Space Sci-Fi Boxed Set: Intergalactic Wars, Alien Attacks & Space Adventure Novels. David Lindsay

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СКАЧАТЬ the fate of these pioneers of theirs and learned their lesson, and that on the planet Venus they have found a securer settlement. Be that as it may, for many years yet there will certainly be no relaxation of the eager scrutiny of the Martian disk, and those fiery darts of the sky, the shooting stars, will bring with them as they fall an unavoidable apprehension to all the sons of men.

      The broadening of men’s views that has resulted can scarcely be exaggerated. Before the cylinder fell there was a general persuasion that through all the deep of space no life existed beyond the petty surface of our minute sphere. Now we see further. If the Martians can reach Venus, there is no reason to suppose that the thing is impossible for men, and when the slow cooling of the sun makes this earth uninhabitable, as at last it must do, it may be that the thread of life that has begun here will have streamed out and caught our sister planet within its toils.

      Dim and wonderful is the vision I have conjured up in my mind of life spreading slowly from this little seed bed of the solar system throughout the inanimate vastness of sidereal space. But that is a remote dream. It may be, on the other hand, that the destruction of the Martians is only a reprieve. To them, and not to us, perhaps, is the future ordained.

      I must confess the stress and danger of the time have left an abiding sense of doubt and insecurity in my mind. I sit in my study writing by lamplight, and suddenly I see again the healing valley below set with writhing flames, and feel the house behind and about me empty and desolate. I go out into the Byfleet Road, and vehicles pass me, a butcher boy in a cart, a cabful of visitors, a workman on a bicycle, children going to school, and suddenly they become vague and unreal, and I hurry again with the artilleryman through the hot, brooding silence. Of a night I see the black powder darkening the silent streets, and the contorted bodies shrouded in that layer; they rise upon me tattered and dog-bitten. They gibber and grow fiercer, paler, uglier, mad distortions of humanity at last, and I wake, cold and wretched, in the darkness of the night.

      I go to London and see the busy multitudes in Fleet Street and the Strand, and it comes across my mind that they are but the ghosts of the past, haunting the streets that I have seen silent and wretched, going to and fro, phantasms in a dead city, the mockery of life in a galvanised body. And strange, too, it is to stand on Primrose Hill, as I did but a day before writing this last chapter, to see the great province of houses, dim and blue through the haze of the smoke and mist, vanishing at last into the vague lower sky, to see the people walking to and fro among the flower beds on the hill, to see the sightseers about the Martian machine that stands there still, to hear the tumult of playing children, and to recall the time when I saw it all bright and clear-cut, hard and silent, under the dawn of that last great day… .

      And strangest of all is it to hold my wife’s hand again, and to think that I have counted her, and that she has counted me, among the dead.

       THE END

The Shape of Things To Come

       Table of Contents

       Introduction: The Dream Book of Dr. Philip Raven

       Book the First: Today and Tomorrow: The Age of Frustration Dawns

       1. A Chronological Note

       2. How the Idea and Hope of the Modern World State First Appeared

       3. The Accumulating Disproportions of the Old Order

       4. Early Attempts to Understand and Deal with These Disproportions; The Criticisms of Karl Marx and Henry George

       5. The Way in Which Competition and Monetary Inefficiency Strained the Old Order

       6. The Paradox of Over-Production and Its Relation to War

       7. The Great War of 1914-1918

       8. The Impulse to Abolish War; The Episode of the Ford Peace Ship

       9. The Direct Action of the Armament Industries in Maintaining War Stresses

       10. Versailles: Seed Bed of Disasters

       11. The Impulse to Abolish War: Why the League of Nations Failed to Pacify the World

       12. The Breakdown of “Finance” and Social Morale after Versailles

       13. 1933: “Progress” Comes to a Halt

       Book the Second: The Days After Tomorrow: The Age of Frustration

       1. The London Conference: the Crowning Failure of the Old Governments; The Spread of Dictatorships and Fascisms

       2. The Sloughing of the Old Educational Tradition

       3. Disintegration and Crystallization in the Social Magma. The Gangster and Militant Political Organizations

       4. Changes in War Practice after the World War

       5. The Fading Vision of a World Pax: Japan Reverts to Warfare

       6. The Western Grip on Asia Relaxes

       7. The Modern State and Germany

       8. A Note on Hate and Cruelty

       9. The Last War Cyclone, 1940-50

       10. The Raid of the Germs

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