"Ian Watson & Roberto Quaglia - Beloved Vampire of the Blood Comet" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watson Ian)

into immortal vampires. Were they lucky! Polls reveal that the majority of mankind would happily be
vampirized – however, the world vampire élite reserve their magic bites for an increasingly restricted
circle of privileged people. I’m really afraid that Silviu will never bite me.

However – and this is the scary bit—I still don’t really know if Silviu has told me the whole truth. Could
the bizarre encounter between Bush and Dracula have been a complete coincidence? Is there really a
vampiric shield on the Moon that protects us from the full effects of UFOs? Are most planets in our
galaxy made of flesh? And do my menstruations really have a subtle flavour of ginger?

The most ominous doubt emerges occasionally in the dreamy mists of early dawn, as my eyes open from
the sleep that each night makes them innocent again. It’s then, while I’m neither fully awake nor asleep,
that I sometimes wonder this:

Now that the world is ruled by vampires, and people believe in them and piously pray during ceremonial
colonoscopies, do vampires actually exist, or are they state-of-the-art from the élite’s myth factory? Is
Silviu Romanescu, now a top figure of the Vlad Tsepesh administration, really the vampire that he
purports to be?

An invasion by aliens mightn’t be noticed if the aliens imitated, not the widescreen technicolor special
effects of Independence Day or The War of the Worlds, which would shout invasion—but instead the
black-and-white erotic-noir of B movies of beloved memory set in Transylvania, with which we all feel at
home. Imagery is everything nowadays.




About the Authors




Ian Watson wrote the screen story for Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and especially the last 20
minutes of it which many people seem not to realise is very bleak, not schmaltzy. That was after 9 months
spent in Stanley Kubrick’s kitchen and snooker room. He also annoyed the SF community by writing 4
Warhammer 40K novels for Games Workshop under his own name, yet he receives more fan mail for
those, on account of life-altering epiphanies, than for his other 40 odd novels and story collections.
(Should “40 odd” have a hyphen? No!) Games Workshop reacted to the great popularity of one of
these, Space Marine, by banning its republication on grounds of heresy; so tattered old copies usually
cost a lot of eBay. Like many sorcerers, Ian lives with a female black cat in a tiny village in rural England.
His Hungarian publisher and his Spanish translator maintain a web-site to honour the almost unknown
though admirable and peculiar Colombian poet Miguel Ajeno.

Roberto Quaglia from Genoa usually lives in Bucharest speaking Romanian, although he can now also
imitate enough Russian to make Russians believe that he’s speaking Russian. As a result, he recently
posed for the Russian Penthouse. Admiration of Bob Sheckley caused Roberto to invite Sheckley to
Italy, then drive him around Europe for several years in his big white Mercedes labelled
www.surrealism.info until the letters fell off the rear window. Ex-barman, prize photographer, and
one-time surrealist City Councillor for Genoa, Roberto’s hilarious double novel Bread, Butter and
Paradoxine is available in English – and he’s Vice-President of the European SF Association, which
presides over the Eurocons held in different countries such as Bulgaria and Ukraine recently, and in 2007