"James E. Gunn - Station In Space" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gunn James E)

I spent eight hours a day in my basement office, turning out ten pages a day and rewriting it once. That
meant I could write a short story in a week, a novelette in two weeks, a short novel in four weeks, and a
novel in three months. I wroteThis Fortress World andStar Bridge that way, and both got published by
Gnome Press in 1955, but I got a total of $500 ($450 when my agent took his percentage) forThis
Fortress World and half that (Jack got half) forStar Bridge . Both novels were reprinted later and
translated into a number of foreign languages, and provide a good return for my efforts, but I didn't know
about those prospects then, and at the time $750 for six months' work seemed like a poor strategy for a
struggling writer.

I made two decisions: I would place my stories in the near future, and I would write my novels in the
form of short stories and novelettes that I could get published first in the magazines and later collect as
books. When I became a teacher of fiction writing I passed it along to my students as "Gunn's Law" (Sell
it twice!).

One of the ideas I was turning over in my head was the near future of space flight: how would the public's
inertia ever be overcome? Willy Ley and Wernher von Braun had started the process by collaborating on
an issue ofCollier's dedicated to the construction of a space station, complete with evocative paintings by
astronomical artist Chesley Bonestell. It was later reproduced in book form asThe Conquest of Space. I
sat down to write a story that might be published in the slick magazines (the ultimate aspiration of every
pulp writer). I called it "The Cave of Night," and when it was done I asked my agent to send it to
Collier's and, ifCollier's rejected it, to theSaturday Evening Post . He sent it toCollier's , and when
Collier's rejected it he shipped it over to Horace Gold atGalaxy, who paid me 3 ┬╜ cents a word and
published it in the February 1955 issue.

A couple of good things happened. "The Cave of Night" was dramatized on NBC's "X Minus One" radio
program. I got $50 for that. A year or so laterGalaxy told my agent it wanted to develop a television
program that would broadcast dramatizations from the pages ofGalaxy , as "X Minus One" had done on
radio.Galaxy wanted "The Cave of Night" for its pilot program and bought the TV rights for $350. Not
long afterwards, apparently, that project fell through and the rights were sold to Desilu, which broadcast
a version in 1959 on "Desilu Playhouse" under the title of "Man in Orbit" (with Lee Marvin and H. G.
Marshall). That was too late to save my full-time writing career (by then I was working in the
Chancellor's office at the University of Kansas), but it was good to have something on television, even
though somewhere along the line the point of the story had been changed (that would become a familiar
feeling).

Back in 1954, however, I had gone on to write "Hoax." Horace Gold didn't like it ("Are you going to
keep on writing stories about hoaxes?" he wrote), but James Quinn did and published it inIF in
December of 1955. I wrote "The Big Wheel" in 1955, and it got published inFantastic Universe in
September 1956. By that time I was editing the alumni publications for the University of Kansas Alumni
Association, under an agreement that I could take off one week a month and a month every summer to
write. I also enrolled in a writers workshop course from mainstream author and editor Carolyn Gordon,
who taught me (among other things) about Flaubert's invention of creating a sense of reality by describing
places with appeals to at least three senses. I wrote "Powder Keg" in that class. I suspect that Ms.
Gordon was a bit puzzled by it, but she didn't flinch.If published it in April of 1958.

Before that came out I had written in the summer of 1956 the short novel "Space Is a Lonely Place," and
Bob Mills, who later would become my agent, published it in his innovative magazineVenture in May
1957. By that time Bantam Books had decided to start a science-fiction line, and my then agent, Harry
Altshuler, submittedStation in Space . Bantam didn't reply for a several months (Harry would write that
submitting a book to Bantam was like dropping it down a well, but eventually they always seemed to