"Judith Merril - Daughters of Earth and Other Stories" - читать интересную книгу автора (Merril Judith)

dynamics of the past.
The prophecy business is not always comfortable. If you're not being stoned in the marketplace,
you're likely to get hustled off in a straitjacket. The lucky prophet who squeezes between the rock of
martyrdom and the hard place of ridicule runs the subtler risk of burial alive by
canonizationтАФentombment in holy writ. Finally, there is the unique ambivalence, for a prophet, of
becoming "dated."
The Gernsback-era evangelists of space flight are of course overjoyed at the realization of many of
their visionsтАФbut the more accurate their predictions were, the more likely their stories are to be
considered too "dated" for space-age readers.
The stories in this book, mostly written more than thirty years ago, have sadly/happily experienced no
such epiphany. All the "conventional science fiction" stories were first published before the first moon
landing. (The exceptions are a story-poem and a story-article, both from the seventies.) Those that were
set in a near-future on Earth contain some errors of "future history." (One in fact is about a quite different
first lunar landing.) I have resisted the temptation to "update" these pieces, but I would urge readers to
note the original publication dates: the sad fact is that errors in prediction have not quite blunted the
prophetic content. "Real history" has done little or nothing to resolve the various problems to which they
were addressed.
Maybe in another thirty years . . . ?
Judith Merril Toronto, 1985

Note #2
S p a c e is sparse
planets are profligate
peripatetic
s p a c e soundless
separate sad?
perhaps
a planet will have
plants plains palaces plateaus plates plots
perambulators
planets swim in solar s p a c e
soliloquize
plantains pearls pastorales petroleum plums purple
penicillin
palominos
people.
Planets
prop up petrels planes and parachutes
proliferate peasantry protozoa pasturage pestilence
pallbearers
paleontology
people
on planets pop up
past all the panic planet pageantry -
 plinths plazas pampas patios palms poles poplarsтАФ
pop!
poppoppoppoppopulating
pristine parsecs of sane
silent
sanitary