"Spider Robinson - By Any Other Name" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

Telempath (forthcoming)
 FOREWORD

Perhaps a story collection should be allowed to speak for itself.
That was my original intention; I submitted this book to Toni Weisskopf without a foreword. The basic plan was
simple: to gather all the short stories IтАЩve written that arenтАЩt already collected in User Friendly (Baen 1998), with a little
bit of nonfiction for lagniappe. So the assembly process was not onerous. Basically I pulled manuscripts from the trunk,
glanced at their titles, nodded nostalgically, and added them to the pile. Deciding their order was a no-brainer: begin
and end with a Hugo-winner, and in between those, alternate humorous and serious stories. Writing a foreword
seemed superfluous.
Then a few days ago the galley proofs arrived, and I sat down and read them through, and here I am writing a
foreword after all.
I have not written short fiction for some time now. Novels pay so much better that, without consciously planning
to, I just stopped getting short story ideas a few years back. So I hadnтАЩt read any of those stories particularly recently.
Some I had not read in twenty years or more. As I rediscovered them now, unexpected patterns emerged.
IтАЩd begun the galleys firmly resolved to do nothing but correct typos. I was determined to make no retroactive
improvements to these storiesтАФto let them stand as they first came into the world, flaws and all. But I found I kept
wanting to push dates forward. I was rather startled to realize how many of these stories are now chronologically
outdated. Written, in some cases, in the early 1970s, they tended to be set in the тАЬdistant futureтАЭ of twenty or thirty
years later. IтАЩm most comfortable in that range: the further ahead into the future I speculate, the less confident I am
about my own guessesтАФand if IтАЩm dubious, how am I to convince a reader? But history has begun to overtake me.
I was not dismayedтАФor even surprisedтАФat how often my guesses about the future had turned out to be dead
wrong. IтАЩve never claimed or wished to be a prophet; I write about possible futures, and strive for plausible ones.
But I was somewhat surprised at just how my speculations were wrong: over and over, it seems, I was too
optimistic. I donтАЩt mean that all the stories youтАЩre about to read are upbeat, by any means. But most of the futures I
imagined were, in retrospect, at least a little better than the one we actually got. At least more technologically
advanced.
I find IтАЩm proud of that.
I only pray I can manage to sustain that attitude of positive expectation, that tendency toward benign delusion,
through the next quarter-century of tumult and shenanigans. And infect as many other people with it as possible.
Because unconscious expectations are so important. We need all the Placebo we can get. ItтАЩs been shown again
and again: if you introduce a new teacher to a perfectly average class of kids, and tell him theyтАЩre the Advanced
group, by the end of the year they will be. This real year 2000 may not be quite as advanced as some of the ones I
envisioned for entertainment purposes . . . but it is, I think, a far nicer one than most average citizens living in the
1970s or 1980s would have believed possible. (Just for a start: no Cold War.) Optimistic science fiction may just
have had something to do with that. As my friend Stephen Gaskin once said, тАЬWhat you put your attention on
prospers.тАЭ
Case in point: the title story of this book.
 It was, if memory serves, the third story I ever tried to write for money. IтАЩd sent my first one to the most popular
magazine in the field, AnalogтАФtalk about irrational optimismтАФand miraculously, it sold. But the second, set in the
same tavern, had not sold there . . . or anywhere else. Then from somewhere came тАЬBy Any Other Name,тАЭ and I just
knew this one was going to sell. Perhaps itтАЩs weird to call it an optimistic story, since it posits the total collapse of
technological civilizationтАФbut it also suggests that humanity will ultimately survive just about any collapse. In any
event, it was a much more complex and ambitious story than anything IтАЩd ever tried before, and I certainly sent it off
with high hopes.
It was bounced by every market in science fiction.
More than a dozen rejections, beginning with Analog and ending underneath the bottom of the barrel. The last
editor on the list lost the damn thing for several months . . . then rejected it . . . then lost it again. (I was so green, the
only other copy in existence was the handwritten first draft.)
By the time I finally got it back, I had written several other stories, and not one of them had sold, either. I suspect