"(ebook txt) William Gibson - Disney Land with the Death Penalty" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gibson William)

In 1811, when Temenggong, a local chief, arrived to resettle Singapura,
the Lion City, with a hundred Malays, the jungle had long since reclaimed
the ruins of a 14th-century city once warred over by Java, Siam, and the
Chinese. A mere eight years later came Sir Stamford Raffles, stepping
ashore amid a squirming tangle of kraits and river pirates, to declare the
place a splendid spot on which to create, from the ground up, a British
trading base. It was Raffles's singular vision to set out the various
colonial jewels in Her Majesty's crown as distinct ethnic quarters: here
Arab Street, here Tanjong Pagar (Chinese), here Serangoon Road (Indian).
And Raffles's theme park boomed for 110 years - a free port, a Boy's Own
fantasy out of Talbot Mundy, with every human spice of Asia set out on a
neatly segmented tray of sturdy British china: "the Manchester of the
East." A very hot ticket indeed.

When the Japanese came and took it all, with dismaying ease, the British
dream-time ended; the postwar years brought rapid decay, and equally rapid
aspirations for independence. In 1965, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew, a
Cambridge-educated lawyer, became the country's first prime minister.
Today's Singapore is far more precisely the result of Lee Kuan Yew's
vision than the Manchester of the East ever was of Sir Stamford Raffles's.
Lee Kuan Yew's People's Action Party has remained in power ever since; has
made, some would say, quite drastically certain that it would do so. The
emblem of the PAP is a cartoony lightning bolt striking within a circle;
Reddi Kilowatt as the mascot of what is, in effect, a single-party
capitalist technocracy.


Finance Data a State Secret

SINGAPORE: A government official, two private economists, and a newspaper
editor will be tried jointly on June 21 for revealing an official
Singaporean secret - its economic growth rate.

Business Times editor Patrick Daniel, Monetary Authority of Singapore
official Shanmugaratnam Tharman, and two economists for regional brokerage
Crosby Securities, Manu Bhaskaran, and Raymond Foo Jong Chen, pleaded not
guilty to violating Singapore's Official Secrets Act.

South China Morning Post, 4/29/93


Reddi Kilowatt's Singapore looks like an infinitely more liveable version
of convention-zone Atlanta, with every third building supplied with a
festive party-hat by the designer of Loew's Chinese Theater. Rococo
pagodas perch atop slippery-flanked megastructures concealing enough cubic
footage of atria to make up a couple of good-sized Lagrangian-5 colonies.
Along Orchard Road, the Fifth Avenue of Southeast Asia, chocka-block with
multi-level shopping centers, a burgeoning middle class shops ceaselessly.
Young, for the most part, and clad in computer-weathered cottons from the