"Tanya Huff - What Ho, Magic!" - читать интересную книгу автора (Huff Tanya)

Tanya Huff is...



This book is the first collection of some of Tanya's short stories, and the stories, bristling with an elegant
wit that never becomes either self-indulgent or pretentious, speak more clearly for themselves than I ever
could.

I'd like to concentrate on the work, and the work alone, but there's so much of Tanya in the work she
does it would be like telling half a story when I know more of it: doesn't feel right. Besides, anyone who's
reading this has already bought the book, a sure indication that I'd be singing to the choir.

So, briefly, Tanya Huff is scum. A maggot. Moreover, I mean both words in the nicest possible way.

Perhaps a little background is in order.

The first time I met Tanya, I was fifteen years old. I was at my first convention, and very nervous; she
was at her umpteenth, and very confident. She was also dressed up as Belit. I couldn't think of anything
clever to say to her - a recurring theme - so I didn't say anything at all because, well, I was intimidated.
Nevertheless, I remembered her clearly.

The second time I met Tanya was as a customer at Bakka, the science fiction bookstore inToronto
where we'd later spend six of her eight-year tenure working together. She had just sold a novella to Pat
Price at Amazing - the Kelly Chase story - and she was determined to sell a novel before she reached
the other side of thirty.

At that time, I was scribbling poetry and editing fledgling attempts at my own fiction, and she seemed to
have stepped across the impossibly wide divide that separates the published - and publishable - from the
unpublished. She was very matter of fact about the sale and her future career. I was impressed - and
intimidated - so I didn't mention the fact that I was writing.

I started working at Bakka very shortly after that, part-time to her full-time, and when I finally graduated
to full-time, we overlapped on four of our five days. During those years, as most of you probably did, I
read Tanya's fiction. But I got to read it before it was published.

It was torture.

Poets tend toward melodrama and abuse of the language; they're always at least a bit infatuated with
words and the cadence of words, and before they find their feet...well, it isn't pretty. That was me.

Misery loves company. Unfortunately, I never did get any, not that way.

Tanya has never had that problem. I'm fairly certain she knows what purple prose is, but I guarantee
she's also incapable of committing it.

"Here, Michelle," she'd say, "I think this is too slow. Or too boring. Or maybe not enough is happening.'"
So I'd read her very polished, highly amusing and often deeply moving writing - and then I'd slink off to
my computer with an inferiority complex the size of a small planet. This was her idea of not good enough!
Tanya, I thought, you are scum. But I wasn't about to say that because I didn't want it to be taken the
wrong way.