Ryman Geoff Скачать все книги 6 Количество книг

In a semi-tropical London, surrounded by paddy-fields, the people feed off the sun, like plants, the young are raised in Child Gardens and educated by viruses, and the Consensus oversees the country, “treating” non-conformism. Information, culture, law and politics are biological functions. But Milena is different: she is resistant to viruses and an incredible musician, one of the most extraordinary women of her age. This is her story and that of her friends, like Lucy the immortal tumour and Joseph the Postman whose mind is an information storehouse for others, and Rolfa, genetically engineered as a Polar Bear, whose beautiful singing voice first awakens Milena to the power of music.

In a semi-tropical London, surrounded by paddy-fields, the people feed off the sun, like plants, the young are raised in Child Gardens and educated by viruses, and the Consensus oversees the country, “treating” non-conformism. Information, culture, law and politics are biological functions. But Milena is different: she is resistant to viruses and an incredible musician, one of the most extraordinary women of her age. This is her story and that of her friends, like Lucy the immortal tumour and Joseph the Postman whose mind is an information storehouse for others, and Rolfa, genetically engineered as a Polar Bear, whose beautiful singing voice first awakens Milena to the power of music.

From Publishers Weekly

"Reality's got a hole in it." That's what runs through Michael Blasco's head when he discovers that he has the uncanny ability to bring his fantasies to life in this wacky, inspired third novel by Ryman (Was). The 38-year-old gay protagonist is a government scientist experimenting on baby chicks and has a flat in London 's West End with Phil, his passionless boyfriend. While seething on a subway platform, he imagines the beefy trainer at his gym stripping naked right in front of him-and poof-it happens! Terrified at first, Michael quickly regains his composure and wills into action a series of characters like Tarzan and cartoon diva Taffy Duck; narcissistically, he also conjures a copy of himself. His reunion with a long-lost high school sweetheart nicknamed Bottles proves to be touching and funny, but his meeting with Mark, a victim of AIDS, turns sad when Mark rebuffs his plea to revive him. In an effort to inject passion into his stagnant relationship, Michael "calls up" a younger version of Phil paired with a younger version of himself. When this scheme backfires, he returns to the anonymous "speedy, functional sex" that has long sustained him. A night out with feisty Billie Holiday, passionate sex with Picasso and dalliances with Lawrence of Arabia on Viagra reinvigorate him and make for some funny, titillating reading, but as Michael's notebook of his wild adventures begins to overflow, the story's whimsical tone changes, revealing more of his true character as well as some particularly troublesome personal problems. Among them is a disturbing boyhood fixation on his father, which mutates into a wincingly unnerving incestuous sequence. Ryman's "careful-what-you-wish-for" message is artfully packaged in this quirky, offbeat, entertaining novel.

"Inventive… a risky, highly imaginative addition to a unique and valuable boody of work." – Kirkus

"Ryman's 'careful-what-you-wish-for' message is artfully packaged in this quirkyy, off-beat, entertaining novel." – Publishers Weekly

***

David, a young scientist investigating what happens to the brain during the process of learning, suddenly finds himself the subject of a bizarre experiment. On the way home from the lab one night he spies Tony, a fitness instructor from his gym, on the same platform waiting for the tube. David's had an obsession with Tony for weeks, but Tony's barely noticed him at all. Until now. When David imagines the man naked, an extraordinary thing happens: Tony strips there and then on the platform and offers himself in front of all onlookers. Horrified, David flees. But back at his flat, Tony reappears, as if by magic. And disappears, when David wishes him away. And reappears when he calls him back. David can conjure up anyone, from any time, and he does: Billie Holliday, Johnny Weismuller, Daffy Duck, Picasso, Sophia Loren, even his younger self. Mad with lust and losing all scientific objectivity, he runs the gamut of his fantasies until, sated and morally bankrupt, he's forced to confront himself. It is not a pretty sight.

From Publishers Weekly

Ryman's darkly imaginative, almost surreal improvisation on L. Frank Baum's Oz books combines a stunning portrayal of child abuse, Wizard of Oz film lore and a polyphonic meditation on the psychological burden of the past.

From Kirkus Reviews

The Scarecrow of Oz dying of AIDS in Santa Monica? Uncle Henry a child abuser? Dorothy, grown old and crazy, wearing out her last days in a Kansas nursing home? It's all here, in this magically revisionist fantasy on the themes from The Wizard of Oz. For Dorothy Gael (not a misprint), life with Uncle Henry and Aunty Em is no bed of roses: Bible-thumping Emma Gulch is as austere (though not as nasty) as Margaret Hamilton, and her foul- smelling husband's sexual assaults send his unhappy niece over the line into helpless rage at her own wickedness and sullen bullying of the other pupils in nearby Manhattan, Kansas. Despite a brush with salvation (represented by substitute teacher L. Frank Baum), she spirals down to madness courtesy of a climactic twister, only to emerge 70 years later as Dynamite Dottie, terror of her nursing home, where youthful orderly Bill Davison, pierced by her zest for making snow angels and her visions of a happiness she never lived, throws over his joyless fianc‚e and becomes a psychological therapist. Meanwhile, in intervening episodes in 1927 and 1939, Frances Gumm loses her family and her sense of self as she's transformed into The Kid, Judy Garland; and between 1956 and 1989, a little boy named Jonathan, whose imaginary childhood friends were the Oz people, grows up to have his chance to play the Scarecrow dashed by the AIDS that will draw him to Kansas-with counselor Davison in pursuit-in the hope of finding Dorothy's 1880's home and making it, however briefly, his own. This tale of homes lost and sought, potentially so sentimental, gets a powerful charge from Ryman's patient use of homely detail in establishing Dorothy's and Jonathan's childhood perspectives, and from the shocking effects of transforming cultural icons, especially in detailing Dorothy's sexual abuse. Science-fiction author Ryman (The Child Garden, 1990) takes a giant step forward with this mixture of history, fantasy, and cultural myth-all yoked together by the question of whether you can ever really go home.

'Geoff Ryman's new novel is swift, smart and convincing. Air is a wonderful and frightening examination of old and new, and survival on the interface between'. – Greg Bear

'This is a liminal book: its characters are on the threshold of something new; their village is on the brink of change; the world is launching into a new way to connect; humanity, at the end of the novel, is on the cusp of evolution… its plot is exciting and suspenseful, its characters gripping, its wisdom lightly and gracefully offered, its language clear and beautiful. Like The Child Garden, Air is both humane and wise. This novel is such a village. I cannot recommend it highly enough. It becomes finer as I think back on it, and I look forward to rereading it. I only wish Ryman's work were more widely available and more widely read, as it deserves'.- Joan Gordon New York Review of Science Fiction

'Ryman renders the village and people of Kizuldah with such humane insight and sympathy that we experience the novel almost like the Air it describes: It's around us and in us, more real than real, and it leaves us changed as surely as Mae's contact with Air changes her. This amazing balance that Ryman maintains – mourning change while embracing it – renders Air not merely powerful, thought-provoking, and profoundly moving, but indispensable. It's a map of our world, written in the imaginary terrain of Karzistan. It's a guide for all of us, who will endure change, mourn our losses, and must find a way to love the new sea that swamps our houses, if we are not to grow bitter and small and afraid'. – Robert Killheffer, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction

'The wondrous art wrought in Ryman's Air shows some of its meaning plainly, calling forth grins, astonishment and tears. More of its meaning is tucked away inside, like the seven hidden curled-up dimensions of spacetime, like the final pages of the third book of Dante, beyond words or imagining high and low. Treasure this book'. – Damien Broderick, Locus

Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter is an exemplary story that sweeps up an entirely novel lane to transverse and exceed the boundaries of archetypal ghost stories. Sith is moneyed and supremely fine looking but the haunting of her Cambodian past refuses to let her be, tormenting her until she takes note of their unbidden laments. Geoff Ryman writes in charmed fashion to plant a new and almost welcome face to poltergeist. -Eugen Bacon, Fictionwise Recommender

***

In Cambodia people are used to ghosts. Ghosts buy newspapers. They own property.

A few years ago, spirits owned a house in Phnom Penh, at the Tra Bek end of Monivong Boulevard. Khmer Rouge had murdered the whole family and there was no one left alive to inherit it. People cycled past the building, leaving it boarded up. Sounds of weeping came from inside.

Then a professional inheritor arrived from America. She'd done her research and could claim to be the last surviving relative of no fewer than three families. She immediately sold the house to a Chinese businessman, who turned the ground floor into a photocopying shop.

The copiers began to print pictures of the original owners.

At first, single black and white photos turned up in the copied dossiers of aid workers or government officials. The father of the murdered family had been a lawyer. He stared fiercely out of the photos as if demanding something. In other photocopies, his beautiful daughters forlornly hugged each other. The background was hazy like fog.

One night the owner heard a noise and trundled downstairs to find all five photocopiers printing one picture after another of faces: young college men, old women, parents with a string of babies, or government soldiers in uniform. He pushed the big green off-buttons. Nothing happened.

He pulled out all the plugs, but the machines kept grinding out face after face. Women in beehive hairdos or clever children with glasses looked wistfully out of the photocopies. They seemed to be dreaming of home in the 1960s, when Phnom Penh was the most beautiful city in Southeast Asia.

News spread. People began to visit the shop to identify lost relatives. Women would cry, "That's my mother! I didn't have a photograph!" They would weep and press the flimsy A4 sheets to their breasts. The paper went limp from tears and humidity as if it too were crying.

Soon, a throng began to gather outside the shop every morning to view the latest batch of faces. In desperation, the owner announced that each morning's harvest would be delivered direct to The Truth, a magazine of remembrance.

Then one morning he tried to open the house-door to the shop and found it blocked. He went 'round to the front of the building and rolled open the metal shutters.

The shop was packed from floor to ceiling with photocopies. The ground floor had no windows-the room had been filled from the inside. The owner pulled out a sheet of paper and saw himself on the ground, his head beaten in by a hoe. The same image was on every single page.

He buried the photocopiers and sold the house at once. The new owner liked its haunted reputation; it kept people away. The FOR SALE sign was left hanging from the second floor.

In a sense, the house had been bought by another ghost.

This is a completely untrue story about someone who must exist.