"Dan Simmons - Muse of Fire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Simmons Dan)

MUSE OF FIRE
DAN SIMMONS


A
writer of considerable power, range, and ambition, an eclectic talent not willing to be
restricted to any one genre, Dan Simmons sold his first story to The Twilight Zone
Magazine in 1982. By the end of that decade, he had become one of the most
popular and bestselling authors in both the horror and the science fiction genres,
winning, for instance, both the Hugo Award for his epic science fiction novel
Hyperion and the Bram Stoker Award for his huge horror novel Carrion Comfort in
the same year, 1990. He has continued to split his output since between science
fiction (The Fall of Hyperion, The Hollow Man) and horror (Song of Kali, Summer
of Night, Chil-dren of the Night). .. although a few of his novels are downright
unclassifiable (Phases of Gravity, for instance, which is a straight literary novel
although it was published as part of a science fiction line), and some (like Children
of the Night) could be legitimately considered to be either science fiction or horror,
depending on how you squint at them. Similarly, his first collection, Prayers to
Broken Stones, contains a mix of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and тАЬmainstreamтАЭ
stories, as does his most recent collection, Lovedeath. Some of his most recent
books confirm his reputation for unpredictability, includ-ing The Crook Factory, a
spy thriller set in World War II and starring Ernest Hemingway; DarwinтАЩs Blade, a
тАЬstatistical thrillerтАЭ halfway between mystery and horror; Hardcase, a hard-boiled
detective novel; and A Winter Haunting, a ghost story. Coming up is a new novel,
The Terror. Born in Peoria, Illinois, Simmons now lives with his family in Colorado.

Simmons has established himself as a force to be reckoned with in the New
Space Opera with his glittering, baroque Hyperion novels, and his two most recent
novels, Ilium and Olympus, which use the Trojan War as the backdrop for an
ambitious space opera duology. In the complex and multi-faceted novella that
follows, he takes us on a journey of unparalleled scope and scale, in company with a
hapless group of actors who find themselves burdened with the responsibility of
putting on the single most important theatrical performance in human history. ..

****

I sometimes think that none of the rest of the things would have hap-pened if we
hadnтАЩt performed the Scottish Play that night at Mezel-Goull. Nothing good ever
comes from putting on the Scottish PlayтАФif we remember any history at all, we
know thatтАФand much bad often does.

But I doubt if there have ever been ramifications like this before.
 The Muse of Fire followed the Archon funeral barge out of the Pleroma into
the Kenoma, slipped out of its pleromic wake like a newborn emerg-ing from a caul,
and made its own weak-fusion way to our next stop on the tour, a world known only
as 25-25-261B. IтАЩd been there before. By this time, IтАЩd been with the EarthтАЩs Men
long enough to have visited all of the four hundred or so worlds we were allowed to
tour regularly. They say that there are over ten thousand worlds in the TellтАФten
thousand we humans have been scattered to, I meanтАФbut IтАЩll never know if thatтАЩs
true. WeтАЩll never know.