"Larry Niven - Limits" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

more fun that way. And there is a classic exception, a way of collaborating
that holds no risks at all.

Here's how it works. You've got a story in your trunk. Somewhere in
there is a terrific story idea; but it never jelled. You broke your heart over
it when you didn't yet have the skills, and now you can't throw it away and
you can't bear to look at the damn thing either.

Then you meet a writer who seems to have the skills you would have
needed. Hand him the manuscript! "Can you do anything with this?"

Look: you've already done your share of the work, and it's earned you
nothing. He's done no work at all. If he says "No," you've lost nothing. He's
lost nothing. If he says "Yes," it's his risk. Maybe you can get reinspired.
 It was that way with "The Locusts." I'd only recently met Steven Barnes.
The direction he was taking, he would soon become the best of the New Wave
writers. Well, I couldn't have that

I handed him "The Locusts," and he made it work. Ultimately I watched
that story lose him his first Hugo Award. We've since written two novels
together.

At the Phoenix World Science fiction convention in 1979, I told James
Baen that I had run out of anything to say about the Warlock's Era.

Jim made me a proposal. "We'll invite some good people to write stories
set in the Warlock's world. You be editor. I'll do all the work, you take all
the credit."

I don't think either of us believed it would work out that way, and it
didn't. (I didn't expect Jim to leave Ace Books!) I also had my doubts as to
whether one writer would want to work in another's universe. But we tried it.
I hoped, wistfully, that reading stories set in my own universe might
reinspire me.

It did. Dian Girard is an old friend, and writing "Talisman" with her
was a delightful experience. I wrote "The Lion in His Attic" on my own, by
moving my favorite restaurant and restauranteur 14,000 years into the past.
(That's Mon Grenier, in Reseda, owned and run by Andre Lion.) Both stories
have appeared in More Magic, three years overdue.

"The Roentgen Standard" was party conversation among some of the crazier
members of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society. Most of what I did that
night was listen. When Omni bought the article, I earmarked half the money as
a LASFS contribution.

The LASFS turned the money over to the Viking Fund, lest mankind sever
communications with Mars.

Beginning around 1970, Harlan Ellison enlisted a team to build a solar