"Keith Laumer - Retief !" - читать интересную книгу автора (Laumer Keith)

know what he's describing. There are plenty of writers who've seen and done things, but they
can't make those things vivid to the reader. You feel the reality of a Laumer story.
And of course, he did have the knowledge. For example, the Bolo series so perfectly captures
the awesome power of a tank that I figured the author had served in an armored unit at some
point in his varied career. Nope. But part of Keith's World War II training (in what was then the
US Army Air Corps) involved lying down in a slit trench while tanks drove over him. Which,
when you think about it, is an even better way to come to appreciate tanks than riding inside one.
He also came by the diplomatic background of the Retief stories honestly, having served in
the US Foreign Service in the late '50s as vice consul in Burma.
Burma wasтАФand isтАФa fragment of British imperialism rather than a nation state. The area
which the British administered from Rangoon included three major tribal groups, all of whom
hated each other even more than they hated the British (after all, they'd known each other longer).
When the British left Burma in 1948, they handed the administration over to the tribe which
happened to live in the neighborhood of RangoonтАФthereby spawning national resistance
movements in both the north and south of the country which continue active to this day. What
passes for a Burmese central government is intensely xenophobic and handles internal protest by
(for example) machinegunning crowds who are waiting outside hospitals for word on relatives
machinegunned during earlier peaceful protests.
It was the practice of the diplomatic community of the time to pretend that Burma was a
normal country, civilized according to Western standards. As a matter of fact, the Secretary
General of the United Nations then was Burmese. (A similar process goes on today in regard to
Iran. About the only people who publicly deny that Iran is civilized are the theocrats who lead
Iran.)
The pretense would have been difficult to maintain for those diplomats stationed in Burma
who went beyond the social whirl and actually learned something about the country. Of course,
most of them didn't get out into the country. The US presence in Burma was just as remarkable as
Burma itself.
The United State Foreign Service had gone through reorganizations both before and after
World War II, leaving several different types of diplomats coexisting rather uncomfortably. The
older and greater in the status, the less awareness of the realities of the modern international
community and the greater scorn for pragmatists like Captain Keith Laumer, who'd transferred
into the diplomatic service from the Air Force.
What I'm trying to imply with all this is that the incredible byzantine backgrounds of the
Retief stories owe as much to Keith's memory as to his imagination.
The humor (sometimes pretty black humor, granted) and realism which pervade the Retief
stories are both pretty obvious. Besides those things, the stories are sometimes constructed with
very, very sneaky cleverness. I'll give one example (but I won't tell you what the story was).
Analog was always a squeaky-clean magazine (even before it became a deadly dull
magazine). But back in the '70s, Analog ran a Retief story in which the native names were what
appeared at first glance to be collections of unpronounceable consonantsтАФa science fiction clich├й
for suggesting alien sounds.
If you looked very carefully, though (and to be quite honest, I didn't, until a linguist friend
pointed it out to me) and noted the ways the natives mispronounced English words, it turned out
that all those native names were scatological. John Campbell must have been spinning in his
grave.
So what you have in your hands are some of the funniest, cleverest, and most (unfortunately)
realistic stories ever written about life at the sharp end of international relations. You're about to
have fun.
And who knows? You may also learn something that'll make the international news a little
easier to understand.