"Spider Robinson - Post Toast" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

Spider grins. "That part fucking DELIGHTS me. The only kind of church I'd be willing to duck into
to get out of a driving rain would be one where some of the congregation are a little vague on the
Prophet's actual name, and it's all right to call him an asshole out loud, but the goddam DOCTRINE itself
somehow got preserved. I would rather those people remember 'Shared pain is lessened; shared joy is
increased; thus do we refute entropy' than remember the name of the first idiot to say it. My interest in
being worshipped approaches zero...from BENEATH." He looks thoughtful, and sights through his
untouched drink at the dancing flames again. "I admit I do feel just a tad like Moses, camped outside a
suburb of the Promised Land, watching his name get misspelled in the history books." Suddenly he
giggles and lowers his glass, rescued as always by his sense of humour. "Then again, that happens in my
OWN books, sometimes."
"Hell, Spider," Jake says, "I got an idea. You say somebody there hipped you to the place. So you
can send them a letter, right?"
"Yeah, sort of. I can e-mail folks who can pass the file through the membrane."
"So why don't you write and tell them all about your next Tor Books hardcover about us,
CALLAHAN'S LEGACY? You know, the one about the night Buck Rogers walked in and started
setting hundred dollar bills on fire. Or tell 'em about the hardcover omnibus of your first three Callahan
books that Tor will bring out shortly after that. Hell, tell them about the complete list of your books
posted in the Compuserve SFLit Forum. If that many people bought a book or two apiece, you could
afford a better Ficton-Twister, right?"
Spider shrugs. "I'd like to, Jake. For one thing, I hear there's some confusion over there about the
NON-Callahanian book that just came out, the Baen paperback called DEATHKILLER; I'd like to tell
them it's a combined reissue of 2 related out-of-print novels called MINDKILLER and TIME
PRESSURE, slightly revised and updated; and I'd love to explain to them how the story "God Is An
Iron" originally grew to become the former of those, and why both books BELONG together; and I'd
like to let them know that I'm presently working on a third novel in that ficton called LIFEHOUSE. I
could mention the computer- game version of Callahan's Place coming soon for PC and Mac from
Legend Entertainment. I might even remind them that anyone in the world who wants to bother can, for
less than the cost of a single hardcover, become a nonattending member of the World SF Convention,
and nominate and vote for the annual Hugo Award, thereby strongly influencing the course of modern sf
and the income of the winning writers...and that even a man with three Hugos could always use a few
more. (Ask my friend Harlan.) But there are two problems...
"First, they might take all that for an attempt to 'post a commercial message on USENET.' This
violates a stringent ficton-wide taboo, roughly equivalent to defecating in public after ingesting a prune
stew, and punishable by 'public flaming' (which I will not describe, but I hear it's worse than public
phlegming) and 'spamming' (enough said).
"And second of all, even if they WANT to hear about that stuff... suppose I DID clear enough to buy
myself a Ficton-Twister that'll run System 7, and a whole new whack of compatible software...pardon
me, I mean, 'enough magic'...why, if that happened, I'd feel obliged to visit alt.callahans with my new rig
and say thanks, and then they'd all know my interworld address. Have you ever tried to answer mail
from 61,000 people?"
(a rumble of apprehension as the magnitude of Spider's problem begins to dawn)
"Even if one percent of 'em were interested enough to bother," he goes on, "that's enough man-hours
to eat up all the profit 61,000 sales would bring in, right there. Say I only hear from one TENTH of one
percent, and not one of those is a chump: 61 interesting letters a day. The nicest form-response I could
design would disappoint or offend many of them -- and that's not even the problem.
"The problem is that I would LOVE to answer each one personally and at length, spend every
waking minute of every working day chatting with friendly strangers who believe that shared pain is
lessened and shared joy is increased, who like to swap compassion and villainous puns, who tolerate the
weird, who help each other through real life and real death...and who in many cases happen to be familiar
with and/or friendly toward my lifework. I had a friend once named Milligram Mulligan -- surely dead, by