"Ian Watson - Life in the Groove" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watson Ian)

Life in the Groove
Ian Watson

Part of the charm of the 45 r.p.m. single - or part of the reason for
junking it in favour of those shiny CDs - is the subtle degradation of its
sound, the rising hiss and the occasional snap or scratch as some piece
of debris is forever bonded into the vinyl by the pressure of diamond chip
against plastic. And because 90 per cent of dust in the home is dead
sloughed human skin, that means that most of those snaps and crackles
and pops are due to a part of yourself becoming One with the music.

Here, in what might be considered the ultimate discworld story, Ian
Watson provides a more catastrophic view of the progress of a stylus
down a spiral scratch. Self-confessed sufferer of tone-deaf-ness, Watson
says that to him all music, from the Red Army Choir to Wagner, tends to
resolve towards its paradigmatic form -тАЩTelstarтАЩ. ThatтАЩs perhaps one
reason why he took such an elliptical approach to the anthologyтАЩs
subject matter, although we should expect nothing less from British SFтАЩs
most iconoclastic talent.

A retired gardener, Watson is author of some thirty novels and short
story collections, the latest being The Flies of Memory and StalinтАЩs
Teardrops. He is also fascinated by body piercing and the fetishisms of
the Modern Primitives, as is made abundantly clear in this story. His
favourite song (apart from тАШTelstarтАЩ) is Kate BushтАЩs version of тАШRocket
ManтАЩ, mainly for her plaintive and surrealistic interpretation of the line
тАШIтАЩm not the man I used to beтАЩ.

****



S
o Fulque Darien at last proudly dis-played the orrery We had
commissioned him to make. He whipped up the purple silk that was
shrouding his device and swung the sheet aside like some conjuror
converting a crouching slavegirl into a pig, or a minotaurador flourishing his
cape to bamboozle a razor-horned ape.

Swankily, indeed!
 Light streamed through the arched, mullioned windows of Our
seclusium, illuminating a thousand motes of dust which DarienтАЩs dramatic
unveiling released - as if to dem-onstrate his molekular theory of matter,
that all the world was made of minute particles glued together by
magnetism, which a strong enough shock could wrench apart. Darien had
begged for funds to prove this.

However, We werenтАЩt interested in the mikrokosm, only in the
makrokosm, as befitted a ruler who must have large concerns.