"Spider Robinson - The Free Lunch" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

A Tor Book Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10010
www.tor.com Tor┬о is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Robinson, Spider.
The free lunch / Spider Robinson.-1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-312-86524-4
1. Runaway teenagers-Fiction. 2. Amusement parks-Fiction. I. Title. PS3568.O3156 F74 2001 813'.54-dc21
2001027196
First Edition: August 2001
Printed in the United States of America
0987654321

for herb varley and also for david gerrold and susan allison, unindicted co-conspirators
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book began in 1984 as a conversation at a certain California theme park with my friend John Varley, and quickly
swelled into a full-fledged literary collaboration. By the end of the day, with some help from bystander David Gerrold,
we had our premise, lead characters, and title. Susan Allison of Ace Books then gra-ciously suggested an excellent
plot no one was using at the mo-ment, which helped considerably. The next thing I knew, I was flying from Halifax,
Nova Scotia, to Eugene, Oregon, to spend a week hunkered down in the bunker with Herb - as I call John Varley for no
particular reason - working on the book. (And wearing the same clothes all week: the airline lost my luggage, and Herb,
unlike me, is built like a Viking chieftain.) We refined our characters, fleshed out our plot, defined our themes, and
set-tled on a classic working method: we would alternate chapters, then each do a final rewrite of the total manuscript. I
drew the first straw, typed out a first chapter, passed the ball to Herb, and flew home.

Fifteen years later I broke down and inquired as to his progress, and there wasn't any.

Furthermore, Herb said, he had gone stale on the idea. Some-how. "It was your idea to start with - why don't you write
it yourself?" he suggested. "Oh, by the way, your luggage finally showed up. By now some of the stuff is almost in
style."

And then - in the very next breath - he suggested another col-laboration.

You see why I love this man? So I won't kill him.

Well, the last one had turned out so well, what could I say? And so I'm pleased to report that Herb and I have begun
another book together, tentatively titled The Little Spaceship That Could. (His original idea, this time.) We spent
months of e-mail time plotting it and creating characters together, I completed the first chapter and sent it to him in
May 1997 . . . and I'm sure chapter 2 will arrive any day now. I'm holding my breath, in fact.

Wish us luck. . . .

-Spider Robinson June 1998

TANSTAAFL:
there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. -Robert Anson Heinlein
It is often the fifth ace that makes all the difference between success and failure. -J. B. Morton