"Kim Stanley Robinson - Venice Drowned (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

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Venice Drowned

Kim Stanley Robinson

I remember Kim Stanley Robinson as one of the best writers in quite an impressive group of
students I taught at the Clarion science fiction writing workshop in the mid-seventies. He was not
the one who dismantled the ceiling, though, nor the one who carried around a small bale of
marijuana and a glazed expression, nor the one who supposedly had shacked up with one of the
instructors, nor the one who liberated the fire hose . . . unfortunately for me, Stan was just a
pleasant, hardworking guy who was mainly thereto write, and write well. Which makes it difficult
to do a racy introduction for him. Doubly difficult because he pleads modesty and will only reveal
the following information:

1. He did his Ph.D. thesis on the novels of Philip K. Dick (whether in the department of
English, theology, philosophy, or pharmacy, he does not say).
2. He teaches at the University of California at Davis.
3. His first novel, The Wild Shore, came out from Ace in 1984.
"Venice Drowned" is a nearly flawless exemplar of a kin of writing that can only be done in
science fiction. I don't know if it has a name-in academic jargon I suppose it would be something
like "refractive mimesis"-but it's that creepy kind of double-vision writing where an imagined
world, similar to ours b~ different in some dramatic particular, is described with such
painstaking authority that it becomes absolutely real, to such c extent that the world ceases to
be simply background for the story; in a curious way, it becomes the story. Philip Dick was the
master of this kind of invention, of course, which doesn't detract from Stan's achievement.
Rereading it gives me goosebumps.

By the time Carlo Tafur struggled out of sleep, the baby was squalling, the teapot whistled, the
smell of stove smoke filled the air. Wavelets slapped the walls of the floor below. It was just
dawn. Reluctantly he untangled himself from the bedsheets and got up. He padded through the other
room of his home, ignoring his wife and child, and walked out the door onto the roof.

Venice looked best at dawn, Carlo thought as he pissed into the canal. In the dim mauve light it
was possible to imagine that the city was just as it always had been, that hordes of visitors
would come flooding down the Grand Canal on this fine summer morning .... Of course, one had to
ignore the patchwork constructions built on the roofs of the neighborhood to indulge the fancy.
Around the church San Giacomo du Rialto-all the buildings had even their top floors awash, and so
it had been necessary to break up the tile roofs, and erect shacks on the roof beams made of
materials fished up from below: wood, brick lath, stone, metal, glass. Carlo's home was one of
these shacks, made of a crazy combination of wood beams, stained glass from San Giacometta, and
drain pipes beaten flat. He looked back at it and sighed. It was best to look off over the Rialto,
where the red sun blazed over the bulbous domes of San Marco.

"You have to meet those Japanese today," Carlo's wife, Luisa, said from inside.