"Ian McDonald - The Best and the Rest of James Joyce" - читать интересную книгу автора (McDonald Ian)

THE BEST AND THE REST OF JAMES
JOYCE
By Ian McDonald

British author Ian McDonald is an ambitious and daring writer with a wide range and
an impressive amount of talent. His first story was published in 1982, and since then
he has appeared with some frequency in Interzone, Isaac AsimovтАЩs Science Fiction
Magazine, Zenith, Other Edens, Amazing, and elsewhere. He was nominated for
the John W. Campbell Award in 1985, and in 1989 he won the Locus тАЬBest First
NovelтАЭ Award for his Desolation Road. He won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1992
for his novel King of Morning, Queen of Day. His other books include the novel
Out on Blue Six and a collection of his short fiction, Empire Dreams. His most
recent books include a new novel, The Broken Land, and a new collection,
Speaking in Tongues, as well as several graphic novels. He is at work on another
new novel, tentatively entitled Necroville. Born in Manchester, England, in 1960,
McDonald has spent most of his life in Northern Ireland, and now lives and works in
Belfast. In the daring, playful, and lushly inventive story that follows, he gives us a
look (or a succession of different looks) at a world-famous writer as youтАЩve never
seen him beforeтАФin fact, as no oneтАЩs ever seen him before . . .

****

Aboard His Britannic MajestyтАЩs air-dreadnought William and Mary as it leaves the
Command Holdfast buried beneath the cratered mudscape once known as London
in the one-hundred-and-first year of the war are 112 ratings, 66 officers, and six
highly important, highly secret passengers: Air Lord Blennerhasset, Admiralty Lord
Van Loos, Marshall Valery-Petain, Director Ames, Sub-Academician Giorgio Joyce
and his father, senior Acade-mician James Joyce. Reinforced concrete bombproof
doors open as William and Mary rises cautiously, every sense tuned, toward the
perpetual rainclouds that discharge their poisoned drizzle over the mudfields of
Staines. Despite two atomic cannon, a complement of ten turret-mounted 18-inch
guns and a veritable arsenal of lighter artillery and rocket racks, the artillerymen
stand-ing by their weapons and the glider-marines ready at the launch tubes are
nervous. They have heard stories of dirigibles, dreadnoughts even, surprised and
destroyed attaining altitude by marauding Tsarist airships lying grounded, half buried
in the mud. For the lynchpin of His MajestyтАЩs airfleet to lift unescorted, unprotected,
into potentially hostile airspace . . .

They have long suspected that the High Command locked up in their War
Room half a mile under Command Holdfast have gone insane: now they have proof.
But His MajestyтАЩs Air Lords need not justify, to the crew of William and Mary their
decision that a lone dirigible might escape the attention a dreadnought with full escort
would warrant. Their destination, the very fact that they are carrying passengers,
have been kept secret from them. But seeing the cindered cities of the midlands
slipping away far beneath their armoured glass observation bullтАЩs-eyes, they know
that their course is northward. A combined services mission, perhaps, supporting
the belea-guered 19th Army bogged down in melting permafrost north of Bergen, or
a search-and-destroy mission on Tsarist submarine traffic across the Barents Sea.
Maybe William and Mary has been sent to rendezvous with the remnant of the
Royal Dutch Airfleet stationed at Scapa Flo Holdfast and destroy the Tsarist North