"Burning Chrome" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gibson Walter)

BURNING CHROME

William Gibson
1986






The Gernsback Continuum

Mercifully, the whole thing is starting to fade, to be-
come an episode. When I do still catch the odd glimpse,
it's peripheral; mere fragments of mad-doctor chrome,
confining themselves to the corner of the eye. There was
that flying-wing liner over San Francisco last week, but
it was almost translucent. And the shark-fin roadsters
have gotten scarcer, and freeways discreetly avoid un-
folding themselves into the gleaming eighty lane
monsters I was forced to drive last month in my rented
Toyota. And I know that none of it will follow me to
New York; my vision is narrowing to a single wave-
length of probability. I've worked hard for that. Tele-
vision helped a lot.
I suppose it started in London, in that bogus Greek
taverna in Battersea Park Road, with lunch on Cohen's
corporate tab. Dead steam-table food and it took them
thirty minutes to find an ice bucket for the retsina.
Cohen works for Barris-Watford, who publish big,
trendy "trade" paperbacks: illustrated histories of the
neon sign, the pinball machine, the windup toys of Oc-
cupied Japan. I'd gone over to shoot a series of shoe
ads; California girls with tanned legs and frisky Day-
Gb jogging shoes had capered for me down the
escalators of St. John's Wood and across the platforms
of Tooting Bec. A lean and hungry young agency had
decided that the mystery of London Transport would
sell waffle-tread nylon runners. They decide; I shoot.
And Cohen, whom I knew vaguely from the old days in
New York, had invited me to lunch the day before I was
due out of Heathrow. He brought along a very fash-
ionably dressed young woman named Dialta Downes,
who was virtually chinless and evidently a noted pop-art
historian. In retrospect, I see her walking in beside
Cohen under a floating neon sign that flashes THIS
WAY LIES MADNESS in huge sans-serif capitals.
Cohen introduced us and explained that Dialta was
the prime mover behind the latest Barris-Watford pro-
ject, an illustrated history of what she called "Ameri-