Читать книгу The Bloody Herring - Phyllis Ann Karr - Страница 4

Foreword

Some have told me that the events of Ship Years 8 and 9 were far too terrible to use as underpinning for a light fantasy romance, and one that in any case can appeal chiefly to the hundred or so avid Savoyards in the ship’s population. My response is that light treatment has been among humanity’s most effective defense mechanisms for dealing with disaster, probably since our race became recognizably human back in Old Earth’s paleolithic; and that Savoy enthusiasm is as precious in Papa’s Pride as any other artifact of our Old Earth heritage.

In any case, these things lie more than half a century in our own past, and if half a century does not make them fair game for historical fantasy, what does? Is the past not the past, whether ten or ten thousand years ago, whether back on Old Earth or out here in our great colony starship of twenty-four pylons revolving around a vast central core?

While retaining the names of such entities as the Antique Terra Theater, which had not yet split into the Order-sponsored Old Earth Company and the Committee-sponsored Players to the Stars, with their respective screenplay arms Universal Aspirations and Pride Productions, I have fictionalized the names and other aspects of individuals actually involved in Chuck Wang’s crime—the worst ever perpetrated and, we hope, ever to be perpetrated in Papa’s Pride. I have added some completely fictional people to the cast, omitted many historical figures entirely, and somewhat condensed, even rearranged, certain of the events. There were never any deliberate murders connected with Wang’s outrage, at least as far as we know. Shipnet will make it very easy for interested readers to collate my tale with as much as we have of the truth.

What I have striven to recreate as faithfully as possible are the conditions of “pylon fever” and the restless searching for family fulfillment that hothoused both Wang’s crime and, arguably, the household conditions under which most of us have grown up: the reshaping of the old “Western World’s” so-called nuclear family that makes that situation in The Gondoliers, when the characters all regard two husbands to three wives as a great problem, seem to everyone outside the Order of the Cosmic Christ such an especially quaint piece of museum morality. When we come to pylon fever and social ferment, however, we must deal more, almost, with theories than with hard data; and I believe my own theories to be based on the most plausible ones of our recognized ship social and medical historians.

It should go without saying that anything which may sound like an Old Earth racial slight or slur is purely an attempt to recreate the mindset of the Gilbertian characters within the fantasy. Papa Gadore had already disregarded “racial” and “national” distinctions, so perceived, in recruiting his great ship’s complement; and the Committee’s system of procreational lists has ensured the blending of genes beyond anything even Papa Gadore could ever have asked of chance and natural human promiscuity. Even I, who would never have existed if my parents had not defied genetic morality, who have been happily raised by a two-parent family living in sanctuary in the convent pylon, am forced to applaud genmorality in this regard.

Of course, the means by which my Dr. Chandra Falcon incubates and enters her patient’s fantasy world—thanks to data allegedly obtained in my fictionalized “last download from Old Earth,” are completely my own invention. Pylon 19 has no such devices. As far as anyone not actually employed in that pylon knows.

—Clea Ortiz Newcome

Loneman’s Haven, pylon 13, May 11, S.Y. 63