"Paul J. McAuley - Winning Peace" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

WINNING PEACE
PAUL J. MCAULEY



B
orn in Oxford, 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 be a frequent contributor to Interzone, as well as to markets such as Asimov’s
Science Fiction, SCI FICTION, Amazing, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science
Fiction, Skylife, The Third Alternative, When the Music’s Over, and elsewhere.

McAuley is at the forefront of several of the most important subgenres in SF
today, producing both “radical hard science fiction” and the revamped and retooled
wide-screen Space Opera that has sometimes been called the New Space Opera, as
well as dystopian sociological speculations about the very near future. He also writes
fantasy and horror. His first novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars, won the Philip K.
Dick Award, and his novel Fairyland won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the
John W Campbell Award in 1996. His other books include the novels Of the Fall,
Eternal Light, and Pasquale’s Angel, Confluence—a major trilogy of ambitious
scope and scale set ten million years in the future, comprised of the novels Child of
the River, Ancient of Days, and Shrine of Stars—Life on Mars, The Secret of Life,
and Whole Wide World. His short fiction has been collected in The King of the Hill
and Other Stories and The Invisible Country, and he is the coeditor, with Kim
Newman, of an original anthology, In Dreams. His most recent books include a new
novel, White Devils, and a new collection, Little Machines. Coming up is a new
novel, Players.

McAuley made his name as one of the best of the New Space Opera writers
with novels such as Four Hundred Billion Stars and the Confluence trilogy, but in
recent years he has created the Quiet War series as well, with stories such as
“Second Skin,” “Sea Scene, With Monsters,” “The As-sassination of Faustino
Malarte,” and others, about the aftermath and the consequences of an interplanetary
war that ravages the solar system. In the tense and suspenseful story that follows, he
deals with the aftermath and the consequences of another space war, an interstellar
one this time, and shows us that if you can’t manage to figure out a way to shake off
the ghosts of the past, you may face a very limited future—such as: none at all.

****

One day, almost exactly a year after Carver White started working for Mr. E. Z.
Kanza’s transport company, Mr. Kanza told him that they were going on a little
trip—down the pipe to Ganesh Five. This was the company’s one and only
interstellar route, an ass-and-trash run to an abandoned-in-place forward facility,
bringing in supplies, hauling out pods packed with scrap and dismantled machinery,
moving salvage workers to and fro. Carver believed that Mr. Kanza was thinking of
promoting him from routine maintenance to shipboard work, and wanted to see if he
had the right stuff. He was wrong.

The Ganesh Five system was a binary, an ordinary K1 star and a brown dwarf