"Bruce Sterling. Catscan {angl., new}" - читать интересную книгу автора

SFville was a 19th-century village. There's a bronze monument to him back
in the old quarter of town, the Vieux Carre. You know, the part the French
built, back before there were cars.

At midnight he stands there, somewhat the worse for the acid rain and the
pigeons, his blind bronze eyes fixed on a future that has long since passed
him by. SFville's citizenry pass him every day without a thought, their
attention fixed on their daily grind in vast American high-rises; if they
look up, they are intimidated by the beard, the grasped lapel, the flaking
reek of Victorian obsolescence.

Everyone here knows a little about old Jules. The submarine, the moon
cannon, the ridiculously sluggish eighty days. When they strip up the
tarmac, you can still see the cobbles of the streets he laid. It's all
still there, really, the village grid of SFville, where Verne lived and
worked and argued scientific romance with the whippersnapper H.G. Wells.
Those of us who walk these mean streets, and mutter of wrecking balls and
the New Jerusalem, should take the time for a look back. Way back. Let's
forget old Jules for the moment. What about young Jules?

Young Jules Verne was trouble. His father, a prosperous lawyer in the
provincial city of Nantes, was gifted with the sort of son that makes
parents despair. The elder Verne was a reactionary Catholic, given to
frequent solitary orgies with the penitential scourge. He expected the same
firm moral values in his heir.

Young Jules wanted none of this. It's sometimes mentioned in the SF
folktale that Jules tried to run away to sea as a lad. The story goes that
he was recaptured, punished, and contritely promised to travel henceforth
"only in his imagination." It sounds cute. It was nothing of the kind. The
truth of the matter is that the eleven-year-old Jules resourcefully bribed
a cabin-boy of his own age, and impersonated his way onto a French merchant
cruiser bound for the Indies. In those days of child labor, the crew
accepted Jules without hesitation. It was a mere fluke that a neighbor
happened to spot Jules during his escape and informed against him. His
father had to chase him down in a fast chartered steam-launch.

This evidence of mulishness seems to have thrown a scare into the Verne
family, and in years to come they would treat Jules with caution. Young
Jules never really broke with his parents, probably because they were an
unfailing source of funds. Young Jules didn't much hold with wasting time
on day-jobs. He was convinced that he was possessed of genius, despite the
near-total lack of hard evidence.

During his teens and twenties, Jules fell for unobtainable women with the
regularity of clockwork. Again and again he was turned down by middle-class
nymphs whose parents correctly assessed him as an art nut and spoiled
ne'er-do-well.

Under the flimsy pretext of studying law, Jules managed to escape to Paris.