"Harry Harrison - Galactic Dreams" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison Harry)

rich with experiences, tan of skin and slightly more solvent, we drove back to
New York.

And continued on to England.

Many times many people, eyebrows raised, have asked me why I did this or that.
Like driving to Mexico with an infant. Or going to Denmark for a one month
visit and staying for seven years. My answer, quite often, is that it seemed
like a good idea at the time. People with regular jobs, mortgaged homes,
children in school and a pension hovering goldenly in the distance are often
infuriated by this answer.

But it is a true one, not a glib or evasive answer. We were committed to the
freelance life. And enjoyed living someplace else. For a writer it was
paradise. Learning new languages, living in new cultures, responding to new
realities, ideas, experiences. I am more than blessed that Joan shares my
enthusiasms.

On the jacket of the German translation of one of my novels is a German
expression. It refers to me as a Weltenbummler. Was I being called a world
bum? Not nice. Professor T. A. Shippey, science-fiction scholar and linguist,
set me right. "No, not a bum, Harrison - though others may think differently.
It is an ancient and good German term, not too different from our word
`apprentice.тАЩ



Or better `journeyman,' as in journeyman printer. A novice working at a
skilled trade would go from workplace to workplace, learning new skills and
crafts.тАЭ
I think the Germans are right about me. Weltenbummler indeed. Everything new,
different, interesting, educational becomes part of a writer's life. It is all
grist for the creative mill. Many times the connection is obvious; I wrote
Captive Universe after living in Mexico, seeing the life there in the isolated
villages, discovering how these people understood their world. тАШIn Our Hands
the StarsтАЩ uses Denmark as a setting; the people, their attitude towards life,
shape the structure of the novel.

Those are the obvious examples. But there are subtler threads in my writing,
many times things that I am not aware of, that are pointed out by critics or
friends. Or enemies? I do not wish to put down Peoria, home of that fine
writer Philip Jose Farmer, but I do feel that there is more to the world than
Peoria. I have lived for extended periods, for months and years, in a total of
six countries. I have visited at least sixty more. I feel enriched by the
experience. More important - I feel that my work has been enriched.

Circumstance, and residing outside my native country for some thirty-odd
years, have certainly changed me. The way I think, the way I write. I am an
internationalist now, feeling that no single country is better than another.
Though there are certainly some that are worse. I speak Esperanto like a