Solitaire Station

by Lucius Shepard

Un vero capolavoro della fantascienza che ha vinto tutti i premi più Premio Locus, Premio Science fiction Chronicle, Premio Nebula, Premio Hugo
La Stazione spaziale Solitaire, posta oltre l’orbita di Marte, è stata creata per costruire e lanciare nel cosmo le navi-luce alla ricerca di mondi abitabili. È popolata da migliaia di persone, gente che anni di isolamento e la nostalgia della Terra e delle proprie famiglie hanno reso fragile, turbolenta e facile preda di una temuta e arrogante organizzazione chiamata Magnificenza che sta cercando di assumere il controllo della Stazione.
In questo scenario si muovono Bill, un ritardato perseguitato da tutti, e John, agente della Sicurezza della Stazione. Il suo non è un lavoro facile, ma mai avrebbe pensato di dover affrontare una situazione talmente esplosiva da costringerlo a scardinare le strutture della stessa Solitaire Station.
Traduzione italiana di Armando Corridore

Genres: Science Fiction

95 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Brief biographies are, like history texts, too organized to be other than orderly misrepresentations of the truth. So when it's written that Lucius Shepard was born in August of 1947 to Lucy and William Shepard in Lynchburg, Virginia, and raised thereafter in Daytona Beach, Florida, it provides a statistical hit and gives you nothing of the difficult childhood from which he frequently attempted to escape, eventually succeeding at the age of fifteen, when he traveled to Ireland aboard a freighter and thereafter spent several years in Europe, North Africa, and Asia, working in a cigarette factory in Germany, in the black market of Cairo's Khan al Khalili bazaar, as a night club bouncer in Spain, and in numerous other countries at numerous other occupations. On returning to the United States, Shepard entered the University of North Carolina, where for one semester he served as the co-editor of the Carolina Quarterly. Either he did not feel challenged by the curriculum, or else he found other pursuits more challenging. Whichever the case, he dropped out several times and traveled to Spain, Southeast Asia (at a time when tourism there was generally discouraged), and South and Central America. He ended his academic career as a tenth-semester sophomore with a heightened political sensibility, a fairly extensive knowledge of Latin American culture and some pleasant memories.

Toward the beginning of his stay at the university, Shepard met Joy Wolf, a fellow student, and they were married, a union that eventually produced one son, Gullivar, now an architect in New York City. While traveling cross-country to California, they had their car break down in Detroit and were forced to take jobs in order to pay for repairs. As fortune would have it, Shepard joined a band, and passed the better part of the 1970s playing rock and roll in the Midwest. When an opportunity presented itself, usually in the form of a band break-up, he would revisit Central America, developing a particular affection for the people of Honduras. He intermittently took odd jobs, working as a janitor, a laborer, a sealer of driveways, and, in a nearly soul-destroying few months, a correspondent for Blue Cross/Blue Shield, a position that compelled him to call the infirm and the terminally ill to inform them they had misfiled certain forms and so were being denied their benefits.

In 1980 Shepard attended the Clarion Writers’ Workshop at Michigan State University and thereafter embarked upon a writing career. He sold his first story, "Black Coral," in 1981 to New Dimensions, an anthology edited by Marta Randall. During a prolonged trip to Central America, covering a period from 1981-1982, he worked as a freelance journalist focusing on the civil war in El Salvador. Since that time he has mainly devoted himself to the writing of fiction. His novels and stories have earned numerous awards in both the genre and the mainstream.

Reviews

[Antonio Fanelli · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesante, gradevole
Troppo semplice, poco appassionante.

[Salvatore Pulvirenti · Rating 5 out of 5]

Uno dei pi�� bei libri che abbia letto ultimamente.
Seppure il tutto si dipani in 120 paginette la storia scivola via bene e con una conclusione onesta.
Lo scenario �� immediatamente comprensibile sin dall'inizio, dove vengono presentati e definiti da subito i protagonisti, e i particolari che pian piano compongono il quadro finale sono ben distribuiti lungo tutto il resto.

L'aspetto umano della vicenda, che va oltre quello meramente politico a contorno, rimane comunque al centro. E non solo dei singoli individui ma dell'intera comunit�� spaziale.

Veramente un must

[Giuseppe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ok, ha vinto un sacco di premi, quindi forse è la traduzione a penalizzarlo. Mia idiosincrasia: troppi punti esclamativi. La storia è bella, l'impianto è buono, ma i dialoghi sono esagerati e lo stile a tratti è molto retrò (più nel senso del comodino della nonna che nel senso del gusto antico)