Thomas M Disch - In Xanadu

VIP免费

2024-11-23 0 0 56.98KB 8 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

In the late sixties, Tom Disch, along with John Sladek, was, in a I sense, the U.S. Ambassador to

the British New Wave movement. His novel Camp Concentration, written in that period, should be

on every reading list of classic sf.

Over the years Disch has been, besides a great novelist in and out of sf, a poet, playwright,

critic, children's author (his Brave Little Toaster was even Disney-ized), teacher, and, of course,

short-story writer.

I've considered him a mentor for more than twenty-five years and am proud to present his

latest fiction, which recalls a bit his New Wave days.

In Xanadu

thomas M. disch

In memory of John Sladek, who died March 10, 2000

And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread,

For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge

PART ONE

xanadu

is awareness was quite limited during the first so-long. A popup screen said WELCOME TO XANADU, [Cook, Fran]. YOUR AFTERLIFE BEGINS NOW! BROUGHT

TO YOU BY DISNEY-MITSUBISHI PRODUCTIONS of quebec! a votre sante toujours! Then there was a choice of buttons to click on, Okay or Cancel. He didn't

have an actual physical mouse, but there was an equivalent in his mind, in much the way that amputees have ghostly limbs, but when he clicked on Okay with

his mental mouse there was a dull Dong! and nothing happened. When he clicked on Cancel there was a trembling and the smallest flicker of

darkness and then the pop-up screen greeted him with the original message.

This went on for an unknowable amount of time, there being no means by which elapsed time could be measured. After he'd Dong!ed on Okay enough

times, he stopped bothering. The part of him that would have been motivated, back when, to express impatience or to feel resentment or to worry just wasn't

connected. He felt an almost supernatural

passivity. Maybe this is what people were after when they took up meditation. Or maybe it was

supernatural, though it seemed more likely, from the few clues he'd been given, that it was cybernetic

in some way. He had become lodged (he theorized) in a faulty software program, like a monad in a

game of JezzBall banging around inside its little square cage, ricocheting off the same four points on

the same four walls forever. Or as they say in Quebec, toujours.

And oddly enough that was Okay. If he were just a molecule bouncing about, a lifer rattling his

bars, there was a kind of comfort in doing so, each bounce a proof of the mass and motion of the

molecule, each rattle an SOS dispatched to someone who might think, Ah-ha, there's someone there!

state pleasure-dome 1

And then—or, as it might be, once upon a time—Cancel produced a different result than it had on

countless earlier trials, and he found himself back in some kind of real world. There was theme music

("Wichita Lineman") and scudding clouds high overhead and the smell of leaf mold, as though he'd

been doing push-ups out behind the garage, with his nose grazing the dirt. He had his old body back,

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Thomas M Disch - In Xanadu.pdf

共8页,预览1页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Thomas M Disch - In Xanadu

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: