"James P. Hogan - Giants 4 - Entoverse" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

inaugurated a campaign to retard Earth's progress toward rediscovery of the
sciences and advanced civilization, while they themselves absorbed Thurien
technology and gained autonomy over their own affairs. From its beginnings,
they altered the course of Earth's history by infiltrating agents, fully human
in form, to spread beliefs in magic and superstition, and to found irrational
mass movements that would keep Earth impotent by diverting its energies away
from the path by which real knowledge is acquired.
As the confidence and arrogance of the Jevlenese leaders grew, so did
their resentment of the restraint to their ambitions posed by the Ganymeans,
whose nonviolent ways merely aroused their contempt. Taking advantage of the
innate Ganymean inability to suspect motives, the Jevlenese gained control of
the surveillance operation set up to keep a watch over Earth's development;
while preserving outward appearances of being model prot├йg├йs of the Ganymeans,
they fed the Ganymeans falsified accounts of a militarized Earth about to
burst out from the Solar System, and used this as a pretext for inducing the
Ganymeans to prepare countermeasures. What the Jevlenese planned to do was
seize control of the countermeasures themselves, eliminate their Terran rivals
and repossess the Solar System, and then sweep outward in a wave of
acquisition and conquest across the galaxy, unchecked and unopposed.
But the reappearance of a lost starship from the ancient Ganymean
civilization on Minerva changed everything.
The Ganymean scientific mission ship Shapieron, returning after a
twenty-five-million-year time dilation compounded by a fault in the vessel's
space-time-distorting drive method, came back to the Solar System to find
Minerva gone and a new, terrestrial race spacefaring among the planets. The
"Giants" remained on Earth for six months and mingled harmoniously. But the
most significant outcome of the pooling of the Terran proclivity for intrigue
with alien technical ability was the establishing of the first direct contact
between Earth and Thurien, bypassing the Jevlenese and the millennia-old
surveillance system. The affiance led to a confrontation in which the deceit
and scheming of the Jevlenese was exposed, revealing the network of
infiltrators by which they had endeavored to subvert modern-day Earth after
the attempts to block its technological advancement failed.
The encounter that followed came to be known as the Pseudowar. In it,
the supercomputing entity JEVEX, which managed all of the communications,
information handling, and other vital functions of the Jevlenese worlds, was
penetrated and defeated by a fictional interstellar attack force consisting
entirely of computer-generated imagination. The just-proclaimed "Federation,"
by which the Jevlenese proposed bringing their plans to fruition, collapsed,
JEVEX was shut down, and Jevlen put on a period of probation. The Ganymeans of
the Shapieron, displaced from their own home and time and needing an interval
of respite to adapt to their new circumstances, were installed on Jevlen to
take charge of the rehabilitation. Earth, rid of the corrupt element
responsible for practically all of the more sordid side of its turbulent
history, looked forward to assuming its rightful place in the interstellar
community.
So, once again, after a few more old beliefs had been toppled, what
remained was surely fact, resting on solid foundations. The future could be
faced with assurance.
Nothing more could go wrong, now...