"How We Lost The Moon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

how we lost the moon,
a true story by frank w. allen
PAUL J. McAULEY


Born in Stroud, England, in 1955, Paul J. McAuley now makes his home in London.
A professional biologist for many years, he sold his first story in 1984, and
has gone on to he a frequent contributor to Interzone, as well as to markets
such as Amazing, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science
Fiction, When the Music’s Over, and else­where.

McAuley has a foot in several different camps of science fiction writing, being
considered one of the best of the new breed of British writers (although a few
Australian writers could be fit in under this heading as well) who are producing
that brand of rigorous hard science fiction with updated modern and stylistic
sensibilities that is sometimes referred to as “radical hard sci­ence fiction,”
in addition to being one of the major young writers who are producing that
revamped and retooled widescreen Space Opera that has sometimes been called the
New Baroque Space Opera. But, something of a literary millipede, McAuley refuses
to be limited to a mere two camps in which to put his feet, and also writes
Dystopian sociological speculations about the very near future, some elegant and
literate Alternate History, and even some unabashed fantasy and supernatural
horror stories, all with equal fluency and skill. His first novel, Four Hundred
Billion Stars, won the Philip K. Dick Award. His other books include the novels
Of the Fall, Eternal Light, and Pasquale’s Angel; two collections of his short
work, The King of the Hill and Other Stories and The Invisible Country; and an
original anthology co-edited with Kim Newman, In Dreams. His acclaimed novel
Fairyland won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Award in
1996. His most recent books are Child of the River and Ancients of Days, the
first two volumes of a major new trilogy of ambitious scope and scale,
Confluence, set ten million years in the future. The third book in the trilogy,
Shrine of Stars, is due out soon. Currently he is working on a new novel, The
Secret of Life. His stories have appeared in our Fifth, Ninth, Thirteenth,
Fifteenth, and Sixteenth Annual Collec­tions. His web site is at
http://www.omegacom.demon.co.uk.

On the busy, bustling, colonized future Moon, McAuley reminds us that although
everyone makes mistakes, some mistakes have far greater consequences than
others...

* * * *


I
probably think that you know everything about it. After all, here we are,
barely into the second quarter of the first century of the Third Millennium, and
it’s being touted as the biggest event in the history of humanity. Yeah, right.
But tossing aside such impossibly grandiose claims, it was and still is a hell
of a story. It’s generated millions of bytes of Web journalism (two years after,
there are still more than two hundred official Web sites, not to mention the