• Complain

Walter Tevis - Mockingbird

Here you can read online Walter Tevis - Mockingbird full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. City: London, year: 2007, publisher: Gollancz, genre: Science fiction. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Walter Tevis Mockingbird
  • Book:
    Mockingbird
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Gollancz
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2007
  • City:
    London
  • ISBN:
    978-0575079151
  • Rating:
    5 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 100
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

Mockingbird: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Mockingbird" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

The future is a grim place in which the declining human population wanders, drugged and lulled by electronic bliss. Its a world without art, reading and children, a world where people would rather burn themselves alive than endure. Even Spofforth, the most perfect machine ever created, cannot bear it and seeks only that which he cannot haveto cease to be. But there is hope for the future in the passion and joy that a man and woman discover in love and in books, hope even for Spofforth. A haunting novel, reverberating with anguish but also celebrating love and the magic of a dream. Mockingbird Review From the Inside Flap A moral tale that has elements of Aldous Huxleys , , and . Set in a far future in which robots run a world with a small and declining human population, this novel could be considered an unofficial sequel to , for its central event and symbol is the rediscovery of reading. Because of its affirmation of such persistent human values as curiosity, courage, and compassion, along with its undeniable narrative power, will become one of those books that coming generations will periodically rediscover with wonder and delight. Ive read other novels extrapolating the dangers of computerization but Mockingbird stings me, the writer, the hardest. The notion, the possibility, that people might indeed lose the ability, and worse, the desire to read, is made acutely probable. bestselling author ANNE MCCAFFREY Walter Tevis is science fictions great neglected master, one of the definitive bridges between sf and literature. For those who know his work only through the movies, the lucid prose and literary vision of and will come as a revelation. AL SARRANTONIO, Author of saga

Walter Tevis: author's other books


Who wrote Mockingbird? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

Mockingbird — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Mockingbird" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Walter Tevis

MOCKINGBIRD

Science Fiction Masterworks Volume 70 For Eleanora Walker The inner life - photo 1

Science Fiction Masterworks Volume 70

For Eleanora Walker

The inner life of a human being is a vast and varied realm and does not concern itself alone with stimulating arrangements of color, form, and design.

Edward Hopper

Enter the SF Gateway

In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britains oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English languages 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 todays 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.

Spofforth

Walking up Fifth Avenue at midnight, Spofforth begins to whistle. He does not know the name of the tune nor does he care to know; it is a complicated tune, one he whistles often when alone. He is naked to the waist and barefoot, dressed only in khaki trousers; he can feel the worn old paving beneath his feet. Although he walks up the middle of the broad avenue he can see patches of grass and tall weeds on either side of him where the sidewalk has long before been cracked and broken away, awaiting repairs that will never be made. From these patches Spofforth hears a chorus of diverse clickings and wing rubbings of insects. The sounds make him uneasy, as they always do this time of year, in spring. He puts his big hands into his trouser pockets. Then, uncomfortable, he takes them out again and begins to jog, huge and light-footed, athletic, up toward the massive form of the Empire State Building.

The doorway to the building had eyes and a voice; its brain was the brain of a moronsingle-minded and insensitive. Closed for repairs, the voice said to Spofforth as he approached.

Shut up and open, Spofforth said. And then, I am Robert Spofforth. Make Nine.

Sorry, sir, the door said. Couldnt see

Yes. Open up. And tell the express elevator to be down for me.

The door was silent for a moment. Then it said, Elevators not working, sir.

Shit, Spofforth said. And then, Ill walk up.

The door opened and Spofforth walked in and headed across the dark lobby toward the stairway. He muted the pain circuits in his legs and lungs, and began to climb. He was no longer whistling; his elaborate mind had become fixed narrowly now upon his annual intent.

When he reached the edge of the platform, as high above the city as one could stand, Spofforth sent the command to the nerves in his legs and the pain surged into them. He wobbled slightly from it, high and alone in the black night, with no moon above him and the stars dun. The surface underfoot was smooth, polished; once years before Spofforth had almost slipped. Immediately he had thought, in disappointment, If only that would happen again, at the edge. But it did not.

He walked to within two feet of the platforms limit, and with no mental signal, no volition, no wish for it to happen, his legs stopped moving and he found himself, as always, immobilized, facing Fifth Avenue uptown, over a thousand dark feet above its hard and welcome surface. Then he urged his body forward in sad and grim desperation, focusing his will upon the desire to fall forward, merely to lean his strong and heavy body, his factory-made body, out, away from the building, away from life. Inwardly he began to scream for movement, picturing himself tumbling in slow motion, gracefully and surely, to the street below. Yearning for that.

But his body was notas he knew it would not behis own. He had been designed by human beings; only a human being could make him die. Then he screamed aloud, throwing his arms out at his sides, bellowing in fury over the silent city. But he could not move forward.

Spofforth stood there, alone on top of the tallest building in the world, immobilized, for the rest of the June night. Occasionally the lights of a thought bus would be visible, slightly larger than stars, below him, moving slowly up and down the avenues of an empty city. There were no lights on in the buildings.

And then, as the sun began to illuminate the sky over the East River to his right and over Brooklyn, to which no bridges ran, his frustration began to ebb. Had he been given tear ducts he would, then, have found the release of tears; but he could not cry. The light became brighter; he could see the outlines of the empty buses below him. He could see a tiny Detection car moving up Third Avenue. And then the sun, pale in the June sky, burst up over an empty Brooklyn and sparkled on the water of the river as fresh as at the dawn of time. Spofforth took a step backward, away from the death he sought and had been seeking all his long life, and the anger that had possessed him began to ebb with the rising sun. He would go on living, and he could bear it.

He climbed down the dusty staircase slowly at first. But by the time he reached the lobby bis footsteps were brisk, self-assured, full of artificial life.

As he left the building he told the speaker on the doorway, Dont let the elevator be repaired. I prefer the climb.

Yes, sir, the door said.

Outside, the sun was shining brightly and there were a few humans on the street. An old black woman in a faded blue dress happened to brush Spofforths elbow, looked up dreamily at his face. When she saw his marking as a Make Nine robot she immediately averted her eyes and mumbled, Im sorry. Im sorry, sir. She stood near him, at a loss. She had probably never seen a Make Nine before and only knew about them from her early training.

Go on, he said gently. Its all right.

Yes, sir, she said. She fumbled in her dress pocket and pulled out a sopor and took it. Then she turned and shuffled off.

Spofforth walked briskly, in sunshine, back down toward Washington Square, toward New York University, where he worked. His body never tired. Only his mindhis elaborate, labyrinthine, and lucid mindunderstood the meaning of fatigue. His mind was always, always tired.

Spofforths metal brain had been constructed and his body grown from living tissue at a time, long before, when engineering was in decline but me making of robots was a high art. That art too would soon decline and wither; Spofforth himself had been its highest achievement. He was the last of a series of a hundred robots designated Make Nine, the strongest and most intelligent creatures ever made by man. He was also the only one programmed to stay alive despite his own wishes.

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Mockingbird»

Look at similar books to Mockingbird. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «Mockingbird»

Discussion, reviews of the book Mockingbird and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.