"Philip Jose Farmer - Riverworld 3 - The Dark Design" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

THE DARK DESIGNTHE DARK DESIGN
Copyright ┬й 1977 by Philip Jose Farmer.
Though some of the names in The Riverworld Series are fictional, the
characters
are or were real. You may not be mentioned, but you're here.
To Sam Long and my godson David, son of Doctor Doctor
And still the Weaver plies his loom, whose warp
and woof is wretched Man Weaving th' unpattern'd dark design, so dark we
doubt it owns a plan.
-The Kasidah of Haji Abdu al- Yazdi
"Sentence first-verdict afterwards."
-Alice in Wonderland

Foreword


THE BOOK AT HAND IS VOLUME III OF THE RIVERWORLD SERIES.
Originally, it was to be the conclusion of a trilogy. However, the Ms. was
more
than 400,000 words long. Published under one cover, it would be too heavy and
unwieldy for the reader.
Therefore, the publisher and myself decided to cut it into two. Volume TV, The
Magic Labyrinth, will follow this book. It will definitely conclude this phase
of the series, explain all the mysteries set forth in the first three volumes,
tie up all ends in a knot, Gordian or otherwise.
Any novels about the Riverworld after volume IV are not to be considered as
part
of the mainstream of the series. These will be the "sidestream," stories not
directly concerned with mystery and the quests of the first three. My decision
to write these is based on my belief-and that of many others-that the
Riverworld
concept is too big to compress within four volumes. After all, we have a
planet
on which a single river, or a very long and narrow sea, runs for 16,090,000
kilometers, or about 10,000,000 miles. More than thirty-six billion people
live
along its banks, human beings who existed from the Old Stone Age through the
first part of the Elec-tronic Age.
There is not room in the first four volumes to chronicle many events which
might
interest the reader. For instance, the resurrectees were not distributed along
The River according to the chronological sequence in which they had been born
on
Earth. There was a considerable mixture of races and nationalities from
different centuries. Take as an example one of the many thousands of blocs
along
the banks. This would be in an area ten kilometers long, and the people
comprising it would be 60 percent 3rd-century A.D. Chinese, 39 percent
17th-century A.D. Russians, and 1 percent men and women from anywhere and
anytime.