"Kim Stanley Robinson - A History Of The Twentieth Century, With Illustrations" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

A History of the Twentieth Century, with Illustrations
a novelette by Kim Stanley Robinson

"If truth is not to be found on the shelves of the British Museum,
where, I asked myself, picking up a notebook and a pencil, is truth?"
- VIRGINIA WOOLF
Daily doses of bright light markedly improve the mood of people suffering
from depression, so every day at eight in the evening Frank Churchill went
to the clinic on Park Avenue, and sat for three hours in a room
illuminated with sixteen hundred watts of white light. This was not
exactly like having the sun in the room, but it was bright, about the same
as if sixteen bare lightbulbs hung from the ceiling. In this case the
bulbs were probably long tubes, and they were hidden behind a sheet of
white plastic, so it was the whole ceiling that glowed.
He sat at a table and doodled with a purple pen on a pad of pink paper.
And then it was eleven and he was out on the windy streets, blinking as
traffic lights swam in the gloom. He walked home to a hotel room in the
west Eighties. He would return to the clinic at five the next morning for
a predawn treatment, but now it was time to sleep. He looked forward to
that. He'd been on the treatment for three weeks, and he was tired. Though
the treatment did seem to be working - as far as he could tell;
improvement was supposed to average twenty percent a week, and he wasn't
sure what that would feel like.
In his room the answering machine was blinking. There was a message from
his agent, asking him to call immediately. It was now nearly midnight, but
he pushbuttoned the number and his agent answered on the first ring.
"You have DSPS," Frank said to him.
"What? What?"
"Delayed sleep phase syndrome. I know how to get rid of it."
"Frank! Look, Frank, I've got a good offer for you."
"Do you have a lot of lights on?"
"What? Oh, yeah, say, how's that going?"
"I'm probably sixty percent better."
"Good, good. Keep at it. Listen, I've got something should help you a
hundred percent. A publisher in London wants you to go over there and
write a book on the twentieth century."
"What kind of book?"
"Your usual thing, Frank, but this time putting together the big picture.
Reflecting on all the rest of your books, so to speak. They want to bring
it out in time for the turn of the century, and go oversize, use lots of
illustrations, big print run-"
"A coffee table book?"
"People'll want it on their coffee tables, sure, but it's not-"
"I don't want to write a coffee table book."
"Frank-"
"What do they want, ten thousand words?"
"They want thirty thousand words, Frank. And they'll pay a hundred
thousand pound advance."
That gave him pause.
"Why so much?"