"Stephen Golden - Last Ghost" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goldin Stephen)

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STEPHEN GOLDIN

The Last Ghost

STEPHEN GOLDIN was born February 28, 1947, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He
began writing at the age of thirteen and first sold a story when he was
eighteen.
He received his bachelor's degree in astronomy from UCLA in 1968 and then
was employed for almost three years as a physicist/space scientist for Navy
Space Systems. He left the Navy's employment to become, in his words, "a
fulltime, starving writer." He is a member of Science Fiction Writers of
America,
World Future Society, Astronomical Society of the Pacific, and the SFWA
Speakers' Bureau. His hobby is zookeeping, and !he current inventory of his
menage lists cats, mice, chipmunks, fish, snakes, a rat, an iguana, a
chameleon, a land crab, a hamster, a parrot and an alligator.

Goldin edited the forthcoming collection The Alien Condition, and he
assisted
editor David Gerrold with the collections Protostars and Generation. He has
two
novels in progress.

His short story "Sweet Dreams, Melissa," concerning a new-generation
computer brought up to think it's a little girl, was anthologized in Best
SF: 7966,
edited by Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss, and also in The Eleventh Galaxy
Reader, edited by Frederik Pohl.

"The Last Ghost" was a finalist in the balloting for the 1971 Nebula

Awards. It is a reminder that the ultimate loneliness is not the experience
of the
last man alive, but the last man dead.

Eternity is a terrible place to endure alone.

He is the last of his kind, if he is a "he. " (Gender is an arbitrary
difference. All things are eventually the same-and in eternity, eventually
equals always.) He must once have had a name, a handle to his soul,
but that was back before the eternity/instant when he had existed in
corporeal form. He tries to think about things as he had known them,
and finds he can't. He tries to think about things as they are, and finds
he can't quite manage that, either. The will-be is far beyond his powers
of contemplation.