"01- Introduction by Roger Zelazny" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nebula Awards)

INTRODUCTION

Here are seven stories. There is something special about each
one of them, or they wouldn't be here.
They were all of them nominated for the Nebula Award,
a thing presented at the annual Science Fiction Writers of
America awards banquet, a thing which represents our col-
lective opinion as to what is the very best work our area of
literature produced in the year in question.
Three of these stories won that award. Some of the others
came close.
What is a Nebula?
Physically, it is a 9"'X.4V4"X4V4" piece of Incite with a
black base, containing a chunk of quartz and a stylized
representation of the spiral nebula. It is an expensive and,
as such things occasionally are, a lovely thing to behold. It
is our Academy Award/Emmy/Edgar/What Have You. It is
the thing we give to the people we respect, for what they
have written. A full list of winners, for this and previous
years, occurs at the end of this book.
Now, let the Nebula, with its aims reaching out, turning,
represent the human imagination, seeking new things. Okay.
Because of this, no two of our anthologies (or stories) will
ever be alike. Know this, because you need to know it before
you start reading these or any other works of science fiction.
The imagination is a funny thing. By nature, it reaches out;
and this nature is a pleasure-pain thing. As Robert Conquest
has said, nobody reads science fiction out of a sense of duty.
Since it has not yet been academized, you read it, if you read
it at all, for pleasure, impure and unsimple.
And that is what this award represents: recognition of the
highest fruits of the imagination, impure and unsimple.
An individual story of this sort may hold the fascination of '
a spider or a butterfly. When I say that they give pleasure, I
do not mean that you are holding a collection of fairy tales
with happy endings. I mean only that these are stories people
will read because they want to, not because they have to,
I mean that they are alive, with heartbeats, metabolisms,
EEO readings. I mean that they can be sad, happy or neither
of these. The pleasure I mentioned comes from contemplat-
ing the many aspects of the human condition in whatever
variant environments it may be cast, the same as in any other
form of literature.
Two things please bear in mind: like opera, nobody kicks
because people sing instead of talk, or if median res means
Medieval Germany or Italy; likewise, we live now in an age
when the really big philosophical ideas are borne of Science
(cap. "S," yes), rather than debate over the horse's teeth.
So...
This is, as a mass-media magazine once observed, and