"Stanley G. Weinbaum - The New Adam" - читать интересную книгу автора (Weinbaum Stanley G)

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The New Adam
Stanley G. Weinbaum

AVON BOOKS
A division of
The Hearst Corporation,
959 Eighth Avenue
New York, New York 10019

Copyright 1939 by Ziff-Davis Publishing Company.
Copyright renewed 1967 by Eugene M. Kay, Jr.
Published by arrangement with the author's estate.

All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For
information address Ackerman Agency, 901 South Sherbourne Drive, Los Angeles, California 90035.

First Avon Printing, May, 1969 Cover illustration by Jeff Jones

AVON TRADEMARK REG. V.S. PAT. OFF. AND
FOREIGN COUNTRIES, REGISTERED TRADEMARK
MARCA REGISTRADA, HECHO EN CHICAGO, U.S.A.
Printed in Canada.



PROLOGUE

THIS is a story of a superman. It details his origin, his search for happiness, his loves, and finally, his
success or failure, of which you alone can judge. It is a story perhaps fantastic, but a story based,
nevertheless, on possibilities.
A superman is not a man, not a creature of the species Homo Sapiens; this is the fallacy of Nietzsche,
the fallacy of H. G. Wells. These, like others who deal with the matter, have believed that a man, a
human being, raised to the nth degree, represents the super-man. Nietzsche picked one set of
qualitiesтАФthose of fitness, potency, powerтАФWells chose another set, the contemplative, the serene, the
intellectual. So proba-bly, a Neanderthaler in his filthy cave, using his em-bryonic imagination, might have
pictured his super-man as a giant in strength and size, a mighty hunter, one whose meat-pot and belly is
never empty. Cer-tainly he never considered a race whose very thoughts were partly beyond his
conception, and he saw nothing ironical in freezing to death upon a ledge of coal. As we are to the cave
man, superman must be to us. His coming is surely a possibility; perhaps it is inevitable.
For not everything in the world is subject to mathe-matics. Not every factor in this particular sector of
the cosmic whirl can be reduced to formula, expressed in calculus, integrated, packed into nicely labeled
bundles, and filed away in a book. Because one rises from the dinner table and announces his intention to
go across the hall to the library, it does not inevitably follow that he will arrive there. There is a chance
factor in the universeтАФentropy, luck, free will, or what you wishтАФbut an x-factor that prohibits exact