"Alastair Reynolds - Digital to Analogue" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Alastair)

Digital to Analogue
Alastair Reynolds

Alastair Reynolds is that rarity which most people outside the field
assume to be a cliché: a scientist who writes SF. Specifically, he has a
Ph.D. in astronomy, and he works for the European Space Agency in
Holland. One of the youngest of the new wave of British writers, he’s
published three stories so far, all in Interzone. ‘Digital to Analogue’
contains, Reynolds tells us, ‘a number of ideas which were amplified
after reading Simon Rey-nolds’s (no relation) collection of essays in
Blissed Out (Serpent’s Tail, 1991), in particular, the chapter on Acid
House. I also plundered Paul Davies’s book The Cosmic Blueprint
(Unwin, 1989) for the references to entrainment.’

Maybe it’s no surprise that ‘Digital to Analogue’ is hard SF. But it is
hard SF radicalised by close attention to pop cultural iconogra-phy arid
the new tribal ethos of Acid House nightclubbing. Not to mention one of
the neatest paranoid conspiracy theories we’ve come across in a long
time. Just remember, the message is in the bleep . . .

****



I
left the Drome at 3.00 a.m., with Belgian house on indefinite replay in my
brain. I was unaware that I was being followed. You can’t trust yourself at
that hour, not when your nervous system wants to shut down for the night’s
deepest phase of sleep. If we’re awake, it’s then that we make the
stupidest errors, dreaming that our actions won’t have any outcome in the
light of dawn. And, sometimes, a few pills assist the process.

I was more than usually pissed, but had avoided anything else for
most of the night. Then she’d shown up: the girl in the Boulevard Citizens
T-shirt, some Scottish white-soul band, offering E from a hip pouch. I’d
hesitated, my head swirling already, then acquiesced. We did the deal amid
the strobe-storm of sweating revellers and the eardrum-lancing rhythms.

‘I’ll be dead to the world in a few hours,’ I said, slipping the tabs in my
pocket.
 ‘Big deal,’ she said. ‘Me, I just take a sicky. Pick up the ‘phone, tell a
few lies, kick back and snooze.’

‘Great if your phone works,’ I said. “Thing is, I’m a telephone
engineer; work for BT. So it’s me you should thank next time you call in sick.
Probably be eavesdropping from some hole in the ground somewhere.’

I felt a pressure on my shoulder, turned round to see one of my
friends from the office. Sloshing Grolsch everywhere, he began to croon
‘Wichita Lineman’, drunkenly out of tune.