"Alan Dean FOSTER - Smart Dragons, Foolish Elves" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

Fantasy is a tool that enables the writer to go beyond the constraints of everyday life to make a point. The vehicle can be ethnic mythology, puberty, Roman history, love, beer, a grand quest or a tiny afterthought. The humor can be contained in a quick punchline or an elaborate buildup. A story can make us laugh out loud or simply smile knowingly. Humor can be light, dark, and every shade in between, depending on what setting the toaster has been left on.

I like to believe that in addition to making us laugh or smile, each of the stories in this collection has something to say to us. Laughter lingers longest when it also makes a point. We usually remember the stories that cut deeper than those that merely anesthetize.

Some of the authors in this collection are noted for their humorous fiction. Most are not. Quite the contrary, they are famed for the dark and serious, or expansive and adventurous, or the biting, or the poetical. But not humor. Not for making the reader grin and chuckle. Those are the ones I particularly prize.

Because there's laughter in all of us, even in long-faced, somber authors charged with explaining the Meaning of It All to desperate readers. Sometimes it's a little slow manifesting itself, is all. The reason is that genuinely amusing fiction is the toughest kind to write. Succinctly put, "Funny is hard."

Keep that in mind as you put aside your casual evening's reading of Proust or Solzhenitsyn and dig into something really serious. Like this book. If it makes you smile, then it's done its job. If it makes you think, you've received a bonus. Take two stories, drink plenty of liquids, and stay in bed.

That done, have you heard the one about . . . ?

-Alan Dean Foster Prescott, Arizona

How nice to be able to open a collection of the extraordinary with a quite ordinary tale. After all, what could be more ordinary than buying a car? Cars are unremarkable utilitarian objects that we deal with every day of our lives.

Still, it would be a fairly simple matter to concoct a story about a remarkable car. One that kills, like Stephen King's Christine. Or one that metamorphoses into a starship, as in the movie The Last Starfighter. But once-you've tossed out the punchline, so to speak, where's your story? No, no. Better to keep it simple, ordinary, unspectacular.

Robert Silverberg has been writing simple, ordinary stories about everyday situations and events for a long time now. Ifs the ease and skill with which he brings off whatever he wants to try that's spectacular. This quiet little story, for example. You have to take it ...



As Is

ROBERT SILVERBERG

"As is," the auto dealer said, jamming his thumbs under his belt. "Two hundred fifty bucks and drive it away. I'm not pretending it's perfect, but I got to tell you, you're getting a damned good hunk of car for the price."

"As is," Sam Norton said.

"As is. Strictly as is."

Norton looked a little doubtful. "Maybe she drives well, but with a trunk that doesn't open-"

"So what?" the dealer snorted. "You told me yourself you're renting a U-Haul to get your stuff to California. What do you need a trunk for? Look, when you get out to the Coast and have a little time, take the car to a garage, tell 'em the story, and maybe five minutes with a blowtorch-"

"Why didn't you do that while you had the car in stock?"

The dealer looked evasive. "We don't have time to fool with details like that."

Norton let the point pass. He walked around the car again, giving it a close look from all angles. It was a smallish dark-green four-door sedan, with the finish and trim in good condition, a decent set of tires, and a general glow that comes only when a car has been well cared for. The upholstery was respectable, the radio was in working order, the engine was-as far as he could judge-okay, and a test drive had been smooth and easy. The car seemed to be a reasonably late model, too; it had shoulder-harness safety belts and emergency blinkers.

There was only one small thing wrong with it. The trunk didn't open. It wasn't just a case of a jammed lock, either; somebody had fixed this car so the trunk couldn't open. With great care the previous owner had apparently welded the trunk shut; nothing was visible back there except a dim line to mark the place where the lid might once have lifted.

What the hell, though. The car was otherwise in fine shape, and he wasn't in a position to be too picky. Overnight, practically, they had transferred him to the Los Angeles office, which was fine in terms of getting out of New York in the middle of a lousy winter, but not so good as far as his immediate finances went. The company didn't pay moving costs, only transportation; he had been handed four one-way tourist-class tickets, and that was that. So he had put Ellen and the kids aboard the first jet to L.A., cashing in his own ticket so he could use the money for the moving job. He figured to do it the slow but cheap way: rent a U-Haul trailer, stuff the family belongings into it, and set out via turnpike for California, hoping that Ellen had found an apartment by the time he got there. Only he couldn't trust his present clunker of a car to get him very far west of Parsippany, New Jersey, let alone through the Mojave Desert. So here he was, trying to pick up an honest used job for about five hundred bucks, which was all he could afford to lay out on the spot.

And here was the man at the used-car place offering him this very attractive vehicle-with its single peculiar defect-for only two and a half bills, which would leave him with that much extra cash cushion for the expenses of his transcontinental journey. And he didn't really need a trunk, driving alone. He could keep his suitcase on the back seat and stash everything else in the U-Haul. And it shouldn't be all that hard to have some mechanic in L.A. cut the trunk open for him and get it working again. On the other hand, Ellen was likely to chew him out for having bought a car that was sealed up that way; she had let him have it before on other "bargains" of that sort. On the third hand, the mystery of the sealed trunk appealed to him. Who knew what he'd find in there once he opened it up? Maybe the car had belonged to a smuggler who had had to hide a hot cargo fast, and the trunk was full of lovely golden ingots, or diamonds, or ninety-year-old cognac, which the smuggler had planned to reclaim a few weeks later, except that something unexpected had come up. On the fourth hand-

The dealer said, "How'd you like to take her out for another test spin, then?"