"Spider Robinson - C3 - Callahans Secret" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword IX
The Blacksmith's Tale 1
Pyotr's Story 47
Involuntary Man's Laughter 89
The Mick of Time 105


FOREWORD


There's something we have to get absolutely clear right at the outset, and if you think
you detect a dangerous gleam in my eye, you are perfectly right.
Ordinarily I am rather a hard man to insult. This is partly because I am blessed with a
self-confidence so pervasive that it is frequently mistaken for smugness by less fortunate souls,
and partly because I am abnormally lazy even for a writer-if you're insulted, you're supposed to


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do something about it, so I usually decline to take offence even when offered some.
I'm especially hard to insult professionally, as I am willing to shamelessly admit, having
practiced many of the most disgusting and heinous vices in literature-I freely confess here and
now that in the twelve years since I gave up honest work I have committed editorship (twice!),
agentry (also twice), and book reviewing (multiple counts), and at least one grand jury is still
considering allegations of literary criticism which I have given up denying.
To my own mild surprise, however, I discover that I do have some small shreds of literary
pride left, and I wish to preserve them. . . so there's something we've got to get straight. No
kidding around, now, God damn it; I'm serious. Pay attention:
Yes, this is a book of stories set in the tavern known as Callahan's Place.
Yes, it is the last such book.
Yes, there were others.
Okay, there were two such others.
All right, dammit, yes, Berkley is packaging all of them as a unit, with coordinated
covers and so forth.
Nevertheless and notwithstanding, and we'd better be straight on this or there's gonna be
blood in the scuppers:
I have not written a trilogy.

Repeat: not. It just so happens, by chemically pure chance, that this series of stories
has reached its conclusion coincidental with the completion of the volume immediately following
the one that succeeded the first one. That does not make it a trilogy.
In the first place it is not booby-trapped like most trilogies are. Neither of those first
two volumes ended in the middle of a story, leaving you in midair in plot terms (although the
first one, admittedly, did leave Mike Callahan literally in midair). If you have never read a
Callahan's Place book before, you should find this as good a place to start as any since these
yarns were designed for magazine publication, each is self-contained, and you should feel no need
for any wordy What-Has-Gone-Before synopsis. If you have the first book but missed the second, it