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Автор Питер Гамильтон
A Second Chance at Eden
Introduction
The stories assembled for this collection are set in the universe of my Night’s Dawn trilogy. Now, they form a series of snapshot glimpses into the history of the Confederation leading up to the time of Joshua Calvert and Quinn Dexter. It wasn’t always so.
During the early nineties I wrote several short stories centred around the affinity technology. They didn’t belong to any particular hard and fast version of future history, I was just interested in the potential of the idea. Then along came David Garnett, who had just bought “Candy Buds” for his New Worlds anthology, and said: You should turn this into a novel.
Impossible, I told him.
That was back in the days of my foolish youth, before I learned the hard way that the editor is always right.
He convinced me to go away and think about it. “Night’s Dawn” was the result. OK, so I didn’t get the last laugh, but at least I managed to frighten him with the size of volume one, The Reality Dysfunction, all 374,000 words of it.
As to the stories themselves, some are new, some have appeared in magazines before, in which case I’ve altered them slightly so they fit into the Confederation timeline.
Peter F. Hamilton
Rutland, February 1998
Timeline
2020 - Clavius base established. Mining of lunar subcrustal resources starts.
2037 - Beginning of large-scale geneering on humans; improvement to immunology system, organ efficency increased.
2041 - First deuterium-fuelled fusion stations built; inefficient and expensive.
2044 - Christian reunification.
2047 - First asteroid capture mission. Beginning of Earth's O'Neill Halo.
2049 - Quasi-sentient bitek animals employed as servitors.
2055 - Jupiter mission.
2055 - Lunar cities granted independence from founding companies.
2057 - Ceres asteroid settlement founded.
2058 - Affinity symbiont neurons developed by Wing-Tsit Chong, providing control over animals and bitek constructs.
2064 - Jovian Sky Power corporation (JSKP) industrial consortium formed, begins mining Jupiter's atmosphere for He
2064 - Islamic secular unification.
2067 - Fusion stations begin to use He
2069 - Affinity bond gene spliced into human DNA.
Earth, 2070
Sonnie's Edge
It was daylight, so Battersea was in gridlock. The M500 motorway above the Thames had taken us right into the heart of London at a hundred and fifty kilometres an hour, then after we spiralled down an off ramp onto the Chelsea Bridge our top speed braked to a solid one kph. Our venue was another three kilometres ahead of us.
We joined the queue of chrome-silver vehicles jamming the street, turning up the reflectivity of our own windscreen against the glare. Bikes slithered through the narrow gaps, their riders in slick-skinned kooler suits. Lighthorns flared and blared in fury as they cut through the two-way tailback, chasing after them like some kind of runway strobe effect. As if that wasn't bad enough, every vehicle on the road was humming urgently, hub motors and air-conditioning vibrating the air at a frequency guaranteed to induce a migraine. Three hours of that.
