"Mike Resnick - Roots and a Few Vines" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

totally alien to my experience.
Someone asked Jack and I what we wanted to do with our lives.
(No, that's not the strange part; people were always asking that.)
We each answered that we wanted to write science fiction.
And you know what? For the first time in my life, _nobody
laughed._
That's when I knew I was going to come back to worldcons for
the rest of my life.
* * *
So Guy Gavriel Kay reads off the list of nominees, and then
he opens the envelope, and the winner is Connie Willis, and I am
second to her again for the 83rd time (yeah, I know, I've only
lost 76 Hugos and Nebulas to her, but it _feels_ like 83), and
everyone tells me I've won a moral victory because I have beat all
the short stories and Connie's winner is a novelette that David
Bratman, in his infinite wisdom, decided to move to the short
story category, and I keep thinking that moral victories and 60
cents will get you a cup of coffee anywhere west of New York and
east of California, and that I wish I didn't like Connie so much
so that I could hate her just a little on Labor Day weekends, and
my brain is making up slogans, modified slightly from my youth,
slogans like _Break Up Connie Willis_, which is certainly easier
than breaking up the Yankees, and I am wondering if Tanya Harding
will loan me her bodyguard for a few days, and then I am at the
Hugo Losers Party, and suddenly it doesn't matter that I've lost a
Hugo, because it is now 31 years since that first worldcon I went
to, and it is my annual family reunion, and I am visiting with
friends that I see once or twice or, on good years, five times per
year, and we have a sense of continuity and community that goes
back for almost two-thirds of my life. Hugos are very nice, and I
am proud of the ones I've won, and I am even proud of the ones
I've lost, but when all is said and done, they are metal objects
and my friends are people, and people are what life is all about.
And I find, to my surprise, that almost everyone I am talking
to, almost all the old friends I am hugging and already planning
to see again at the next worldcon, are fans. Some, like me, write
for a living; a few paint; most do other things. But we share a
common fannish history, and a common fannish language, and common
fannish interests, and I realize that I even enjoyed the business
meeting this year, and you have to be pretty far gone into fandom
to enjoy Ben Yalow making a point of order.
* * *
A lot of pros don't go to worldcon anymore. They prefer World
Fantasy Con. It's smaller, more intimate, and it's limited to 750
members -- and while this is not official, there is nonetheless a
"Fans Not Wanted" sign on the door.
That's probably why I don't go. It's true that worldcons have
changed, that people who read and write science fiction are
probably a minority special interest group these days, that bad
movies will outdraw the Hugo ceremony...but the trufans are there.