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Conditions of Sentient Life [MultiFormat]
eBook by Bruce Boston
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$1.59 |
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$1.35 |
eBook Category: Science Fiction/Dark Fantasy
eBook Description: A collection of 21 poems, songs, and prose poems by the first SFPA Grand Master. Reprints from Asimov's SF Magazine, Talebones, Dark Regions, The Third Alternative, and other leading genre publications. Includes the Rhysling Award winner, "Future Present."
eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: 1996
Fictionwise Release Date: May 2003
Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [97 KB], eReader (PDB) [42 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [15 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [16 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [66 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [88 KB], hiebook (KML) [116 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [101 KB], iSilo (PDB) [13 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [16 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [74 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [29 KB]
Words: 4062
Reading time: 11-16 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED
 
"Fantastical visions that one minute send us far out into unknown space, and the next hurtle us down into a bottomless pit of haunted souls. Poems that rely upon the full use of the senses, both the poet's and our own, and the ability to balance sadness and bliss, time and distance.... There's true magic in these stanzas."--G. O. Clark, Star*Line
"...cuts to the heart of the issue in focus like a glass knife. Boston has few rivals in the field of speculative verse, whether he looks forward, back, around the corner or inside.... There can be no denial of the incantatory, skywalk, high quality in the writing range here."--Tony Lee, Dragon's Breath
FUTURE PRESENT: A LESSON IN EXPECTATION The future the past once envisioned is
nothing like the present we now inhabit.
No aerocars. No globed and spired metropoli.
No eccentric rube-goldbergian gadgets that
deliver a cool drink and a shiatsu massage
with the casual flick of a single switch.
No passage to the stars or even Mars.And what of those gently purring walkways
lightly peopled by superior beings who glow
with the logic of a sublime moral grace? Instead the present through which we slog
and stagger seems raw and tatterdemalion
as the past we expected to trash behind
--the twentieth is the cruelest century--
breeding sex plagues out of ignorance,
rife with demagogues and despoilation. And while we ponder what roads not taken
have abandoned us to this frantic moment,
this vain dyspepsia of the modern mind
--no one answer, a gross on every side--
the tomorrow we envision is omnivorous:
mushrooming clouds, displacing populations,
devouring civilization with toxic fungal rains. As those purring walkways recede and fade
into the dimming distance of the mind's eye,
the future, second by ever-rivering second,
oblivious to all expectation, yanks us bodily
into the coagulating rapids of its own design.
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