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

"Three Hearings on the Existence of Snakes in the Human Bloodstream": It's seldom
that I can actually trace the genesis of a story, but "Three Hearings..." is an exception. The night of
January 1, 1996, I couldn't sleep; and when I got out of bed to find something to do with myself, I
happened to pick up a how-to-write-poetry book I'd been meaning to read. (There's this nagging
voice in the back of my head that keeps saying, "Jeez, I really should know something about poetry.
And microbiology. And Chinese folklore." That voice is why I keep writing science fiction instead of
something respectable, like murder mysteries.)

Anyway, I opened the poetry book at random and found a short poem called "The Oxen" by
Thomas Hardy. The poem is based on a folk tradition that oxen supposedly kneel on Christmas Eve,
just as they knelt before the baby Jesus on the first Christmas. Hardy wistfully thinks about the legend
and says he would like someone to say to him, "Let's go into the fields to see the oxen kneeling." Even
better, he'd like to see that they are kneeling. To me, the poem was about becoming tired of modern
sophistication: nostalgically wishing for simplicity and simple proofs of faith.

This led me to think of a point in history where a simple article of faith was suddenly exposed as
a lie. My notes say, "Someone has invented a telescope or a microscope which shows the belief is not
true; that person is pulled in front of the High Priest to judge his heresy. The High Priest is a
sophisticated man and feels the symbolic truth is more important than the literal; but he knows that for
some people, this tiny thing will undermine their faith."

It's a stock situation in science fiction: the moment when science confronts religion. But then I
decided things would be more interesting if, for some people, the microscope/telescope did confirm
their simple faith. Some metaphoric claim of something in a person's blood... and with the poor quality
of early microscopes, some people saw what their religion claimed would be there. Over the
generations, those who did see something would intermarry with one another, tending to reinforce the
trait within that population...

A pattern immediately presented itself: first Leeuwenhoek with the microscope; then Darwin
explaining how selection processes emphasized the trait; and finally, a modern scientist who could lay
out the whole situation with real chemistry. The parallels with Rh-positive and Rh-negative blood were
just begging to be exploited... and the story wrote itself from there.



"Sense of Wonder": A while back, the editors of a proposed new sf magazine called Sense of
Wonder sent mail-outs to various science-fiction writers, inviting us to submit stories. The editors
wanted "big" stories that worked on a cosmic scale, stories designed to evoke the famous "sense of
wonder" that many people believe is the heart of science fiction. The letter specifically mentioned
Dyson spheres and other large-scale props of classic science fiction as examples of what the editors
were looking for.
 I certainly have nothing against Dyson spheres, ringworlds, and the likeтАФI've read plenty of
good stories that use such knick-knacks. However, I was feeling in a contrary mood the day I
received the mail-out. My first response was "Big stage props aren't what you need for sense of
wonder. I'll show you sense of wonder!"

Which is why I wrote this little scene of two boys on a summer afternoon.

And why I wrote all the other stories in this book, too.