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

can say is that my grandfather ran a hardware store and I worked there for several summers. The rest
followed naturally.



"The Reckoning of Gifts": Back when I was doing theater, I wrote a one-act play called
"Gifts" that was performed by my old high school. Years later, when Lorna Toolis and Michael Skeet
asked me to submit a story for Tesseracts 4, I resurrected the idea from the play and this is what I
got.

I should point out the story is substantially different from the play. For example, the play had
none of the Vasudheva/Bhismu subplot. There are subjects that high schools prefer to avoid...

One last thing about "The Reckoning of Gifts"тАФthe story is science fiction. Science fiction. Just
because the tale is dressed in fantasy clothing, just because the characters talk about gods and
demons and dreams, don't automatically believe them. Science-fiction readers should know better.



"The Young Person's Guide to the Organism": The title comes from Benjamin Britten's The
Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra or Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Purcell. This is
a musical work written in 1945, designed to introduce children to the various instruments in a
symphony orchestra.

Structurally, the piece starts with the entire orchestra playing a simple tune composed by Henry
Purcell in the 1600s. Then each different instrument plays a variation on the tune, demonstrating the
sound of the instrument, the range, something about playing technique, and so on. When Britten has
finished taking apart the entire orchestra, he puts it back together again in a fugue that has all the
instruments taking the melody line in the order they were first presented. Finally, while the fugue
continues in the background, the brass section soars in with the original Purcell tune playing over top
of the rest of the orchestra (which is still belting out the fugue).

If that sounds complicated when described in words, it's quite straightforward when you hear the
music. You can probably find a recording of the piece at your local libraryтАФcheck it out and listen for
yourself. Most recordings have narrators who explain what's going on throughout the music, so you
won't have any trouble following the structure.

I followed the same structure in writing "The Young Person's Guide to the Organism." In my
case, the initial "theme" was one of science fiction's classics: First Contact. The story consists of a
number of individual "voices" describing their moment of contact with an enigmatic alien organism that
drifts slowly through the solar system. Each of these individuals imposes his or her own interpretation
on what the organism isтАФthe organism serves as a blank slate on which personal concerns are
projected. At the end of the story, in the fugue section, the individuals are brought together again for a
climax, and then the original theme of First Contact comes back for the grand finale.

It's worth noting that "Organism" tells the story of First Contact between humans and the League
of Peoples. That makes it the foundation for all of the novels I've published so far.