"M. John Harrison - Suicide Coast" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison John M)

suicide coast
M. JOHN HARRISON

M. John Harrison is not a prolific writer, and, in America, at least, is still
little known to the SF readership at large. In Britain, however, he has
been an influential figure behind the scenes since the days of Michael
Moor-cockтАЩs New Worlds in the late тАШ60s, and has had a disproportionate
effect with a relatively small body of work; in fact, recently he was given
the Richard Evans Memorial Award, a new award designed to honor just
that sort of career and reputation. Harrison made his first sale to New
Worlds in 1968, and by 1975 had sold two science fiction novels, The
Committed Men and The Centauri Device, and. published a collection of
his early short work, The Machine in Shaft Ten and Other Stories. It was
the stories and novels he produced during the 70s and early тАШ80s,
though, on the shifting and amorphous borderland of science fiction and
fantasy, that would prove to be his most influential genre-related work. In
The Pastel City, A Storm of Wings, In Viriconium, and in the stories that
would go into the collection Viriconium Nights, he produced a sort of
bizarre, heightened, intellectual, stylishly perverse sword & sorcery, kin
to the mannered, elegant, fin de si├иcle science fantasy of WolfeтАЩs The
Book of the New Sun, AldissтАЩs The Malacia Tapestry, and VanceтАЩs The
Dying Earth, creating a mood of autumnal sadness and of the evocative
strangeness and dislocation of a world seen through the lens of
millennia of elapsed time that is similar to the emotional tone and color
of those books, and sustains it with com-parable skill.

In recent years, he has turned away from genre work to produce
some of the best books of his career in a sequence of ostensibly
тАЬmainstreamтАЭ novels (although, ironically, most of them contain subtle
fantastic elements) such as Climbers, The Course of the Heart, and, most
recently, the critically acclaimed Signs of Life. In the intense and
lapidarian story that follows, a rare foray into core science fiction, he
takes us to a gray, rain-swept, rather dispirited future London, for a sharp
lesson in the difference that Passion makes in all our lives, no matter
where we choose to invest it.

****
F
our-thirty in the afternoon in a converted warehouse near Mile End
under-ground station. Heavy, persistent summer rain was falling on the roof.
Inside, the air was still and humid, dark despite the fluorescent lights. It
smelled of sweat, dust, gymnastsтАЩ chalk. Twenty-five feet above the thick
blue crash-mats, a boy with dreadlocks and baggy knee-length shorts was
supporting his entire weight on two fingers of his right hand. The muscles of
his upper back, black and shiny with sweat, fanned out exotically with the
effort, like the hood of a cobra or the shell of a crab. One leg trailed behind
him for balance. He had raised the other so that the knee was almost
touching his chin. For two or three minutes he had been trying to get the ball
of his foot in the same place as his fingers. Each time he moved, his center
of gravity shifted and he had to go back to a resting position. Eventually he