"Intoduction and Foreword by Poul Anderson" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nebula Awards)

or Aldous Huxley's Brave New World seem to them the
apotheosis of the genre, and their own reading of real science
fiction ended with Carl Claudy's pastiches of H. G. Wells in
the old American Boy magazine. They had fading memories
of the Buck Rogers radio program or the superior draftsman-
ship but inferior plotting of Prince Valiant. The results would
be laughable if they weren't so pitiable. Don't fail to miss
them all.
Often enough a first science fiction novel is written by
someone like Panshin who has obviously learned his trade
well in the rigorous workshops of John W. Campbell, Fred
Pohl, or Ed Ferman. Of course, writing a short story with its
limited vision, singleness of effect, controlled plotting, minimal
characterization, and qualified range is not the same as writ-
ing a novel. Essentially, the problem of the novelist is to
create an entire world, populate it with believable people, and
construct a problem that requires careful, detailed elabora-
tion. Further, he must accomplish this in prose that moves
the story toward its denouement while remaining unobtrusive.
"There are those writers, like Ray Bradbury, whose talents
seem to lead them to the short story as a natural medium.
It is not that Bradbury lacks the artistic vision for the novel;
it is rather that his concepts seize him, shake him, and emerge
explosively after two or three hours of writing into a short
story. Other writers think galactically or epically; no micro-
cosm for them. Their dreams encompass entire worlds, their
characters emerge from ink into reality, and their prose can
be lean, supple, poetic, highly charged with cosmic tensions.
Critics often maintain, with some justification, that it is
more difficult to write a good short story than an average
novel. Perhaps. But when any author masters his trade so well
that his novel is a richly panoplied accomplishment, he
deserves recognition and praise from those who should appre-
ciate the extent of his achievement.
Nineteen sixty-eight produced at least one such novel, John
Boyd's The Last Starship from Earth. It is so good that it
caused Heinlein to break his strongest resolution:, never to
comment in public on anything a colleague has written. He
said, "It is terrific . . . the best anti-utopia, the strongest satire
on trends in our present culture that I have seen since 1984
appeared . . . it belongs up at the top, along with Brave New
World."
Yet despite Heinlein's praise, Boyd's novel had a very
mixed reception. It received a few votes for the Nebula
Award and almost no reviews, even delayed ones, in any of
the science fiction magazines. Why was it ignored? No one
knows for sure, but the sometimes justified xenophobia of
both science fiction writers and fans might have accounted
for part of it. Fans and writers are clannishindeed, have
had clannishness forced upon them by those who think that