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

spacesuit used by NASA, and invented the waterbed and the waldo (if you don't
know what a waldo is, ask anyone who has to manipulate radioactives or other
deadly substances).
But what I admire most about Heinlein is what he chose to teach me and other
children in his famous sf juvenile novels: first, to make up my own mind, always;
second, to think it through before making up my mind; and finally, to get as many
facts as possible before thinking. Here are some brief quotes from his book Time
Enough for Love, short extracts from the note-books of a 2,500-year-old man:
God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolentтАФ it says so right here on
the label. If you have a mind capable of believing all three of these divine
attributes simultaneously, 1 have a wonderful bargain for you. No checks, please.
Cash and in small bills. (and:)
If it can't be expressed in figures, it is not science; it is opinion. (and:)
Democracy is based on the assumption that a million men are wiser than one
man. How's that again? I missed something.
Autocracy is based on the assumption that one man is wiser than a million men.
Let's play that over again, too. Who decides? (and:)
It's amazing how much mature wisdom resembles being too tired. (And my own
personal favorite:)
Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed ofтАФbut do it in private, and
wash your hands afterwards.

Just as Robert Heinlein used love of adven-ture to teach me the love of reason and
science, Theodore Sturgeon used love of words, the beauty that could be found in
words and their thoughtful esthetic arrangement, to teach me the love of ... well, of
love.
Not the kind of love found in Harlequin romances or bad movies, but the love
which is the basis of courage, of hope, of simple human persistence. When I was
sixteenтАФbarely in timeтАФI read a story of his called "A Saucer Full of Loneliness,"
and decided not to kill myself after all. Ten years later I read another Sturgeon story
called "Suicide" aloud to a friend of mine who had made five progressively more
serious attempts at self destruction, and she did not make a sixth. (Should you know
anyone who needs them, the former appears in the collec-tion E Pluribus Unicorn,
and the latter in Sturgeon is Alive and Well.)
It has become something of a cliche to say that all of Ted's work was about love;
he himself did not care for the description, perhaps because the word "love" begs
too many ques-tions. I know, because he told me once, that he accepted Robert
Heinlein's limiting definition of love: "the condition in which the welfare of another
becomes essential to your own." Ted wrote about that state, but about much more
as well; about all the things which fuzzy-minded people confuse with love, but about
much more than those things too. I think that if he must be distilled to some essential
juice, it would per-haps be least inaccurate to say that he wrote about need, about all
the different kinds of human need and the incredible things they drive us to, about
new kinds of need that might come in the future and what those might make us do;
about unsuspected needs we might have now and what previously inexplicable things
about human nature they might account for.
Or maybe what Ted wrote about was good-ness, human goodness, and how
often it turns out to derive, paradoxically, from need. I envi-sion a mental equation
with which I think he would have agreed: Need + Fear = Evil, and Need + Courage =
Goodness.