"Introduction.to.PohlStars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pohl Frederick)by Frederik Pohl Version 1.0
If you find an unexpectedly Oriental flavor to this collection
(and to one particular story in it), it is because
a couple of months ago, for the first time in my life, I
was in China. What brought me there was simple curiosity,
and I sated it. I did all the things tourists are
supposed to do. I climbed the Great Wall and gaped
at the terracotta warriors of Hsian; I cruised on the
Whangpoo River and even walked the old Silk Trail at
the tag end of the Gobi Desert. But that wasn't all I was
curious about, so in between the bouts of tourism, I
spent a lot of time with writers. Chinese writers. Chinese
science-fiction writers in particular.., and I tell you true,
if I had read that sentence a few years ago I would
have assumed it must be the beginning of a science-
fiction story, and not a very plausible one, at that. But
it isn't fiction. It's real. Science fiction is being read,
written, and published in the People's Republic of China.
The more I talked with the people involved in science
fiction there, the more I felt that curious nibble at the
fringes of the memory that is called Deja vu. I had been
there before! For what the Chinese science-fiction scene
reminded me of more than anything else was the way
it had been in the United States when, five decades
ago, I was beginning to try to be a writer of science
fiction. The Chinese science-fiction people I met seemed
young, energetic, idealistic, not very sophisticated-
very like the young, unsophisticated Isaac Asimov,
Donald Wollheim, Cyril Kornbluth, and other teenage
members of the 1930s fan group, the Futurians, which
launched so many of us into careers as writers and
editors. The social standing of science fiction in China
is very low. The literary mandarins don't think it's literature
at all-any more than America's literary mandarins did in the
1930s. (It didn't become respectable in the United States until
some of those bright, unsophisticated kid fans grew up to
become college professors and deans.) The economic situation of science
fiction in China today maps almost exactly with that of
the United States in the 1930s. An average price for a
science-fiction story is about a third of a cent a word
(in 1939 I was lucky enough to average almost half a
cent); a Chinese editor I met confided that his salary
was about eleven dollars a week (my first editorial job
paid ten). And almost all the science fiction being written
by Chinese authors is in the form of short stories;
the few novels published are importations from abroad.
That, too, was true of America then. Almost the only
science-fiction books that one could find were written
by people on the other side of the ocean, such as S.
Fowler Wright, Aldous Huxley, and W. Olaf Stapledon.
The book publishers in America disdained science fiction-at
least when it was by American writers. It was
not until around 1950-and then, again, only because
some fans grew up to start or join publishing companies-that
American science-fiction writers could have
their novels published in hard covers.
To find out that science fiction existed outside the
United States was not a surprise to me-after all, I
spent a couple of years as president of the international
association of science-fiction professionals, World SF,
with members in several dozen countries from Singapore to
the U.S.S.R. and most nations in between. But
it was surely a delight!
Of course, it would take a braver man than I to
predict how widespread science fiction will become in
China. China is an intensely politicized country. Nearly
every aspect of its life has to conform with the decisions
of the high Party apparatus-whatever those decisions
may be at any particular moment-and so it is impossible to
guess what its future will be. China is also a
country that for just about a solid century has been
wracked by a series of violent convulsions, almost nonstop,
revolutions, wars, and internal turmoil. From the
overthrow of the Manchu dynasty-through the war
with Japan; the battle against Chiang Kai-shek, the
"Great Leap Forward, the "Cultural Revolution, the
"Rule of the Gang of Four and their overthrow-there
has hardly been a period of more than a year without
devastating upheaval. The achievements of the current
regime are immense in fundamental ways: They manage to feed
and educate their billion people, an accomplishment no previous
rulers even tried. But they are also, by Western standards, complex,
unpredictable, and frequently weird. Walking the streets of Beijing
or Shanghai today, it is difficult to believe that this
largest nation the world has ever seen was, just a few
years ago, tearing itself to shreds in the violence of the
Cultural Revolution, with factions shelling each other's
campuses and factories at will-and even more difficult
to understand how they managed to pull themselves
together afterward. So I don't know how things are
going to work out for the billion Chinese people, much
less for that tiny fraction of them who read and write
science fiction ... but I wish them well!
This is almost my first short-story collection in a
decade. It isn't that I've given up writing; it's that I've
been writing novels rather than short stories most of
the time.
I must confess that I find this a little nettling. I don't
like to think of myself as a statistic manipulated by large
economic forces.., but that's the way it looks, even to
me. The field that used to be dominated by the magazines,
and thus by short stories, is now overwhelmingly represented by
novels and films. I suppose the
average readership of the science-fiction magazines of
my youth was somewhere around forty thousand copies. Now 40
million people flock to see a new Star Wars
movie in the first weekend of its release. As to books,
the New York Times best-seller list has been heavily
populated with science fiction for this whole year: Arthur
C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Joan Vinge, Anne McCaffrey,
and a dozen others have reached the heights of bookstore sales
previously scaled only rarely by a Frank
Herbert or a Robert A. Heinlein. When Cyril Kornbluth
and I wrote The Space Merchants thirty years ago, we
were in science-fiction's transitional period from magazines
to books; we expected to earn a couple of thousand dollars from
having it run as a serial in Galaxy
magazine, and it did-but it has earned more than that
every year since as a book.
So there is an economic incentive to write longer
pieces. But it isn't all economic. It's where the audiences
are.., and no writer likes to be talking to himself.
I hope you'll enjoy the stories.., and that it won't be
so long before I have another collection of new short
stories to offer!
-Frederik Pohl by Frederik Pohl Version 1.0
If you find an unexpectedly Oriental flavor to this collection
(and to one particular story in it), it is because
a couple of months ago, for the first time in my life, I
was in China. What brought me there was simple curiosity,
and I sated it. I did all the things tourists are
supposed to do. I climbed the Great Wall and gaped
at the terracotta warriors of Hsian; I cruised on the
Whangpoo River and even walked the old Silk Trail at
the tag end of the Gobi Desert. But that wasn't all I was
curious about, so in between the bouts of tourism, I
spent a lot of time with writers. Chinese writers. Chinese
science-fiction writers in particular.., and I tell you true,
if I had read that sentence a few years ago I would
have assumed it must be the beginning of a science-
fiction story, and not a very plausible one, at that. But
it isn't fiction. It's real. Science fiction is being read,
written, and published in the People's Republic of China.
The more I talked with the people involved in science
fiction there, the more I felt that curious nibble at the
fringes of the memory that is called Deja vu. I had been
there before! For what the Chinese science-fiction scene
reminded me of more than anything else was the way
it had been in the United States when, five decades
ago, I was beginning to try to be a writer of science
fiction. The Chinese science-fiction people I met seemed
young, energetic, idealistic, not very sophisticated-
very like the young, unsophisticated Isaac Asimov,
Donald Wollheim, Cyril Kornbluth, and other teenage
members of the 1930s fan group, the Futurians, which
launched so many of us into careers as writers and
editors. The social standing of science fiction in China
is very low. The literary mandarins don't think it's literature
at all-any more than America's literary mandarins did in the
1930s. (It didn't become respectable in the United States until
some of those bright, unsophisticated kid fans grew up to
become college professors and deans.) The economic situation of science
fiction in China today maps almost exactly with that of
the United States in the 1930s. An average price for a
science-fiction story is about a third of a cent a word
(in 1939 I was lucky enough to average almost half a
cent); a Chinese editor I met confided that his salary
was about eleven dollars a week (my first editorial job
paid ten). And almost all the science fiction being written
by Chinese authors is in the form of short stories;
the few novels published are importations from abroad.
That, too, was true of America then. Almost the only
science-fiction books that one could find were written
by people on the other side of the ocean, such as S.
Fowler Wright, Aldous Huxley, and W. Olaf Stapledon.
The book publishers in America disdained science fiction-at
least when it was by American writers. It was
not until around 1950-and then, again, only because
some fans grew up to start or join publishing companies-that
American science-fiction writers could have
their novels published in hard covers.
To find out that science fiction existed outside the
United States was not a surprise to me-after all, I
spent a couple of years as president of the international
association of science-fiction professionals, World SF,
with members in several dozen countries from Singapore to
the U.S.S.R. and most nations in between. But
it was surely a delight!
Of course, it would take a braver man than I to
predict how widespread science fiction will become in
China. China is an intensely politicized country. Nearly
every aspect of its life has to conform with the decisions
of the high Party apparatus-whatever those decisions
may be at any particular moment-and so it is impossible to
guess what its future will be. China is also a
country that for just about a solid century has been
wracked by a series of violent convulsions, almost nonstop,
revolutions, wars, and internal turmoil. From the
overthrow of the Manchu dynasty-through the war
with Japan; the battle against Chiang Kai-shek, the
"Great Leap Forward, the "Cultural Revolution, the
"Rule of the Gang of Four and their overthrow-there
has hardly been a period of more than a year without
devastating upheaval. The achievements of the current
regime are immense in fundamental ways: They manage to feed
and educate their billion people, an accomplishment no previous
rulers even tried. But they are also, by Western standards, complex,
unpredictable, and frequently weird. Walking the streets of Beijing
or Shanghai today, it is difficult to believe that this
largest nation the world has ever seen was, just a few
years ago, tearing itself to shreds in the violence of the
Cultural Revolution, with factions shelling each other's
campuses and factories at will-and even more difficult
to understand how they managed to pull themselves
together afterward. So I don't know how things are
going to work out for the billion Chinese people, much
less for that tiny fraction of them who read and write
science fiction ... but I wish them well!
This is almost my first short-story collection in a
decade. It isn't that I've given up writing; it's that I've
been writing novels rather than short stories most of
the time.
I must confess that I find this a little nettling. I don't
like to think of myself as a statistic manipulated by large
economic forces.., but that's the way it looks, even to
me. The field that used to be dominated by the magazines,
and thus by short stories, is now overwhelmingly represented by
novels and films. I suppose the
average readership of the science-fiction magazines of
my youth was somewhere around forty thousand copies. Now 40
million people flock to see a new Star Wars
movie in the first weekend of its release. As to books,
the New York Times best-seller list has been heavily
populated with science fiction for this whole year: Arthur
C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Joan Vinge, Anne McCaffrey,
and a dozen others have reached the heights of bookstore sales
previously scaled only rarely by a Frank
Herbert or a Robert A. Heinlein. When Cyril Kornbluth
and I wrote The Space Merchants thirty years ago, we
were in science-fiction's transitional period from magazines
to books; we expected to earn a couple of thousand dollars from
having it run as a serial in Galaxy
magazine, and it did-but it has earned more than that
every year since as a book.
So there is an economic incentive to write longer
pieces. But it isn't all economic. It's where the audiences
are.., and no writer likes to be talking to himself.
I hope you'll enjoy the stories.., and that it won't be
so long before I have another collection of new short
stories to offer!
-Frederik Pohl |
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