"Gwyneth Jones - Red Sonja and Lessingham in Dreamland" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jones Gwyneth)

Out in the lobby there were people coming and going. It was lunchtime, the lifts were busy. "Sonja"
noticed a round-shouldered geek of a little man making for the entrance to the clinic. She wondered idly
if that could be "Lessingham."
She would drop out of the group. The adventure with "Lessingham" was over, and there was no one
else for her. She needed to start again. The doctor knew he'd lost a customer, that was why he'd been so
open with her today. He certainly guessed, too, that she'd lose no time in signing on somewhere else on
the semi-medical fringe. What a fraud all that therapy talk was! He'd never have dared to play the sex
change trick on her, except that he knew she was an addict. She wasn't likely to go accusing him of
unprofessional conduct. Oh, he knew it all. But his contempt didn't trouble her.
So, she had joined the inner circle. She could trust Dr. Hamilton's judgment. He had the telltales: he
would know. She recognized with a feeling of mild surprise that she had become a statistic, an element in
a fashionable social concern: an epidemic flight into fantasy, inadequate personalities; unable to
deal with the reality of normal human sexual relations.... But that's crazy, she thought. / don't hate
men, and I don't believe "Lessingham" hates women. There's nothing psychotic about what we're
doing. We're making a consumer choice. Virtual sex is easier, that's all. Okay, it's convenience
food. It has too much sugar, and a certain blandness. But when a product comes along, that is
cheaper, easier, and more fun than the original version, of course people are going to buy it.
The lift was full. She stood, drab bodies packed around her, breathing the stale air. Every face was
a mask of dull endurance. She closed her eyes. The caravanserai walls rose strangely from the empty
plain....

-end-


About the author:
Gwyneth Jones, whose first SF novel, Divine Endurance, was the harbinger of the British SF
renaissance of the late 1980s and early 1990s, has become in the intervening years the leading feminist
SF writer of her generation, and more. In some circles, she is considered simply the best of the younger
generation of British SF writers. Her novel, White Queen, one of the first winners of the James Tiptree,
Jr. Award for "gender bending" SF, is a major science fiction work of the 1990s; some of her fantasy
stories, collected in Seven Tales and a Fable, won a World Fantasy Award in 1996, as did one of her
short stories. This story, from Ellen Datlow's anthology, Off LimitsтАФwhich is not an anthology of alien
sex stories but rather fantastic investigations of human sexualityтАФ takes on the complexities of computer
online sex. Never lacking in ambition, Jones addresses role playing and the issues of control, bondage,
and therapy. In real life, says Jones in an afterword, "sexual negotiations are costly and dangerous," so a
lot of people would prefer escape. The story also makes a provocative contrast to Terry Bisson's "In the
Upper Room," and an interesting comparison to Allen Steele's "Doblin's Lecture."