"Harlan Ellison - Pa" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

The Power of the Nail
Wonderbird
The Song the Zombie Sang
Street Scene
Come to Me Not in Winter's White
 SONS
OF
JANUS
 INTRODUCTION

These are stories I have written with other writers. Collaborations, theyтАЩre called. They are the products of
two minds working together, sometimes in complete harmony, more often in opposition. The former, because the
ideas were so right they needed no conflict to produce a coherent whole; the latter, because writers are perverse
creatures who enjoy tormenting one another. And also, conscious opposition on the part of one of the collaborators,
to the direction a story is taking naturally, may produce a stress that bends it unexpectedly in a to ally unpredictable
way. And from that can come a toad prince or a toad, depending on whether or not both writers know how to handle
a fable run amuck.
The beloved Lester del Rey--one of my early mentors in the craft of professional lying-told me once : never
write a story with someone, that you can do as well by yourself. Well, I believe that. I tried writing a novel with
Avram Davidson once, titled тАЬDonтАЩt Speak of Rope,тАЭ Ech. One of the most horrible experiences in a universe filled
with death camps, hardhats, campus massacres and the human gamut that runs from Spiro to Manson; somewhere in
a file drawer languish ten thousand words of that novel, unended, unlamented, unfortunate. So I do, I really do, agree
with Lester.
Even so, life can occasionally become dull and predictable, and so, to spice it slightly, those of us with a flair
for danger and high adventure take guided tours through the heart of Mt. Vesuvius, stalk the blood-sucking vampire
bat through the swamps and fens of Bosnia and/or Herzogovina, join peace rallies, date beautiful models and, when
all else fails, collaborate on fictions with other writers. I grant you the picture of world-weariness and jaded appetite I
paint, the desperation of ennui that drives men to such hideous extremes as collaboration, is an ugly one. But I feel
you must know what horrors and pitfalls lie behind this seemingly uncomplicated act. Ask Avram. Ech.
But the reward of successful collaboration is a thing that cannot be produced by either of the parties working
alone. It is akin to the benefits of sex with a partner, as opposed to masturbation. The latter is fun, but you show me
anyone who has gotten a baby from playing with him or herself, and IтАЩll show you an ugly baby, with just a whole
bunch of knuckles.
And so, risking the hisses and catcalls of overly critical readers and critics who will call these joint efforts (if
youтАЩll pardon my carrying on the allusion from the preceding paragraph) merely gimmicky constructs, over the past
many years I have yoked myself to fourteen other writers, and from these literary miscegenations have come the
fictions before you.
My relationships with all of these men have been substantially more than what might be termed mere
acquaintanceship. All of them are my friends, but not all of them like me. Nor do I like all of them. Many of them
have done me favors I would be hard-pressed to repay in full or in kind. Others have messed me over hideously.
From time to time I have been in serious disagreement with one or another of them. Between one of them and myself
there was a shadow for many years. Between myself and another is something very much like the love of one brother
for another. One saved my life, literally. I thought another had ruined it. One made me terribly proud of him, and
then sold out, thereby destroying all my illusions about him. Two of them managed to alter the course and texture of
my life. From one I learned much about the nature of love, from another the nature of hate. With one I dreamed odd
dreams, and with another I learned people can only act as people, not as gods. One demonstrated there can be
nobility even in failure, and another showed me how badly success can be handled.
Millions of words of conversation in the past nineteen years have passed between me and these fourteen
men. Advice, shoptalk, problems, respect and denunciation. That is the nature of friendship.
But without these men, I would never have come to write the solo stories on which my reputation--