"Leinster, Murray - The Mad Planet" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

The Mad PlanetThe Mad Planet
by Murray Leinster



Editor's Notes by Blake Linton Wilfong
This story from 1920 has everything: action-packed adventure set in
a distant future of giant insects and savage men, loads of science
(including evolutionary biology, entomology, and the greenhouse effect),
and passages of thought-provoking philosophy and haunting poetic majesty.
It is also an example of the familiar story line mythologist Joseph
Campbell outlined in his bestseller The Hero with a Thousand Faces: "A
hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of
supernatural wonder; fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive
victory is won; the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with
the power to bestow boons on his fellow man." This basic formula, Campbell
explained, has been used and reused with countless variations since the
dawn of storytelling. Yet it is as exciting today as it was millennia ago.
Indeed, "The Mad Planet" was so popular with readers of Argosy
magazine that Leinster followed it the next year with a sequel called "The
Red Dust". A second sequel, "Nightmare Planet", appeared in 1953! Leinster
combined altered versions of the three stories into one book, The
Forgotten Planet (1954).

In his lifetime of 20 years, Burl had never wondered what his grandfather had
thought about his surroundings. The grandfather had suffered an untimely,
unpleasant end, which Burl remembered vaguely as a fading succession of screams
as he was carried away at his mother's top speed.
Burl had rarely thought of the old man since. Surely he had never wondered what
his great-grandfather thought, and there certainly never entered his head such a
hypothetical question as what his many-times-great-grandfather--say of the year
1920--would have thought of Burl's world.
He was treading cautiously over a brownish carpet of fungus growth, creeping
furtively toward the stream he generically called "water". Towering overhead,
three man-heights high, great toadstools hid the grayish sky from sight.
Clinging to their foot-thick stalks were other fungi, parasites on growths that
had once been parasites themselves.
Burl was a slender young man wearing a single garment twisted about his waist,
made from the wing-fabric of a great moth his tribesmen had slain as it emerged
from its cocoon. His fair skin showed no trace of sunburn. He had never seen the
sun, though the sky was rarely hidden from view save by the giant fungi which,
along with monster cabbages, were the only growing things he knew. Clouds
usually spread overhead, and when they did not, perpetual haze made the sun but
an indefinitely brighter part of the sky, never a sharply edged ball of fire.
Fantastic mosses, misshapen fungi, colossal molds and yeasts, comprised the
landscape about him.
Once, as he dodged through the forest of huge toadstools, his shoulder touched a
cream-colored stalk, giving the whole fungus a tiny shock. Instantly, from the
umbrellalike mass of pulp overhead, a fine, impalpable powder fell on him like
snow. It was the season when toadstools sent out their spores, dropping them at