"A Modest Proposal For The Perfection Of Nature" - читать интересную книгу автора (McIntyre Vonda N)

McIntyre, Vonda - A Modest Proposal for the Perfection of NatureA Modest
Proposal for the Perfection of Nature
VONDA N. MclNTYRE
From Hartwell, David - Year's Best SF 11 (2006)
Vonda N. Mclntyre (www.vondanmcintyre.com) lives in Seattle, Washington. The
biography at her website by Eileen Gunn is a delightful tissue of moonshine. She
attended the original Clarion workshop in Pennsylvania at the start of the
1970s, and thereofter founded the original Seattle Clarion. She became famous
for her innovative short fiction and for her novel Dreamsnake (1977), and then
for her bestselling Star Trek novels in the 1980s, for her Starfarers novels in
the early 1990s, and for her Nebula Awardwinning The Moon and the Sun (1997).
Sometime in the early 1980s she stopped writing short fiction, so a year such as
2005, in which two Mclntyre stories were published, is rare.
"A Modest Proposal" was published in Nature. The author says that the full title
includes "for the Perfection of Nature." It has the same finely controlled,
moderate, reasonable, deadpan tone as its literary model by Jonathan Swift. So
it is possible that someone could take it seriously as a good idea. But remember
Swift's proposal to slaughter and eat the poor, and don't.



The crop grows like endless golden silk. Wave after wave rushes across plains,
between mountains, through valleys, in a tsunami of light.
Its harvest is perfection. It fills the nutritional needs of every human being.
It adapts to our tongues, creating the taste, texture and satisfaction of
comfort food or dessert, crisp vegetables or icy lemonade, sea cucumber or big
game. It's the pinnacle of the genetic engineer's art.
It's the last and only living member of the plant kingdom on Earth.
Solar cells cover slopes too steep and peaks too high for the monoculture. The
solar arrays flow in long, wide swaths of glass, gleaming with a subtle
iridescence, collecting sunlight. Our civilization never runs short of power.
The flood of grain drowns marsh and desert, forest and plain, bird and beast and
insect. Land must serve to produce the crop; creatures only nibble and trample
and damage it, diverting resources from the service of human beings. Even the
immortality of rats and cockroaches has failed.
The grain stops at the ocean's beach. No rivers muddy the sea's surface or break
the shoreline. The grain and the cities require fresh water, and divert it
before it wastes itself in the sea.
The tides wash up and back, smoothing the clean silver sand, leaving it bare of
tangled seaweed, of foraging seabirds or burrowing clams, of the brown organic
froth that dirtied it in earlier times. Now and then the waves erase a line of
human footprints, but these are very rare.
The air is clear of any bite of iodine, any hint of pollution or decay.
The sea undulates, blue and green, clear as new glass. Sunlight shimmers on its
surface and dapples the bare sea floor. Underwater turbines cast shadows on the
sand. The tides power the turbines, tapping the force of gravity.
Far from shore, where its colonies will not interrupt the vista of clear water,
a single species of cyanobacterium photosynthesizes near the surface, pumping
oxygen into the crystalline air, controlling the level of carbon dioxide. Its
design copes easily with the increasing saltiness of the sea.