"James Alan Gardner - Gravity Wells" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gardner James Alan)

popping up all over my writing... scalpels and mutilating corpses. It's a good thing I despise Freudian
psychology, or I'd be really, really worried.



"Kent State Descending the Gravity Well: An Analysis of the Observer": This is the
one story I've written as me, Jim Gardner, rather than from some fictional point of view. It's not quite
a true storyтАФI never actually sat down and wrote out the "scribbles" as they appearтАФbut the ideas
did cross my mind as I saw how the press tried to deal with the twentieth anniversary of the killings at
Kent State University. Our beloved media (as they so often do) wrote around the facts without ever
truly connecting to the reality of what happened.

The shootings seem like ancient history now; but for the sake of our souls, we have to remember
that history is about real people with real lives and real deaths. There's something disturbing about the
air of unreality with which we often view the pastтАФas if anything that happened more than a few days
ago took place in some alien dimension that doesn't have much to do with who we are now. I'm
certainly guilty of feeling that way, too... which is one reason I wrote a story about fading memories
and trivializing other people's tragedies.



"Withered Gold, the Night, the Day": I'm normally a pretty cheerful guy... but when I saw
the movie Se7en in 1995, this story just came blurting out over the next three days. A story in which
the world is withered, thinned out, shriveled. Where Everyman is a despairingly unbalanced vampire
who seeks moral guidance from the Devil in a bus shelter.

I should know better than to see certain types of movies. If I'd seen a movie about the Care
Bears, heaven knows what I might have written.



"The Last Day of the War, with Parrots": A story from a woman's point of view. People
ask why I use female narrators so much. My answer is (a) I don't use them any more often than I use
male narrators, and (b) why shouldn't I use female narrators, provided I'm not a jerk about it? To be
sure, men often do lousy jobs of portraying womenтАФbut I have to believe that's just sloppiness and
inattention, not an inevitable fact of gender. I don't accept that the only type of character I can
legitimately write about is someone very much like myself... because frankly, I'm bored with
middle-aged middle-class white men, and there are far too many of those guys in science fiction
already.

Therefore, I resolved long ago that whenever I wrote about the future, I would show it
containing just as many women as men, not to mention people of diverse cultural backgrounds, old,
young, straight, gay, rich, poor, and every other variation I could make fit within the story's logic.
That's the sort of future world I wouldn't mind living to see.
 One more thing about this story. It takes place in the League of Peoples universe, and readers
who know about the League might be wondering how two groups of aliens could descend upon a
planet and start waging war against each other. Isn't that against the fundamental law of the League?
Yes, it is; and someday, at the proper time, I may tell the story of what really happened on
Caproche.