"Norman Spinrad - He Walked Among Us" - читать интересную книгу автора (Spinrad Norman)

the realm of possibility.

It came to Dexter one night during a long stoned bull session with several science fiction writers and one
famous scientist that perhaps it was hubris also of a twisted sort to imagine that the human race lay
anywhere but close to the mean when it came to the bell-shaped curve of galactic assholery.

It seemed logical to assume that we were onlyaverage dickheads, that the present crisis we had
entered, say about the time of Hiroshima, was something thatall sapient species must pass through, the
historical moment, as Dexter put it, when the lunatics take over the asylum.

Sooner or later any species that developed an evolving technology was going to get its hot little
pseudopods on the power of the atom, long before which its activities would have begun doing
unpredictable things to the biosphere, soon after which if not before it was going to crack the biologic
code and start playing with designer genes, all of which was likely to occur long before it had the
technology to escape the consequences by colonizing other planets.

Or, if the foibles of the human race exhibited only average shitheadedness, before it evolved the
necessary wisdom to transform itself into a civilization capable of surviving even another few centuries of
its own history.

Scary stuff.

The human race was going throughits transformation crisisright now , and judging by the lack of good
news from outer space, the chances of negotiating it successfully seemed something like slim and none.

On the other hand, Dexter's New York agent had little trouble getting him a $40,000 contract for a
science fiction novel based on the 30 page outline he batted out around this material on a hot weekend
with the aid of some excellent weed.

Dexter put the Alfa in gear, pulled out of the garage, scraped something on the belly-pan he didn't care
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to think about as he turned out of the driveway and north on Curson, and headed towards his rendezvous
with the rather pathetic latter-day fans of that very visionary novel, a novel which his agentstill hadn't
been able to get back in print.

тАЬTransformationalists,тАЭ they called themselves. Their bible, Dexter D. Lampkin's exercise in science
fictional messianism, the book with which he really thought at the time he was going to change the world,
was called THE TRANSFORMATION.

A NASA deep space antenna picks up a message from an extraterrestrial civilization in the form of a
funeral oration by a species not much in advance of ourselves which has destroyed the viability of its
planet via atomic war, atmospheric degradation, and finally a horrific plague caused by an unfortunate
experiment in genetic engineering.

Worse still, these aliens have received similar messages from severalother intelligent species who have
also done themselves in by similar assholery. This appears to be the galactic norm. If there are any