"Lester Del Rey - The Best Of Lester Del Rey" - читать интересную книгу автора (Del Rey Lester)

The Coppersmith
Hereafter, Inc.
The Wings of Night
Into Thy Hands
And It Comes Out Here
The Monster
The Years Draw Nigh
Instinct
Superstition
For I Am a Jealous People
The Keepers of the House
Little Jimmy
The Seat of Judgment
Vengeance Is Mine
Author's Afterword

The Magnificent
THE UNQUESTIONED KING of-the nighttime air in New York radio is a skinny and
sardonic fellow named Long John Nebel. Long John's marathon talk show runs
from midnight till dawn every night of the week, and what it covers is
everything. I don't just mean "everything." I mean everything. Politics.
Religion. Sex. Hying saucers. Bermuda triangles. War. Science fiction.
Science. Art. Music. You name it, it has been the subject of a Long John
talkfest. And over the years, among his chosen nuclear guest family who join
him after midnight to chew over the topic of the day, one voice has stood out.
Whatever the subject, he has an opinion, and insights and facts to back it up.
He has done the show 400 times at least, not counting reruns on tape, and he
is so well known to the insomniacs of New York (and most other states) that he
is usually introduced only as The Magnificent. He doesn't need to be given a
name, because the listeners know him so well. But he has one. It is Lester del
Rey.
Of course, there are countless thousands of people who have known Lester del
Rey very well for a long time who have never heard him on Long John's show.
They are people like you and me: science-fiction readers. We've known Lester
for forty years, or even longer
All
if we remember those polemical letters in Astounding's "Brass Tacks"
department in the '30s.
Like most sf writers, Lester came to the field as a reader. He liked what he
read. After some thought, he concluded that he would like writing it, too. He
had never written a science-fiction story at the time. That didn't seem to
matter. He reasoned that if he thought of an idea no one else had thought of
before, and told it concisely and literately, with some attention to
interesting characters and colorful backgrounds, John Campbell would buy it.
So he did. And so John did; it was called "The Faithful." That was the first
story Lester sold John Campbell. It certainly wasn't the last. The Golden Age
of Astounding was all the more lustrous for "Nerves," "Helen O'Loy," and all
those others from his hard-driven typewriter.
Once he had formed the habit, Lester did not stop with Astounding. He wrote
for all the other magazines, too, and when a few years later a couple of