"Edgar Pangborn - The Golden Horn" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pangborn Edgar)

EDGAR PANGBORN
The Golden Horn

The late Edgar Pangborn is almost forgotten these days, and is rarely ever
mentioned even in historical surveys of the тАШ50s and тАШ60sтАж which is a pity,
since he had a depth and breadth of humanity that have rarely been
matched inside the field or out. Although he was never a particularly prolific
writer (five SF novels, one or two mainstream novels, and a bakerтАЩs dozen
or so of short pieces), he was nevertheless one of that select crew of
underappreciated authors (one thinks of Cordwainer Smith, Fritz Leiber,
Jack Vance, Avram Davidson, Richard McKenna) who have had an
enormous underground effect on the field simply by impressing the hell out
of other writers, and numerous authors-in-the-egg. Pangborn wrote about
тАЬlittle peopleтАЭ for the most part, only rarely focusing on the famous and
powerful. He was one of only a handful of SF writers capable of writing
about small-town or rural people with insight and sympathy (most SF is
urban in orientation, written by city people about city peopleтАФor, when it is
written by people from small towns, they are frequently kids who couldnтАЩt
wait to get out of those small towns and off to the bright lights of the big
cityтАж which often amounts to the same thing, as far as sympathies are
concerned), and he was also one of the few who could get inside the minds
of both the very young and the very old with equal ease and compassion.

PangbornтАЩs masterpiece was Davy, which, in spite of a somewhat
weak ending (or, at least, a final third that doesnтАЩt quite live up to the
two-thirds that came before it), may well be the finest postholocaust novel
ever writtenтАФin my opinion, it is seriously rivaled only by Walter M. Miller,
Jr.тАЩs A Canticle for Leibowitz and John WyndhamтАЩs Re-birth. In any fair
world, Davy alone ought to be enough to guarantee Pangborn a
distin-guished place in the history of the genre, but there were also novels
like A Mirror for ObserversтАФhis International Fantasy Award winner,
somewhat dated now, but still powerful, in which alien observers from two
opposing philosophical camps vie for the soul of a brilliant human
boyтАФand West of the Sun, an underrated novel about the efforts of human
castaways to survive on an alien world, as well as beautifully crafted short
work such as тАЬA Master of Babylon.тАЭ тАЬLongtooth.тАЭ тАЬThe World Is a Sphere,тАЭ
and тАЬAngelтАЩs Egg.тАЭ

The story that follows, тАЬThe Golden Horn,тАЭ was probably PangbornтАЩs
best short work. Although it was later melded into the novel Davy, it stands
well on its own, and its intelligence and wit, its eloquence and power and
compassion, its evocation of moments of both raw beauty and raw horror,
as well as its slyly satirical touches, make it as good a handling of its theme
as has ever been seen in the genre.

Edgar PangbornтАЩs other works include The Judgment of Eve and
The Company of Glory, the mainstream novel The Trial of Castillo Blake,
the collection Good Neighbors and Other Strangers, and the
posthumously published collection Still I Persist in Wondering. After many
years out of print. Davy was reissued this year, by CollierтАФgo out and buy