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

logic of Murray Lein-ster. I read enormous amounts of science fiction.
I discovered E. E, Smith and John Tame, whose space-time concepts made those of the lectures I
attended shrink into laughability.
But I was that second-most-crippled college bastard, a political science major (the worst, he who
majors in English). No where to go save law school. So I girded myself for the challenge. At least
I would someday make money.
And in my senior year, with required courses laboriously shoveled away, I discovered the motion-
picture department at UCLA. And screenwriting. I found they would give me credit forтАФoh glory of
glories!тАФwatching movies! And for writing, for writing any old yam that came into my head.
School changed from drudgery to pleasure. I told stories and watched them, and that was all that
was required of me. And I learned the joy of those whose lives were concerned primarily with
artistic creation, saw the naked exuberance of a young guest-instructor displayed while he taught
a seminar in the films of director Howard Hawks. Peter Bogdanovich wasn't an especially fine
instructor, but he was enthusiastic. His enthusiasm has done him right well since he taught that
class.
He gave me a B, but wrote on my final exam, "You have good instincts... you should continue."
But law school still beckoned. Until a miracle happened. Despite unspectacular grades, perhaps
because of a good Graduate Entrance Exam score, possibly due to the odd letter I wrote in which I
explained I wished first of all to be the world's greatest gigolo and, second, to write, I was
accepted into the graduate writing program.
My parents wailed silently, stoically, and finally reconciled themselves to the idea of their
young Perry Mason blowing a fat raspberry at the whole legal profession. I turned down USC Law
School and entered the wacky world of graduate film at UCLA. I started at the unprodigal age of
twenty-two to write, seriously, for the first tune.
I wrote a love story set in Japan, a western, a sexy comedy. I wrote a science-fiction detective
film. I wrote an epic. And I started, to amuse myself, to write science-fiction stories. I would
become a combination Ellison/Stapeldon/Clarke/Heinlein. I would smear brilliance like the high-
priced spread across reams of virgin twenty-pound rag.
My first attempt was about an aluminum Christmas tree that took root and started to grow. It was
rejected. Often.


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Crushed? I was wrecked, ruined, psychologically destroyed. I should have gone to law school, vet
school, learned a trade. I would starve, miserably, begging for chocolate-chip danish in the
streets...
I sold a story. My twelfth. And it wasn't even written as a story. But the next one was, and it
sold too. I kept getting rejection slips, but some of them weren't mimeographed, they were
actually written to me. I joined the Science-Fiction Writers of America and met my godsтАФand was
crushed when they turned out to be human. Sometimes more than human, sometimes less. But I was one
of them.
I began to understand how a leper feels.
Harlan Ellison expressed an interest in a story of mine. Would I care to come over to his place to
talk about it? Did Washington free the slaves? Did Lincoln cut down cherry trees?
I met the Harlan Ellison. I'll never forget his first words to me, the first words from a Writer
to a writer.
"First of all, Foster, you know that ninety percent of this story is shit."
But basically, he liked the ending. Would I try again?