stupid to stop and wait if you got up to change your personality or
check your portfolio. If you were lucky, you could get your business done during a commer
No, you don't want to know about commercials. Those were dark years.
Anyway, after all this time—has it been centuries already?—I realized mat The Beverly
Hillbillies was a science fiction show. Maybe it's just that everything looks like science fic
to me, now. The hillbillies were simple folk, Jeffersonian citizen-farmers desperately
scratching a nineteenth-century living from an exhausted land. Then—bing bang boom—th
were thrust into the hurly-burly of the twentieth century. Swimming pools and movie stars!
show was really about the clash of world views; the Clam-petts were a hardy band of time
travelers coming to grips with a bizarre future. And here's the irony: Do you know what the
time machine was?
It seems that one day Jed Clampett, the alpha hillbilly, was shooting at a raccoon. Are th
still raccoons? Submit query.

Raccoon, a carnivorous North American mammal,
Procyon lotor, extinct in the wild since 2250,
reintroduced to the Woodrow Roosevelt Culturological Habitat in 2518.

So one day he was shooting at a raccoon, which apparently he meant to eat, times being
and all, but he missed the mark. Instead his bullet struck the ground, where it uncovered an
seepage. Crude oil, a naturally occurring petrochemical, which we have long since deplete
Old Jed was instantly, fabulously rich. Yes, it was a great fortune that launched him into the
future, just as all the money I made writing expert systems brought me to you.
Of course, the Beverly Hillbillies were backcountry bumpkins, so it was hard to take the
seriously at the time. One of them, I think it was the son—Jerome was his name—seemed t
have fallen out of the stupid tree and hit every damn branch on the way down.
You laugh. That's very polite of you. The last time, no one laughed at my jokes. I was
worried that maybe laughter had gone extinct. How many of you are out there, anyway? Sub
query.

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