"Judith Merril - Out of Bounds" - читать интересную книгу автора (Merril Judith)

overwhelming until tempered by the meeting, at which I was quickly made aware of the fact that nobody
who had actually sold a story to a magazineтАФeven a minor story to a minor magazineтАФcould escape her
awe. In other words, the status Writer was of greater importance to her than any writer. Even me.
At the time she had not yet sold a word, and her chant, her theme was, "I want to be a Writer!" and
the anomaly in this was that she was one, and that anyone in the scrivening trade who ever talked to her
knew immediately that she was; that she was a writer in every respect, from top to toe to inside to out,
who could write and would write and must write if it was on wet cardboard in the pouring rain with a
pointed stick; and she didn't know it!
Telling her did no good, because she didn't believe it. YetтАФwhat is a writer, anyway? What elements
produce that subspecies? Why, only those she had, and has in such full measure; and I shall enumerate:
A respect for the craft. One way to restate this is to say that the pen is mightier than the sword; and
the fair extrapolation of that, these nuclear days, is that the word is mightier than the bombтАФit is, indeed,
truly the ultimate weapon, and the writer writes respectfully, knowing this.
Something to say. This is what the Writer does with what he has, and the more he respects what he
has, the more significant is what he does.
Empathy. Some say a writer has to be interested in people. Some go further and say he has to love
people. But a Writer must be able to see out through other people's eyes and feel with their fingertips.
Humility. One expression of this is "It isn't finished yet," in the sense that anything alive is mutable in
every fibre; changing, growing; so that a Writer's writing has about it the quality of lifeтАФnot harvested
and handed you dewy and fresh, and you'd better gobble it before it goes bad, but able, rather, to live as
you live, grow as you grow тАФto bring you fruits of sight and insight to the degree that the soil and climate
of You can nurture it.
Finally, if the writer is to write fiction, there must be the acquisition of the techniques of fiction, and
the most profound understanding that a story about an Idea or a Thing might be a tract or an article or an
anecdote, but unless and until it is about people, it is not fiction.
From the very beginningтАФand even before that!тАФJudith Merril was a Writer. It may be, however,
that she marks the very beginning with THAT ONLY A MOTHER (humility at work, you see.) And I
would like to say a special few words about this extra-special story.
I have gone over the contents of this collection (incredibly, her first) in its pre-natal form of galleys
and tear-sheets, and I wish you could see it that way too. For every story shows work and more
workтАФtouch here, polish there, rewrite, re-proportionтАФall the effort which means only that this author
regards these stories as alive and growing, even as she has lived and grown since she first wrote them,
and as, therefore, they must live and grow with you. But in one special case I have requested that the
story run just as it first appeared, so that, along with the story, you may read the author.
THAT ONLY A MOTHER is a story that only a mother could have written. What I especially wish
to point out is the so-called "dating" of this story. It takes place in 1953. But what a 1953! We take our
morning newspaper out of a home facsimile gadget. We travel up to the seventeenth floor in a Rolavator,
whatever that is, and, what with nuclear warfare and unbridled research, there is a rising incidence of
mutations; infanticideтАФmost often by the fathersтАФis a rising tide. All of this is ridiculous, of course: what
the lit'ry journals are pleased to dismiss as "mere" science fiction. (Oddly enough, if we now saidтАФfor
this editionтАФ'63 or '83, we would feel that the story was more realistic, or at least less dated. "Dated,"
you know, means beneath consideration.)
It is important, however, not to accept such trivial reasons for dismissing such a story. For this is a
'world of if' story; it is science-fiction functioning, not in its 'might-happen' voice, but in its even more
potent 'might-have-happened' one. We really might have had such a '53 тАФrolavators and all, for war
does strange swift things to the appointments of livingтАФbut for the power of the word.
Now go back and watch the Writer writing this story. Hiroshima is less than two years ago; this is the
time of One World or None and the Soviet scuttling of the Baruch Plan in the United Nations. I am not,
on behalf of this remarkable story, suggesting that it was the word that turned aside the '53 it describes; I
do submit that the Writer writes it because she has something to say; that her deep conviction is that to