"Alan Dean Foster - With friends like these." - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

A Miracle of Small Fishes
Dream Done Green
He
Polonaise
Wolfstroker
Ye Who Would Sing


INTRODUCTION

When I was very young, which was not so very long ago, my friends and I wanted to grow up to be
firemen, policemen, airline pilots, and presidents. I suspect it says something for my generation
when you consider that as youngsters our aspirations were to be successful civil servants.
Certainly no one ever came up to me after a hard afternoon of sockball or kick-the-can and said,


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"Alan, when I grow up, I'm going to be a science-fiction writer."
Even more certainly, I never said it to anyone. But it happened. Where, as my mother was once wont
to ask, did I go wrong?
Probably by giving me all those comic books. Comic books are dangerous to the American way of
life, you see. I've always agreed with that theory. A child raised on comics can't help but grow
up with a questing mind, an expanded imagination, a sense of wonder, a desire to know what make
things tickтАФmachines, people, governments.
No wonder our gilded conservatives are afraid of them.
I don't remember when I first started drawing spaceships. I know I blossomed in the fifth grade.
They weren't very good spaceships, but in my soul I knew they were astrophysically sound. Someday
I'd design real ones. I might have become an engineer, save for one inimical colossus who always
loomed up to block my dream-way: mathematics.
I wasn't helpless, but neither did I display a precocious aptitude for differential calculus. My
feelings were akin to those I experienced when I discovered that it took more than six piano
lessons to play Rachmaninoff's Third ConcertoтАФor even his First Concerto. Mentally, I drifted, my
chosen profession blocked off to me at the tender age of eleven. - If it hadn't been for that damn
book, The Spaceship Under the Apple Tree...
I persevered with my school work, finding in myself certain talents for the biological sciences.
Math always cropped up somehow, somewhere, stopping me. What to do? I was good at English and
history, but I wanted to design spaceships dammit!
I kept on drawing them, knowing it was futile, but unable to resist the smooth lines, the sensuous
curves of propulsive exhausts, the sharp stab of some irresistible power-beam. When I started
fiddling around with writing, I stayed away from science fiction. Impossibly complex, intricate,
challenging... I wrote love stories, mysteries, even fantasy. How could I consider writing science
fiction when The World of Null-A read like Chinese? I didn't even read that much sf, turning
instead to natural history, politics, science, literatureтАФI immersed myself throughout high school
in tons of such nonscience fiction. Little did I know.
It started in college, at UCLA. The more arcane philosophy I was forced to read, the more I looked
forward to relaxing with the directions of the good doctor Asimov. Thomas Hobbs drove me to relax
in the humor and humanity of Eric Frank Russell. The painful details of political science were
less hurtful when salved with judicious doses of Robert Sheckley, or buried beneath the smooth