"Mark S. Geston - Lords Of The Starship" - читать интересную книгу автора (Geston Mark S)

can easily see that the number of works begins to slacken around 1483. The
hopes echoed in writings published after that date are almost identical to
previous works, but they are fiercer, more emphatic, more desperate in tone.
This decline continues until there were simply no more books printed at all;
exactly when this occurred it is impossible to tell because of the varying and
usually inaccurate calendars employed in later days.
At first, one might suspect some monstrous plot designed to remove all
pessimistic literature from the hands of the people, but we have enough
evidence to surmise that almost no restrictions of this nature were ever
imposed. It would seem that people had been so happy, so incredibly content
that when things took a change for the worse, they could only ignore it. One
can almost envision those last wretched authors fighting battles with their
own minds that might have rivaled the chaos that was raging beneath their very
windows. Their incessant denial of the obvious in favor of the broken memories
of the past led, in many cases, to out and out insanity.
And then, one supposes, people just stopped writing and turned their
attentions to darker things.
The age that followed this collapse, the one which we are in now, has
been given many names, none of them really miserable enough: the Darkness, the
Pit, the Black Years, Badtime, and so on. For the year 1483 was merely the
beginning, when the first vital parts began to fail. Separating this date and
the present, there lie an indeterminate number of years during which things
not only failed but changed and sometimes even grew.
In man, the change consisted, I think, of a loss; of what I cannot say,
but the results of it are the ghastly societies of our times.
In the World, the change was more visible, or it would be to a citizen
of the First World, had he the misfortune to be alive now. Our World has been
twisted, warped, and torn so utterly out of shape that it bears virtually no
physical resemblance to the First World. The people and some of their stories
linger on, but that is all. Just how this monstrous dislocation was
accomplished is probably beyond human ken, but its fact is undeniable; the
maps and statistics in First World volumes could not all be complete
fabrication, yet none of them bears the slightest resemblance to any portion
of the World today. . . .
_Five pages here seem to be missing or censored out_.
How can I sum up an uncalculated age of confusion and darkness in a few
pages? I cannot. My mind reels and stumbles as each passing minute reminds me
of yet another tragedy, another catastrophe that my readings have prodded from
my imagination with their mindless optimism, and which my direct experience
has more than confirmed the possibility of. I am sickened and humiliated that
the fate of my race and my World should come to such a dreadful and apparently
permanent juncture.


_Fragment of a manuscript found during the opening of the Black Library
at Calnarith_.