"William Tenn - Brooklyn Project" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tenn William)

"тАФspared all attainable virtue. ThenтАФ"


XI. XII. XIII. XIV. XV XVI. XVII. XVIII. XIX. BongтАФbongтАФbong
bongbong-bongongongngngngggg...


"тАФwe are indeed ready for refraction. And that, I tell you, is good enough for those who billow and
those who snap. But those who billow will be proven wrong as always, for in the snapping is the rolling
and in the rolling is only truth. There need be no change merely because of a sodden cilium. The
apparatus has rested at last in the fractional conveyance; shall we view it subtly?"
They all agreed, and their bloated purpled bodies dissolved into liquid and flowed up and around to
the apparatus. When they reached its four square blocks, now no longer shrilling mechanically, they rose,
solidified, and regained their slime-washed forms.
"See," cried the thing that had been the acting secretary to the executive assistant on press relations.
"See, no matter how subtly! Those who billow were wrong: we haven't changed." He extended fifteen
purple blobs triumphantly. "Nothing has changed!"


Afterword

Nineteen forty-seven was the year of the first great science-fiction boom, following both the interest
generated by the development of the atomic bomb and several highly success-ful science-fiction
anthologies. The editor of one of these, Groff Conklin, was approached by moneyed people who offered
to back him and Ted Sturgeon in a new magazine of which they were to be co-editors. This was a couple
of years before Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas were to get together to produce The
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and was a harbinger of the excitement that was to grip the
science-fiction publish-ing field in the late '40s and early '50s.
Ted and Groff in their turn approached me and a number of other writers, offering a rate unheard up
to that timeтАФfour and five cents a wordтАФ"for the very best stories of which you guys are capable,
something genuinely distinguished." (The going rate for sci-ence fiction at that time was one-half cent to a
dazzling two cents a word. Only John W. Campbell of Astounding ever paid at the high rateтАФand only
when a story knocked him off his chair.)
I had been thinking for a number of months about a new kind of story and one which had hitherto
been inexplicably absent from the magazines we all wrote for: straight down-the-line and overt political
satire. I say "inexplicably" because such satire had been very successful at novel lengthтАФZamiatin's We
and Huxley's Brave New World, to mention only the first two examples that came to mindтАФand
because the science-fiction magazine would seem to be the natural, even ideal, vehicle for such stories.
And the America of 1947 seemed made for such satire. The Federation of Atomic Scien-tists, a
group composed of the younger physicists and chemists who had worked on the Manhattan Project and
been terrified of what they had accomplished, was under attack from many official and unofficial quarters
as unpatriotic orтАФmuch worse in those daysтАФdemonstrating outright friendliness with the potential
enemy. We were then, you might remember, in the earliest stages of what came to be known as the Cold
War.
On the Congressional front, Senator Joseph McCarthy had not yet appeared in all his rattling glory,
but the matters he was to specialize in had been ably handled for some years now by Martin Dies and the
House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). The stage was being set.
Nineteen forty-seven was also the year, therefore, of a slashing attack on the entertain-ment industry
by Martin Dies and HUAC: all kinds of celebrities and behind-the-scenes creative people had been
subpoenaed and questioned most closely about their political associations and personal friendshipsтАФall