"Ken MacLeod - Who" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacLeod Ken)

WHO’S AFRAID OF WOLF 359?
KEN MACLEOD
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THE NEW SPACE OPERA Edited By Gardner Dozois & Jonathan Strahan

v 1.0 Scanned By NERDs, Proofed By MadMaxAU

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ere’s a fast-paced, freewheeling, frenetic romp that demonstrates that if life hands you lemons, make
lemonade—no matter who gets in your way or what extremes you have to go to get the lemons out of it.

Ken Macleod graduated with a B.S. in zoology from Glasgow Univer-sity in 1976. Following research in
biomechanics at Brunei University, he worked as a computer analyst/programmer in Edinburgh. He’s
now a full-time writer, and widely considered to be one of the most exciting new SF writers to emerge in
the nineties, his work featuring an emphasis on politics and economics rare in the New Space Opera,
while still main-taining all the wide-screen, high-bit-rate, action-packed qualities typical of the form. His
first two novels, The Star Fraction and The Stone Canal, each won the Prometheus Award. His other
books include the novels The Sky Road, The Cassini Division, Cosmonaut Keep, Dark Light, Engine
City, and Newton’s Wake, plus a novella chapbook, The Human Front. His most recent books are the
novel Learning the World and a collection, Strange Lizards from Another Galaxy. He lives in West
Lothian, Scotland, with his wife and children.

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When you’re as old as I am, you’ll find your memory’s not what it was. It’s not that you lose memories.
That hasn’t happened to me or anyone else since the Paleocosmic Era, the Old Space Age, when people
lived in caves on the Moon. My trouble is that I’ve gained memories, and I don’t know which of them
are real. I was very casual about memory storage back then, I seem to recall. This could happen to you
too, if you’re not careful. So be warned. Do as I say, not as I did.

Some of the tales about me contradict each other, or couldn’t possibly have happened, because that’s
how I told them in the first place. Others I blame on the writers and tellers. They make things up. I’ve
never done that.

If I’ve told stories that couldn’t be true, it’s because that’s how I remember them.

Here’s one.

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I ran naked through the Long Station, throwing my smart clothes away to distract the Tycoon’s dogs.
Breeks, shirt, cravat, jacket, waistcoat, stockings, various undergarments—one by one they ran, flapped,
slithered, danced, or scurried off, and after every one of them raced a scent-seeking but merci-fully
stupid hound. But the Tycoon had more dogs in his pack than I had clothes in my bundle. I was down to
my shoes and the baying continued. I glanced over my shoulder. Two dogs were just ten meters behind