"Michael Marshall Smith - Maybe Next Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Michael Marshall)

Maybe Next Time
By Michael Marshall Smith
****

Michael Marshall smith lives in North London and Brighton with his wife Paula and
two cats. His first novel, Only Forward, won the August Derleth and Philip K. Dick
Awards; his second, Spares, was optioned by Steven Spielberg and translated in
seventeen countries worldwide; his third, One of Us, was op-tioned by Warner
Brothers.

His most recent novels, The Straw Men and The Lonely Dead (a.k.a. The
Upright Man), published under the name тАЬMichael MarshallтАЭ, have been
international best-sellers, and he is cur-rently working on a third volume in the series.

SmithтАЩs short fiction has won the British Fantasy Award three times, and is
collected in What You Make It and the International Horror Guild Award-winning
More Tomorrow & Other Stories. Six of his tales are currently under option for
television.

About the following story, the author reveals: тАЬEvery now and then the reality
of time hits you: the fact that it really is passing, and that there will come a point
where the seemingly random things that happen every day will reach a conclusion,
and stop, and then they will be all that ever happened.

тАЬThe act structure of oneтАЩs life will then finally become evident - but only
when it is too late to do anything about it: too late to punch up the action in the
middle section, or spread some more laughs throughout, to take it all just a bit more
seriously - or perhaps less seriously. This story came from one of those realizations,
and wonders what it might be like if the universe worked otherwise.тАЭ

****

AT first, when david began to consider the problem, he wondered if it was related
to the start of a new year. January in London is not an exciting time. YouтАЩd hardly
contend the month showed any part of the country at its best, but there were places -
the far reaches of Scotland, perhaps, or the stunned emptiness of the midland fens -
where you could at least tell it was winter, a season with some kind of character and
point. In London, the period was merely still-grey and no-longer-New Year and
Spring-not-even-over-the-horizon. A pot of negatives, a non-time of non-events in
which you trudged back to jobs that the festive break had drunkenly blessed with
purpose, but which now felt like putting on the same old overcoat again. But still,
however much David unthinkingly lived a year that began in the Autumn - as did
most who had soldiered their way through school and college, where promise and
new beginnings came with the term after the summer - he could see that January was
the real start of things. He thought at first that might be it, but he was wrong. The
feelings were not coming after something, but point-ing the way forward. To May,
when he would have his birthday. To May, when he would be forty years old.
****
The episodes came on quietly. The first he remembered happened one
Thursday afternoon when he was at his desk in Soho, pen hovering over a list of