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

often vanished for weeks.

Jules' son Michel grew up to be a holy terror, visiting upon Jules all the
accumulated karma of his own lack of filial piety. The teenage Michel was
in trouble with cops, was confined in an asylum, was even banished onto a
naval voyage. Michel ended up producing silent films, not very
successfully. Jules' stepdaughters made middle-class marriages and vanished
into straitlaced Catholic domesticity, where they cooked up family feuds
against their scapegrace halfbrother.

Verne's work is marked by an obsession with desert islands. Mysterious
Isles, secret hollow volcanoes in the mid-Atlantic, vast ice-floes that
crack off and head for the North Pole. Verne never really made it into the
bosom of society. He did his best, and played the part whenever onstage,
but one senses that he knew somehow that he was Not Like The Others and
might be torn to pieces if his facade cracked. One notes his longing for
the freedom of empty seas and skies, for a submarine full of books that can
sink below storm level into eternal calm, for the hollow shell fired into
the pristine unpeopled emptiness of circumlunar space.

From within his index-card lighthouse, the isolation began to tell on the
aging Jules. He had now streamlined the production of novels to industrial
assembly-work, so much so that lying gossip claimed he used a troop of
ghostwriters. He could field-strip a Verne book blindfolded, with a greased
slot for every part - the daffy scientist, the comic muscleman or acrobat,
the ordinary Joe who asks all the wide-eyed questions, the woman who
scarcely exists and is rescued from suttee or sharks or red Indians.
Sometimes the machine is the hero - the steam-driven elephant, the flying
war-machine, the gigantic raft - sometimes the geography: caverns,
coal-mines, icefloes, darkest Africa.

Bored, Jules entered politics, and joined the Amiens City Council, where he
was quickly shuffled onto the cultural committee. It was a natural sinecure
and he did a fair job, getting electric lights installed, widening a few
streets, building a municipal theater that everyone admired and no one
attended. His book sales slumped steadily. The woods were full of guys
writing scientific romances by now - people who actually knew how to write
novels, like Herbert Wells. The folk-myth quotes Verne on Wells' _First Men
In The Moon_: "Where is this gravityrepelling metal? Let him show it to
me." If not the earliest, it is certainly the most famous exemplar of the
hard-SF writer's eternal plaint against the fantasist.

The last years were painful. A deranged nephew shot Verne in the foot,
crippling him; it was at this time that he wrote one of his rare late
poems, the "Sonnet to Morphine." He was to have a more than nodding
acquaintance with this substance, though in those days of children's
teething-laudanum no one thought much of it. He died at seventy-seven in
the bosom of his vigorously quarrelling family, shriven by the Church.
Everyone who had forgotten about him wrote obits saying what a fine fellow
he was. This is the Verne everyone thinks that they remember: the