"Harlan Ellison - Partners in Wonder" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

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
тАУ however great or small it may be тАУ is based. Without all the words they have given the world on their
own, some larger part of the joy of having been a part of speculative fiction would never have been. Bloch
and his psychos and the Ripper; BovaтАЩs clear view of the importance of space travel; Budrys and the Gus
nobody bothers; Davidson and his sentient coathangers; Delany and frelking; Hensley and his son, Randy;
Laumer and Retief; Rotsler and a stack of cartoons only slightly smaller than Everest; Sheckley and all his
dimensions of wonder; Silverberg and thorns; Slesar and the greatest short-story ever written; Sturgeon
and...well, everything; Van Vogt and weapon shops and Jommy Cross and the cortical thalamic pause;
Zelazny and he who shapes.
All of them are masters, each of them writes only as he can write, and no two can ever be
confused in the minds of students of masterful sf. These are the extra special meanings for me of these
superimportant people:
Laumer is strength, and Davidson is erudition, and Budrys is empathy, and Delany is youthful
commitment, and Sheckley is outrageous madness, and Sturgeon is both dazzlement and love, and Bova is
the rationality of reality, Silverberg is craft, Van Vogt is complex conceptualization. Rotsler is irreverence,
Hensley is gentleness, Zelazny is poetic intricacy, Bloch is coming to grips with terror, and Slesar is
courage and pride and dignity.
I have learned these things from these men. So it is not merely by chance that we came together
finally to write. It is heady company and only a fool or an amateur would consider working with them
without a full realization of how good one must be to share the same story with each of them.
The individual introductions to the stories will tell you how the pieces came to be written, the
method of collaboration, any sidelights or anecdotes that informed them, any mishaps or contretemps
encountered in their making, their history and their success or failure as works of art, in my estimation.
(Understand: just because a story reaches print, or even sees repeated anthologization, does not mean that
we, the authors, are totally delighted with the outcome. Some of these stories fail in some of the areas
where we considered it important to succeed. Some started out as one thing, and wound up as quite another,
thereby dampening our pleasure. But in rehashing the histories of these stories with the men who were one
half their origin, I have not found one who regretted the experiment. That says something; what, IтАЩm not
certain.)
It sounds like hype to point out that this is the first book of its kind ever published; in that one way
it is the most original book of stories ever published, and in the same way it is a monstrous literary joke.
Throughout, however, it is for me a delight. You cannot know what a joy it is, what a prideful thing it is,
what a satisfying thing it is, to have my name linked with these men.
I have a few regrets. IтАЩll name them. Norman Spinrad, Isaac Asimov, Michael Moorcock and
Philip Jose Farmer. I wanted to write stories with all of them, and somehow, through no real fault of
anyone, they just didnтАЩt get written. IтАЩm sorry about that. TheyтАЩll more than likely never get written now.
And I think it a bad thing that there is no Ellison/female collaboration here. What a strange mindfuck it
would be to read a story on which IтАЩd worked with, say, Kate Wilhelm or Ursula Le Guin or Joanna Russ.
Yeah, I lament that.
And the lamentations are all that remain, because now having written the collaborative thing out
of my system тАУ it was a thing to do, you see тАУ I doubt very much that IтАЩll do it again. Oh, there may be one
or two little stories that chance ordains will be written in company with another, but a project like this? No,