"Callahan 02 - Time Travellers Strictly Cash 1.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

You see, I suspect in my heart of hearts that if he had lived, John W. Campbell would have hated my stuff.
Or at least failed to buy it with any regularity. 1 don't write watchacall your average Astounding story. I've never written astory with an engineer as the protagonist. I'm massively ignorant of sшience, and rarely write stories about physical problems. I don't know how to design a planet, and! don't much want to learn; I tend to keep my stories in and around known ones. The second Callahan story ever published, "The Time Traveler," caused one Analog reader to-cancel

* - i.e., anybody in the world who chooses to bother. You. If you like.
** - each year George Martin publishes an anthology of original st°rles by all she Campbell Award nominees, called New Voices. (Pocket) Highly recommended.

his subscription because they'd "stopped printing science fiction."
Don't get me wrong. I think that if we had ever met, John and I would have found many many things to agree about. It's hard to be certain what those things would have been; I understand that his thought was, like a UFO, capable of sudden 18O░course~changes without structural damage. But I'd guess that we would have agreed an a number of importaut things: the value of reason and technology and liberty and hope and conscience and competence for a start. I have enjoyed a lot of the stories that John Campbell paid money for.
I just don't think he would have bought much of my particular brand of sf for Analog.
Until now. When I sent the manuscript of "Soul Search" to Ben Bova (at Omni, where he has lately gone after several years as editor of Analog, I said in the cover letter, "This is the first story I've written that I really think John Campbell would have bought."
It's such a Campbellian notion, precisely the kind of idea he used to toss at writers over those famous lunches. "Okay, assume reincarnation. New: what happens to cryogenics?" Whether he would have actually bought the story you have
just read or not can never be known, but I think it's the kind of story idea that would have made John's eyes light up.
Incidentally, while I know many people who emphatically believe in reincarnation, I have never met or read one who could satisfactorily explain population growth. As far as I know the hypothesis I offer in "Soul Search" -that human population is inversely proportional to that of other species-is original with me, The beauty of it is that since I haven't specified which species (Cats, dogs and dolphins, certainly. But do goats have souls' Owls? Salmon? Oats? Cockroaches? Viruses? Computers?)* the hypothesis cannot be disproved unless and until we have a complete and accurate census of all life on Earth.

' When I lived on the Fundy Shore, there was a stand of rock maples back up the Mountain that I got to know preny well. Some ofem even became volunteer blood donors for my pancakes. I'm sure they hod souls.


Concerning "Spider vs. The. Hax Of Sol III":


I know a simple, four-letter word whose meaning can, by the transposition of the last two letters, be precisely reversed-without altering its pronunciation.
To substantiate this claim, I have to go back just over five years.
Five years ago Jim Baen was the editor of Galaxy magazine, in the process of making it the second-best-selling magazine in the business. I was a novice sf writer, with no novels and fewer than haif a dozen short stories published. Jim had bought exactly one of these for Galaxy (well, it was the only one I showed him), and a couple of times when I'd passed through New York he had thrown me a double sawbuck for a day's worth of reading slushpile. "Slush" is the technical term for unsolicited manuscripts, and for about 99.6% of them, it is a very charitable description indeed. The remaining four tenths of a percent are what keeps sf alive and growing, and in particular they were what was keeping Galaxy alive and growing five years ago, as the publisher gave Jim a monthly budgшtof two cheese sandwiches, a firkin of salt and a buffalo nickel with which to produce the magazine. Furthermore each month's budget tended to actually leave the accounting department in the following flscal year, or worse. Jim needed his slush combed pretty thoroughly.
(I wish to note here that to my knowledge Jim always warned his writers at point-of-sale to expect late payment. I have known editors less forthright.)
Anyway, I was on the phone with him one day, I forget who called who or why, I remember 1 was in North Dartmouth, Massachusetts, working on a story called "Stardance" with my wife Jeanne, and didn't want to be distracted.
"Here's a good question," he said. "What's the difference between a critic and a book reviewer?"
I thought about it. "I guess I'd say a critic is someone who evaluates books in terms of the objective standards of serious literature. A reviewer is someone who believes those standards to be either imaginary or irrelevant, and evaluates books in terms of his own prejudices."
"Say it simpler."
I was itching to get back to my little basement writingnook. "Uh. -. . a critic tells you whether or not it's Art; a reviewer tells you whether or not it's any damn good to read."
"Done," he said.
"Huh?"
"The pay is half a cheese sandwich."
"What?"
"All right, all right, you can have the buffalo nickel; Pournelle and Geis are splitting the salt."
"What the hell arc you talking about?"
"You're my new book reviewer. Deadline is next week; we'll call it a guest column and then phase you in permanently in a couple of months."
"You've got a book reviewer. One of the biggest names in the business."
"I had a book reviewer. Sturgeon has this bad habit."
"Eh?"
"Eating. We owe him a great many cheese sandwiches."
"Ah. I take it the cheese sandwiches you are offering me are similarly promissory in nature?"
"You've got it. Same as buying stories: I promise to pay you before you die-but you have to promise not to die."
You can't let editors push you around in this business or you're finished. "Let me see if I've got this straight. You want me to stop work on a novella which is no question going to win the Hugo, Nebula and Locus next year,** just put that on hold for awhile, read about a dozen books and think of something coherent to say about them, type the whole thing up and send it in by next week, stick my neck out by telling people what I think is good and bad on the basis of my three


*Actually, Jim got me every penny I was owed. Eventually.

**-no, I haven't got fivesight. I say that about every story; it just happened to be true this time.

whole years in the business-and furthermore you want me to do this month after month-and furthermost, the pay for