"Mike Resnick - Hunting Lake" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

Gordon Scott was allowed to speak in sentences, rather than
monosyllables. At least I'd like to think so.)
Finally, in his last few years, Lake began researching his
father's missionary work in Africa. This in turn led him to
investigate reported answers to prayer, and that led to two more
bestsellers, YOUR PRAYERS ARE ALWAYS ANSWERED and YOU NEED NEVER
WALK ALONE. He died on Christmas Day, 1961, while working on a
biography of his father.
I discovered Alexander Lake when I was eleven years old. I
picked up a copy of KILLERS IN AFRICA, and had read half of it in
the bookstore before my mother realized she was either going to
have to buy the book or leave me in the store overnight. A few
months later I bought HUNTER'S CHOICE with money I had earned
mowing lawns, and from that day forward I knew two things: that
someday I would visit the wonderful continent that Lake had made
come alive on the printed page (I have, 5 times now, with more
trips planned), and that I would find some way to make my living
from Africa (that took a little longer, and considering that I
became a science fiction writer, it was a lot more difficult --
but I managed. I would confidently suggest that no other science
fiction writer, dead or alive, has set 13 books and 22 works of
short fiction in Africa or African analogs, or received as many
major and minor awards for them. And of course, a lot of Lake's
reminiscences have been appropriated, thinly-disguised, in my
fiction.)
Before we go any further, I want to tell you a little
something about the cover to this edition of HUNTER's CHOICE. At
first glance it appears to be a scene from Chapter 6 ("Don't Spoil
the Heads") of this book, but if you'll look at it _closely_,
you'll see it's really from KILLERS IN AFRICA'S chapter on
elephants. The giveaway is the figure of Lake himself, on the
ground beneath the elephant. The African with the axe is, of
course, Ubusuku.
So why didn't we run it on KILLERS IN AFRICA? Simple. I
didn't know Storm Alexis Lake then. Over the past few months she
has graciously gone through her father's old notes and magazine
articles as we try to find enough uncollected material to create a
brand-new Alexander Lake book. During one of our phone
conversations, she mentioned that she and her brother owned this
remarkable painting of her father's miraculous escape from a
wounded elephant, rendered by an artist named Kahn. Before she was
through describing it, I knew we had the cover for HUNTER'S
CHOICE.
By the way, as the editor of this series, I do try to be
thorough, and when it came time to publish HUNTER'S CHOICE, I
thought I would see if I could find a negative opinion, since mine
is one of unmitigated praise. Well, I checked every review ever
written, and I finally found one, in the September, 1954 issue of
_African Wild Life_, published by the South African Wild Life
Society, of which less than 2,000 copies were printed. (How's