"Ken MacLeod - A Case of Consilience" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacLeod Ken)

MacLeod, Ken - A Case of Consilience




A Case of Consilience
KEN MacLEOD
From Hartwell, David - Year's Best SF 11 (2006) and Gardner Dozois - The Year's Best Science Fiction
23rd Annual Collection (2006)

Ken MacLeod (kenmacleod.blogspot.com) lives in West Lothian, Scotland. He became prominent in the
late 1990s with his early novels, the four politically engaged books in the Fall Revolution series, that
began in the UK in 1995 with The Star Fraction, and in the U.S. in 1999 with the reprinting of The
Cassini Division. His next three novels are The Engines of Light trilogy, and his latest novels are
Newton's Wake (subtitled A Space Opera in the UK in 2004) and Learning the World (2005, subtitled
or, The New Intelligence: A Scientific Romance). He wrote an essay on "The New Space Opera" for
Locus in 2004, and is generally regarded as central to British space opera in this generation. He has
published very little short fiction.

"A Case of Consilience " was published in Nova Scotia. It is in dialogue with James Blish's classic, "A
Case of Conscience." The first twist is that MacLeod's Christian, Donald Maclntyre, is a Scots
Presbyterian, not a Catholic priest. The second is that the intelligent alien is a vast subterranean mycoid
тАФa fungus. Maclntyre's belief motivates him to bring the gospel to the alien. But then there is the alien
point of view.




When you say it's Providence that brought you here," said Qasim, "what I hear are two things: it's bad
luck, and it's not your fault."

The Rev. Donald Maclntyre, M.A. (Div.), Ph.D., put down his beer can and nodded.

"That's how it sometimes feels," he said. "Easy for you to say, of course."

Qasim snorted. "Easy for anybody! Even a Muslim would have less difficulty here. Let alone a Buddhist
or Hindu."

"Do tell," said Donald. "No, what's really galling is that there are millions of Christians who would take
all this in their stride. Anglicans. Liberals. Catholics. Mormons, for all I know. And my brethren in the,
ah, narrower denominations could come up with a dozen different rationalizations before breakfast, all
of them heretical did they but know itтАФwhich they don't, thank the Lord and their rigid little minds, so
their lapses are no doubt forgiven through their sheer ignorance. So it's given to me to wrestle with. Thus


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 MacLeod, Ken - A Case of Consilience

a work of Providence. I think."