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

It just means you have to work a little harder to hunt them up.
One of the things I have tried to do with the new writers I
have helped to bring into this field, the coming superstars like
Nick DiChario and Barb Delaplace and Michelle Sagara and Jack
Nimersheim and all the many others, is to not only show them how
to make a good story better, or to get an editor to pick up the
check for meals, but also to understand the complex and symbiotic
relationship between fandom and prodom.
Some of them, like Nick, luck out and find it right away.
Some, like Barb, wander into a bunch of Trekkies or Wookies or
Beasties who won't read anything except novelizations, who are
watchers rather than readers, whose only literary goal is to tell
second-hand stories in a third-hand universe, and she wonders what
the hell I'm talking about. Then I drag her to a CFG suite or a
NESFA party and she meets the fandom _I_ know, and suddenly she
understands why we keep coming back.
* * *
So I'm sitting in the airport, waiting to board the plane
from Winnipeg to Minnesota. I think there are three mundanes on
the flight; everyone else is coming from worldcon. Larry Niven's
there, and Connie Willis, and maybe a dozen other pros, and one of
the topics of conversation as we await the plane is whose names
will make the cover of _Locus_ if the plane crashes, and whose
names will be in small print on page 37, and how many obituary
issues Charlie Brown can get out of it. Then the topic turns to
who you would rescue if the plane crashed: Connie and Larry and
me, because you wanted more of our stories, or Scott Edelman and
me, because you wanted us to be so grateful to you that we'd buy
your next twenty stories. (That goes to show you the advantages of
being able to do more than one thing well.)
Now, in any other group, that would be a hell of a morbid
discussion, but because they were fans, and almost by definition
bright and witty, it was the most delightful conversation I'd
heard all weekend, and once again I found myself wondering what my
life would have been like if Ace had not forwarded that letter to
Caz 32 years ago.
And then I thought back to another convention, the 1967
worldcon. I was still very young, and too cynical by half, and
when Lester del Rey got up to give his Guest of Honor speech, he
looked out at the tables -- every worldcon until 1976 presented
the GOH speech and the Hugo Awards at a banquet -- and said,
"Every person in the world that I care for is here tonight."
And I thought: what a feeble thing to say. What a narrow,
narrow life this man has lived. What a tiny circle of friends he
has.
Well, I've sold 72 books of science fiction -- novels,
collections, anthologies -- and I've won some awards, and I've
paid some dues, and I don't think it's totally unrealistic to
assume that sometime before I die I will be the Guest of Honor at
a worldcon.