Читать онлайн «Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand»
Автор Сэмюэль Дилэни
STARS IN MY POCKET LIKE GRAINS OF SAND
Samuel R. Delany
Enter the SF Gateway …
In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:
‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written. ’
Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.
The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.
Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.
Welcome to the SF Gateway.
Contents
Title Page
Gateway Introduction
Contents
Writer’s Note
PROLOGUE: A World Apart
MONOLOGUES: Visible and Invisible Persons Distributed in Space
Chapter 1. From Nepiy to Free-Kantor
Chapter 2. The Flower and the Web
Chapter 3. Visitors on Velm
Chapter 4. Rescue on Rhyonon
Chapter 5. Rescue Continued
Chapter 6. Rescue Concluded
Chapter 7. Home and a Stranger
Chapter 8. Strangers and Visitors
Chapter 9. From Breakfast to Morning
Chapter 10.
A Dragon HuntChapter 11. A Tale of Two Suppers
Chapter 12. Return to Dyethshome
Chapter 13. Formalities
EPILOGUE: Morning
Website
Also By Samuel R Delany
Dedication
Author Bio
Copyright
Writer’s Note
– Samuel R. Delany
PROLOGUE
A World Apart
‘Of course,’ they told him in all honesty, ‘you will be a slave. ’
His big-pored forehead wrinkled, his heavy lips opened (the flesh around his green, green eyes stayed exactly the same), the ideogram of incomprehension among whose radicals you could read ignorance’s determinant past, information’s present impossibility, speculation’s denied future.
‘But you will be happy,’ the man in the wire-filament mask went on from the well in the circle desk. ‘Certainly you will be happier than you are. ’ The features moved behind pink and green plastic lozenges a-shake on shaking wires. ‘I mean, look at you, boy. You’re ugly as mud and tall enough to scare children in the street. The prenatal brain damage, small as it is, we still can’t correct. You’ve been in trouble of one sort or another for as long as there are records on you: orphanages, foster homes, youth rehabilitation camps, adult detention units – and
