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

Did Washington free the slaves? Did Lincoln... ?
In two days I buried Ellison under three or four complete rewrites. Becase I was excited. Because
I was anxious. And because the next week I had to report to the Army. Yup. And I also wanted to
finish the novel I was working on, my first.
I never satisfied Harlan, but I finished the novel. It was rejected. And then it sold. And IтАФI was
lost. I was one of the happy lepers, come what may. I might be a starving leper, I might be a
wealthy one, but I had chosen my disease.
I got out of the Army, went to work writing press releases for a tiny local public relations
outfit. I also ran the duplicating machine and cleaned out the fish tank. I made $400 a month, to
start. A year and some months later, I began to feel like those fish.
If I could only find something I liked, something to put seafood in my mouth while I resumed
writing. I knew nobody made a living writing science fiction, except people like Heinlein and
Anderson and Asimov and what the hell, they were immortal anyway, so what difference did it make?
A part-time teaching position opened at Los Angeles City College. I applied and was accepted.
Furthermore, I enjoyed it. A course in film history and one in writing. I've also taught writing
at UCLA, and even a seminar on the works of H. P. Lovecraft.
I kept writing. Things Started To Happen. Books sold, stories sold. Other people would pay to
share with me yarns I wrote for my own enjoyment. I was happy, content. Who wouldn't be? I've
never known a storyteller who was unhappy when telling stories.
Now I'm a writer, but I feel guilty. This is too much fun. It's sinful to enjoy life so much. I
haven't suffered enough to be a writer. I like other human beings, I like this sad, smoggy world.
I like my agents and my publishers and editors. I even like critics. I love my wife, who is much
too beautiful for me.
Clearly, there is something drastically wrong with me.
Or maybe it's all a dreamтАФyeah, tomorrow I'll wake up and have to go read law books; put on a suit
and tie; smile at people I'd like to be honest with. But for now, today, this minute, I'm going to
enjoy every second of that dream.
I can't give it to you. But I can share a little of it. It's in this book.


WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE...

My favorite writer of science fiction was, and still is, the inimitable Eric Frank Russell. When I
was turning in short stories to the magazines instead of papers to my college professors and
collecting rejection slips instead of credits and grades, I often wondered why Russell had stopped
writing. I miss him.
At the 1968 World Science-Fiction Convention in Oakland, John Campbell told me that Russell was
his favorite writer, and that he too sorely bemoaned the lack of yarns Russellian. So I decided to
try a Russell-flavored Terra-├╝ber-alles story. Campbell liked it. He never sent acceptance
lettersтАФjust checks.
And man and boy, that was a change from rejection slips.

As she commenced her first approach to the Go-type sun, the light cruiser Tpin's velocity began to
decrease from the impossible to the merely incredible. Her multidrive engines put forth the barely
audible whine that signified slowdown, and she once more assumed a real mass that the normal
universe could and would notice.



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