"Rudy Rucker - Inside Out" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rucker Rudy)

INSIDE OUT
Rudy Rucker

[07 feb 2002тАФscanned, proofed and released for #bookz]

Rudy Rucker is a mathematician who writes books of popular science and science fiction. His
SF swings widely and freely into the surreal and metaphysical upon occasion. In this story, his
future is a fantasy land and his science is transformed by metaphor. In direct rebellion against the
tradition of fantasy world-building, Rucker doesn't just paint the world of the story with a broad
brush; he paints it with a broom. He simultaneously denies the necessity of rationalizing the world
of the story while invoking the standard scientific technique of oversimplifying for the sake of
mathematical argument (in this case involving topologyтАФan interesting contrast to R. A Lafferty's
story (pp.375-88). Fast and loose, wild-and-crazy fantastic, that's Rudy Rucker.

You might think of Killeville as a town where every building is a Pizza Hut. Street after street of
Pizza Huts, each with the same ten toppings and the same mock mansard roofтАФthe same shiny zero
repeated over and over like same tiles in a pavement, same pixels in a grid, same blank neurons in an
imbecile's brain.
The KillevillersтАФthe men and women on either side of the Pizza Hut countersтАФsee nothing odd
about the boredom, the dodecaduplication. They are ugly people, cheap and odd as K-Mart dolls. The
Killeville gene pool is a dreg from which all fine vapors evaporate, a dreg so small that some highly
recessive genes have found expression. Killeville is like New Zealand with its weirdly unique fauna.
Walking down a Killeville street, you might see the same hideous platypus face three times in ten
minutes.
Of course a platypus is beautiful ... to another platypus. The sound that drifts out of Killeville's
country clubs and cocktail parties is smug and well-pleased. It's a sound like locusts, or like feasting
geese. "This is good food," they say, "Have you tried the spinach?" The words don't actually matter; the
nasal buzzing honk of the vowels conveys it all: We're the same. We're the same.
Unless you were born there, Killeville is a horrible place to live. Especially in August. In August the
sky is a featureless gray pizza. The unpaved parts of the outdoors are choked with thorns and poison ivy.
Inside the houses, mold grows on every surface, and fleas seethe in the wall-to-wall carpeting. In the wet
grayness, time seems to have stopped. How to kill it?
One can watch TV, go to a restaurant, see a movie, or drink in a barтАФthough none of these
pastimes is fun in Killeville. The TV channels are crowded with evangelists so stupid that it isn't even
funny. All the restaurants are, of course, Pizza Huts. And if all the restaurants are Pizza Huts, then all the
movie theaters are showing Rambo and the Care Bears movie. MADD is very active in Killeville, and
drinking in bars is risky. Sober, vigilant law-enforcement officers patrol the streets at every hour.
For all this, stodgy, nasty Killeville is as interesting a place as can be found in our universe. For
whatever reason, it's a place where strange things keep happening ... very strange things. Look at what
happened to Rex and Candy Redman in August, 198-.
Rex and Candy Redman: married twelve years, with two children aged eight and eleven. Rex was
dark and skinny; Candy was a plump, fairskinned redhead with blue eyes. She taught English at Killeville
Middle School. Rex had lost his job at GE back in April. Rex had been a CB radio specialist at the
Killeville GE plantтАФthe job was the reason the Redmans had moved to Killeville in the first place. When
Rex got laid off, he went a little crazy. Instead of selling the house and movingтАФwhich is what he should
have doneтАФhe got a second mortgage on their house and started a business of his own: Redman
Novelties & Magic, Wholesale & Retail. So far it hadn't clicked. Far from it. The Redmans were broke
and stuck in wretched Killeville. They avoided each other in the daytime, and in the evenings they read
magazines.
Rex ran his business out of a run-down building downtown, a building abandoned by its former