"Ken Macleod - Fall Revolution 3 - The Cassini Division" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacLeod Ken)

This is a reasonably entertaining book. The plot concerns the efforts of humans, assisted by
advanced technology including everyone's fad favorite, nanotechnology, to combat sentient 'post-
human' entities who developed from a melding of human minds with computer technology. This
book contains a lot of entertaining ideas and suffers from MacLeod's tendency to pack a large
volume of material into a relatively short book. Plot and characterization suffer considerably as a
result.
 About the Author
Ken MacLeod graduated with a B.Sc. in Zoology from Glasgow University in 1976. Following
research in biomechanics at Brunel University, he worked in a variety of manual and clerical jobs
while completing an M.Phil. thesis. He previously worked as a computer analyst/programmer in
Edinburgh, but is now a full-time writer. He lives in West Lothian, Scotland, with his wife and
children, and is the author of two previous novels, The Star Fraction, runner-up for the Arthur C.
Clarke Award, and The Stone Canal.
Contents
About the Author
1 Looking Backward
2 After London
3 News From Nowhere
4 The State of the Art
5 The Coming Race
6 Valhalla
8 City of the Living Dead
9 A Modern Utopia
10 In the Days of the Comet
11 Looking Forward
 1 Looking Backward
THERE ARE, still, still photographs of the woman who gate-crashed the party on the
observation deck of the Casa Azores, one evening in the early summer of 2303. They show her
absurdly young about twenty, less than a tenth of her real age and tall; muscles built-up by
induction isotonics and not dragged down by gravity; hair a black nebula; dark skin, epicanthic
eyelids, a flattish nose, and thin lips whose grin is showing broad white teeth. She carries in her
right hand a litre bottle of carbon-copy Lagrange 2046. Her left hand is at her shoulder, and on its
crooked forefinger is slung a bolero jacket the colour of old gold, matching a gown whose almost
circular skirts hem is swinging about her ankles as she strides in. What looks like a small monkey
is perched on her right, bare, shoulder.
Something flashed. I blinked away annular afterimages, and glared at a young man clad in
cobalt-blue pyjamas who lowered a boxy apparatus of lenses and reflectors with a brief apologetic
smile as he ducked away into the crowd. Apart from him, my arrival had gone unnoticed.
Although the deck was a good hundred metres square, it didnтАЩt have room for everybody who was
invited, let alone everybody whoтАЩd turned up. The natural progress of the evening, with people
hitting off and drifting away to more private surroundings, would ease the pressure, but not yet.
There was room enough, however, for a variety of activities: close dancing, huddled eating,
sprawled drinking, intense talking; and for a surprising number of children to scamper among them
all. Cunningly focused sound systems kept each cluster of revellers relatively content with, and
compact in, their particular ambience. The local fashions seemed to fit the party, loose and fluid
but close to the body: women in saris or shifts, men in pyjama-suits or serious-looking togas and
tabards. The predominant colours were the basic sea-silk tones of blue, green, red, and white. My
own outfit, though distinctive, didnтАЩt seem out of place.
The centre of the deck was taken up by the ten-metre-wide pillar of the buildingтАЩs air shaft.