"Bruce Sterling - Midnight on the Rue Jules Verne" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

Bruce Sterling
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CATSCAN 1 "Midnight on the Rue Jules Verne"

A kind of SF folk tradition surrounds the
founding figure of Jules Verne. Everyone knows he was
a big cheese back when the modern megalopolis of
SFville was a 19th-century village. There's a bronze
monument to him back in the old quarter of town, the
Vieux Carre. You know, the part the French built, back
before there were cars.
At midnight he stands there, somewhat the worse
for the acid rain and the pigeons, his blind bronze
eyes fixed on a future that has long since passed him
by. SFville's citizenry pass him every day without a
thought, their attention fixed on their daily grind in
vast American high-rises; if they look up, they are
intimidated by the beard, the grasped lapel, the
flaking reek of Victorian obsolescence.
Everyone here knows a little about old Jules.
The submarine, the moon cannon, the ridiculously
sluggish eighty days. When they strip up the tarmac,
you can still see the cobbles of the streets he laid.
It's all still there, really, the village grid of
SFville, where Verne lived and worked and argued
scientific romance with the whippersnapper H.G. Wells.
Those of us who walk these mean streets, and mutter of
wrecking balls and the New Jerusalem, should take the
time for a look back. Way back. Let's forget old Jules
for the moment. What about young Jules?
Young Jules Verne was trouble. His father, a
prosperous lawyer in the provincial city of Nantes,
was gifted with the sort of son that makes parents
despair. The elder Verne was a reactionary Catholic,
given to frequent solitary orgies with the penitential
scourge. He expected the same firm moral values in his
heir.
Young Jules wanted none of this. It's sometimes
mentioned in the SF folktale that Jules tried to run
away to sea as a lad. The story goes that he was
recaptured, punished, and contritely promised to
travel henceforth "only in his imagination." It sounds
cute. It was nothing of the kind. The truth of the
matter is t

hat the eleven-year-old Jules resourcefully
bribed a cabin-boy of his own age, and impersonated
his way onto a French merchant cruiser bound for the
Indies. In those days of child labor, the crew
accepted Jules without hesitation. It was a mere fluke