"Callahan 01 - Callahan's Crosstime Saloon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

sewer 'way out on Long Island. Far from being a drop-out, he was writing stories
and songs, as well as sewer-sitting. He's a worker, and he knows science fiction
very well, a fact that surprised a lot of people when he started reviewing books
for Galaxy magazine. He's also a guitar-strummin' singer, and I found out how
good he is at many a party. But that was later.
I bought "The Guy with the Eyes." When it came out in Analog, it caused a mild
ripple among our readers. I had expected some of them to complain because it
wasn't galaxy-spanning superheroic science fiction. Instead, they wrote to tell
me that they got a kick out of Callahan's Place. How about more of the same?
Now, an editor spends most of his time reading lousy stories. John Campbell,
who ran Analog (nee Astounding) for some thirty-five years, often claimed to
hold the Guinness Book of Records championship for reading more rotten SF
stories than anyone else on Earth. (Most likely he could have expanded his claim
to take in the entire solar system, but John was a conservative man in some
ways.)
So when you spend your days and nights-especially the nights-reading poor
stories, it's a pleasure to run across somebody like Spider: a new writer who
has a good story to tell. It makes all those lousy stories worthwhile. Almost.
It's a thrill to get a good story out of the week's slushpile-that mountain of
manuscripts sent in by the unknowns, the hopefuls, the ones who want to be
writers but haven't written anything publishable yet.
But the real thrill comes when a new writer sends in his second story and it's
even better than the first one. That happens most rarely of all. It happened
with Spider. He brought in the manuscript of "The Time Traveler," and I knew I
was dealing with a pro, not merely a one-time amateur.
We talked over the story before he completed the writing of it. He warned me
that he couldn't really find a science fiction gimmick to put into the story. I
fretted over that (Analog is, after all, a science fiction magazine), but then I
realized that the protagonist was indeed a time traveller; his "time machine" ,
was a prison.
Just about the time the story was published, thousands of similar time
travelers returned to the U.S. from North Vietnamese prisons. Spider's story
should have been required reading for all of them, and their families.
Sure enough, we got a few grumbles from some of our older readers. One sent a
stiff note, saying that since the story wasn't science fiction atall, and he was
paying for science fiction stories, would we please cancel his subscription. I
wrote him back pointing out that we had published the best science fiction
stories in the world for more than forty years, and for one single story he's
cancelling his subscription? He never responded, and I presume that he's been
happy with Analog and Spider ever since.
Callahan's Place grew to be an institution among Analog's readers, and you can
see it-and the zanies who frequent Callahan's-in all their glory in this
collection of stories. What you're reading is something truly unique, because
the man who wrote these stories is an unique writer. It's been my privilege to
publish most of these stories in Analog. Several others are brand new and
haven't been published anywhere else before.
It's also been a privilege, and a helluva lot of fun, to get to know Spider
personally. To watch him develop as a writer and as a man.
He went from guarding sewers to working for a Long Island newspaper. When that
job brought him to a crisis of conscience-work for the paper and slant the news