"David Langford - The Spear of the Sun" - читать интересную книгу автора (Langford David)

the spear of the sun rebounded to strike the murderer blind." The little priest shivered. "Yes, the humour
of God can be cruel. Astron's easy arrogance saw the motes in all men's eyes, and now at last found the
beam in his ownтАж.
"Picture him now, flinging his suit this way and that with those clever little gas-jets, with nightmare
pressing in as he realizes he cannot find the ship in the endless dark. And then comes the course
correction and he has no more chance. And now that void which he worshipped in his heart has become
his vast sarcophagus."
"I think," said Flambeau slowly, "that brandy would be a good thing. Mother of God. All that from a
missing ring."
"Not only that." said Father Brown, "The viewport crystal was slightly distorted by the heat of the
beam's passage. I said the stars looked twisted, but you thought I was being sentimental."


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About the author:
David Langford is a physicist and science fiction fan, who has won many Hugo Awards both for his monthly fanzine,
Ansible (also excerpted as a monthly column in Interzone, and online: http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/SF-archives/Ansible/)
and as Best Fan Writer. He is the most famous humorous writer in the SF fan world today. His fan writings have been
collected in Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (Langford is deaf). He is also the author of several books of nonfiction and
a hard-science fiction novel, The Space Eater. His occasional professional short stories (as opposed to the parodies
he publishes in fanzines) are usually witty but entirely serious hard SF. This story is something of a departure for him,
though not in its wit. It is an outrageous alternate universe story in which the distinguished writer G. K. Chesterton, a
contemporary of H. G. Wells, who is most famous for his Catholic writings and his mystery fiction (the Father Brown
series) but who also wrote fantasy (The Man Who Was Thursday) and SF (The Napoleon of Notting Hill) is the
founder of genre SF. It was published (with especially wonderful illustrations, I might add) in Interzone. Interzone has
done a number of alternate universe stories in the mode of, and/or featuring the characters of, the founders of SF such
as Wells and Verne, by many writers including Brian Stableford, Kim Newman, and Stephen Baxter over the past few
years.