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"Unearthed"
Aug. 20th, 2012 11:28 am“What are you preparing for?”
“What do you mean?” He wiped his face with a shirt.
“Is there another war coming? Some enemy to defeat?”
“The enemy is ignorance,” he said, so sincerely he might have been a child. “And death. Death is an enemy. Our bodies give out too soon.”
I had no answer. My own fragile body appeared likely to give out long before his.
“I’ve long thought that I have a mission,” he said, turning away as he said it, busying himself with tiny flasks cluttering the supervisor’s desk. “If I know more, more about the world, science, myself… I can do more for the world.”
Back in March 2010, Asimov’s published William Preston’s “Helping Them Take The Old Man Down”, about the 21st century and the last year in the life of the force of Nature known as the Old Man, his homage to Clark Savage Jr, as the authorities attack his Fortress of Solitude. Last year, they published Preston’s “Clockworks”, set in the 1960s, and told from the point of view of a man who used to be a criminal mastermind until the Old Man captured him and took him thru personality correction.
In the September issue, “Unearthed” takes us all the way back to 1925, in which we find when and why the Old Man, still very young, took on his Great Work, as he sees visions of Tomorrow and a non-stop series of disasters, including the collapse of a great tower.
Recommended.
“What do you mean?” He wiped his face with a shirt.
“Is there another war coming? Some enemy to defeat?”
“The enemy is ignorance,” he said, so sincerely he might have been a child. “And death. Death is an enemy. Our bodies give out too soon.”
I had no answer. My own fragile body appeared likely to give out long before his.
“I’ve long thought that I have a mission,” he said, turning away as he said it, busying himself with tiny flasks cluttering the supervisor’s desk. “If I know more, more about the world, science, myself… I can do more for the world.”
Back in March 2010, Asimov’s published William Preston’s “Helping Them Take The Old Man Down”, about the 21st century and the last year in the life of the force of Nature known as the Old Man, his homage to Clark Savage Jr, as the authorities attack his Fortress of Solitude. Last year, they published Preston’s “Clockworks”, set in the 1960s, and told from the point of view of a man who used to be a criminal mastermind until the Old Man captured him and took him thru personality correction.
In the September issue, “Unearthed” takes us all the way back to 1925, in which we find when and why the Old Man, still very young, took on his Great Work, as he sees visions of Tomorrow and a non-stop series of disasters, including the collapse of a great tower.
Recommended.
