"Kim Stanley Robinson - A History Of The Twentieth Century2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

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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?"
"They're new to publishing, they come from computers and this is the kind of numbers they're used to. It's
a different scale." "That's for sure. I still don't want to do it." "Frank, come on, you're the one for this!
The only successor to Barbara Tuchman!" That was a blurb found on paperback editions of his work.
"They want you in particular - I mean, Churchill on the twentieth century, ha ha. It's a natural." "I don't
want to do it." "Come on, Frank. You could use the money, I thought you were having trouble with the
payments-" "Yeah yeah." Time for a different tack. "I'll think it over." "They're in a hurry, Frank." "I
thought you said turn of the century!" "I did, but there's going to be a lot of this kind of book then, and
they want to beat the rush. Set the standard and then keep it in print for a few years. It'll be great." "It'll
be remaindered within a year. Remaindered before it even comes out, if I know coffee table books." His
agent sighed. "Come on, Frank. You can use the money. As for the book, it'll be as good as you make it,
right? You've been working on this stuff your whole career, and here's your chance to sum up. And
you've got a lot of readers, people will listen to you." Concern made him shrill: "Don't let what's
happened get you so down that you miss an opportunity like this! Work is the best cure for depression
anyway. And this is your chance to influence how we think about what's happened!" "With a coffee table
book?" "God damn it, don't think of it that way!" "How should I think of it." His agent took a deep
breath, let it out, spoke very slowly. 'Think of it as a hundred thousand pounds, Frank." His agent did not
understand.
Nevertheless, the next morning as he sat under the bright white ceiling, doodling with a green pen on
yellow paper, he decided to go to England. He didn't want to sit in that room anymore; it scared him,