"John Kessel - The Last American" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kessel John)

pain. This crude weapon was used for crowd control or to subdue suspects
of crimes.

When Ambassador for the New Humanity Mona Vaidyanathan first
visited Steele, she asked what the queer black object was. Steele told her
that it had been the most frequent means of communication between his
father and himself. тАЬWhen I was ten years old,тАЭ he told her, тАЬwithin a single
month my father used that on me sixteen times.тАЭ

тАЬThatтАЩs horrible,тАЭ she said.

тАЬNot for a person with a moral imagination,тАЭ Steele replied.

In this new biography of Steele, Fiona 13, the Grand Lady of
Reproductions, presents the crowning achievement of her long career
recreating lives for the Cognosphere. Andrew Steele, when he died in
2100, had come to exemplify the twenty-first century, and his people, in a
way that goes beyond the metaphorical. Drawing on every resource of the
posthuman biographer, from heuristic modeling to reconstructive DNA
sampling to forensic dreaming, Ms. 13 has produced this labor of, if not
love, then obsession, and I, for one, am grateful for it.

Fiona presents her new work in a hybrid form. Comparatively little of
this biography is subjectively rendered. Instead, harking back to a bygone
era, Fiona breaks up the narrative with long passages of textтАФstrings of
printed code that must be read with the eyes. Of course this adds the
burden of learning the code to anyone seeking to experience her
recreation, but an accelerated prefrontal intervention is packaged with the
biography. Fiona maintains that text, since it forces an artificial linearity on
experience, stimulates portions of the left brain that seldom function in
conventional experiential biographies. The result is that the person
undergoing the life of Andrew Steele both lives through significant
moments in SteeleтАЩs subjectivity, and is drawn out of the stream of sensory
and emotional reaction to contemplate the significance of that experience
from the point of view of a wise commentator.

I trust I do not have to explain the charms of this form to those of you
reading this review, but I recommend the experience to all cognizant
entities who still maintain elements of curiosity in their affect repertoire.

****

CHILDHOOD

Appropriately for a man who was to so personify the twenty-first
century, Dwight Andrew Steele was born on January 1, 2001. His mother,
Rosamund Sanchez Steele, originally from Mexico, was a lab technician at
the forestry school at North Carolina State University; his father, Herbert
Matthew Steele, was a land developer and on the board of the PlanterтАЩs
Bank and Trust. Both of SteeleтАЩs parents were devout Baptists and