"Ian R. MacLeod - Nevermore" - читать интересную книгу автора (Macleod Ian R)

NEVERMORE
Ian R. MacLeod

“Nevermore” appeared in the July 1998 issue of Asimov’s, with an
illustration by Mark Evans. British writer Ian MacLeod has been one of
the hottest new writers of the nineties to date, and, as the decade
progresses, his work continues to grow in power and deepen in maturity.
MacLeod has published a slew of strong stories throughout the nineties
in Asimov’s, as well as in markets such as Interzone, Weird Tales,
Amazing, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Several of
these stories made the cut for one or another of the various “Best of the
Year” antholo-gies; in 1990, in fact, he appeared in three different Best of
the Year anthologies with three different sto-ries, certainly a rare
distinction. His first novel. The Great Wheel, was published in 1997,
followed by a major collection of his short work, Voyages by Star-light.
His novella “The Summer Isles,” an Asimov’s story, is on the final Hugo
ballot as these words are being typed. MacLeod lives with his wife and
young daughter in the West Midlands of England.

Here, in a stylish and compelling look at a deca-dent modern world
that ought to be Utopia, he proves once again that Art—like Passion—is
in the eye of the beholder.

****

Now that he couldn’t afford to buy enough reality, Gustav had no option but
to paint what he saw in his dreams.

With no sketchpad to bring back, no palette or cursor, his head rolling
up from the pillow and his mouth dry and his jaw aching from the booze
he’d drunk the evening before—which was the cheapest means he’d yet
found of getting to sleep—he was left with just that one chance, and a few
trailing wisps of something that might once have been beautiful before he
had to face the void of the day.

It hadn’t started like this, but he could see by now that this was how it
had probably ended. Representational art had had its heyday, and for a
while he’d been feted like the bright new talent he’d once been sure he
was. And big lumpy actuality that you could smell and taste and get under
your fingernails would probably come back into style again—long after it
had ceased to matter to him.
 So that was it. Load upon load of self-pity falling down upon him this
morning from the damp-stained ceiling. What had he been dreaming?
Something—surely some-thing. Otherwise being here and being Gustav
wouldn’t come as this big a jolt. He should’ve got more used to it than this
by now.... Gustav scratched himself, and dis-covered that he also had an
erection, which was another sign—hadn’t he read once, somewhere?—that
you’d been dreaming dreams of the old-fashioned kind, unsimulated,
unaided. A sign, anyway, of a kind of biological opti-mism. The hope that
there might just be a hope.