"Oswald Bastable - 03 - The Steel Tsar" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moorcock Michael)

'Our minds can hold only so much,' she said. 'As I've mentioned before,
sometimes we do suffer from genuine
amnesia, or at least a kind of blocking out of much of our memory. It is one of
the ways in which we are
sometimes able to enter time-streams not open to the general run of
chrononauts.'
'Time makes you forget?' I said ironically.
'Exactly.'
'As someone who affects anarchism,' I said. 'I'm curious about the references
here to Kerensky's Russia. Could
it be that-?'
She stopped me. 'I can't tell you any more until you have read the
manuscript.'

'A world in which the Bolshevik Revolution did not take place. He hints at it
in the other story . . .' I had often
wondered what the Russian Empire would have been like in such circumstances, for
one of my other abiding
interests is in the Soviet Union and its literature, which was so badly stifled
under Stalin.
'You must read what Bastable has written, then ask me some questions. I'll
answer where I can. It is up to you,
he says, how much "shape" you give it, as a professional writer. But he trusts
you to preserve the basic spirit of the
memoir.'
'I shall do my best.'
And here, for better or worse, is Oswald Bastable's third memoir. I have done
as little work on it as possible
and present it to the reader pretty much as I received it. As to its
authenticity, that is for you to judge.


Michael Moorcock, Three Chimneys, Yorkshire, England.
June 1980






Part One
An English Airshipman's Adventures in the Great War of 1941

1. The Manner of My Dying

It was, I think, my fifth day at sea when the revelation came. Just as at
some stage of his existence a man can
reach a particular decision about how to lead his life, so can he come to a
similar decision about how to encounter
death. He can face the grim simple truth of his dying, or he can prefer to lose