"Spider Robinson - My Mentors" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

MY MENTORS

(READ ALOUD ON CBC RADIO, MARCH 1987)

I have been influenced by three people so heavily that I consider each to be a
"mentor," in the precise meaning of "one who teaches how to think." The first two
are gone, now; only the third is in shape to play football. All three, however, are
immortal.
I was born, physically, in 1948. But I was born as a thinking being in early 1955,
at age 6, when a librarian whose name I do not know gave me the first book I ever
read all by myself, with no pictures in it. It was called Rocketship Galileo, the first of
the books written especially for young people by the already leg-endary Robert
Anson Heinlein, the first Grand-Master of Science Fiction.
I don't think it's possible to overstate the influence that book had on my life and
work. It was about three teenaged boys whose Uncle Don took them along on the
first-ever flight to the Moon, where they found diehard Nazis plot-ting a Fourth
Reich, and outsmarted them. I was entranced. When I had finished it I went back to
the library and asked if they had any more by this guy. They took me to a section
where all the books had the same sticker on the spine, showing a VтАУ2 impaling an
oxygen atom, and my life began. Valentine Michael Smith, the Man from Mars;
Lazarus Long, the wise and ornery immortal; the nameless man who, thanks to a time
machine and a sex change, was both of his own parents and his only child, a closed
loop in time ... When I had worked my way through all the Heinlein titles, enjoying
them hugely, I tried some of the ones filed on either side ... and while they weren't
quite as good, they were all superior to anything else I could find in the building.
(This was back when any sf novel which had been both published in hardcover and
pur-chased by a library had to be terrific.)
It wasn't just the thrilling adventure, or even the far-out ideasтАФyou could find
those in comic books but the meticulous care and thought with which the ideas were
worked out and made plausible, related to the known facts of science. Almost
incidentally, seemingly accidentally, Heinlein's sf taught me facts of science, and the
love of scienceтАФtaught me that in science could lie adventure and excitement and
hope. I still remember my confusion and dismay at the way all my schoolteachers
conspired to make science seem dry and dull and impenetrable. It was my first
science teacher who told me flatly that manned spaceflight was nonsense. How many
young minds did he ruin?
Three years ago I visited my cousin Clare at her office in New York. As we
chatted, my eyes kept inexplicably slipping from her, irresistibly drawn to a shelf at
the edge of my peripheral vision. Finally they focused, and I understood. Clare is the
children's book editor at Scribner's. I began to explain my rude inattention, and she
cut me off. "I know," she said, "the Heinlein juveniles; happens all the time." Sure
enough, there they were, the building blocks of my reason, arrayed in the same order
they'd had on the shelf of the Plainview Public Library, all those years ago.
That Clare understood my problem at once suggests just how much influence
Heinlein has had on the world, since he began writing in 1939. You can't copyright
ideas, only arrange-ments of words ... but if you could copyright ideas, every sf
writer in the world would owe Heinlein a bundle. There can't be more than a handful
of sf stories published in the last forty years that do not show his influence one way
or another. He opened up most of science fiction's frontiers, wrote a great many
definitive treat-ments of its classic themes, and in his spare time he helped design the