"G. Stanley Weinbaum - The Best of Stanley G Weinbaum" - читать интересную книгу автора (Weinbaum Stanley G)

Shifting Seas
 The Worldsof If
The Mad Moon
Redemption Cairn
The Ideal
The Lotus Eaters
Proteus Island
Afterword: Stanley G. Weinbaum, A Personal Recollection by Robert Bloch


The Second Nova

THREE TIMES in the half-century history of magazine science fiction a new writer has burst into the
field like a nova, cap-turing the imagination of the readers at once, altering the nature of science fiction
and converting every other writer into an imitator. (Nor may there ever be a fourth time, for since 1939,
when the third nova appeared, the field has surely grown too large and too diverse to be turned in its path
by any single story by any new writer.)
Let me tell you about the first and third novas, then, so that you can see the similarities between them
and will have a better appreciation of the truly remarkable nature of the second and greatest of the three.
In the August 1928 issue of Amazing Stories, at a time when magazine science fiction was only a little
over two years old, there appeared the first installment of "The Skylark of Space," by Edward Elmer
Smith and Lee Hawkins. It was E. E. Smith's first published science-fiction story.
For the first time in a science-fiction magazine, man was whirled off into the depths of interstellar
space, with all the Universe open before him. For the first time, the reader had the chance to visualize
man as a creature of infinite capacity тАФman as God, almost.
The readers loved it. "The Skylark of Space" became a classic at once, and other writers did their
best to imitate it. The field was never the same again, and E. E. Smith was a demigod of science fiction
for the remainder of his life.
E. E. Smith was the first nova.
In the August 1939 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, there appeared the short story "Life-Line,"
by a new author, Robert A. Heinlein. It attracted attention at once for its low-keyed, naturalistic style, for
the utter absence of histrionics or the cardboard attitudes common in most science fiction.
The story did not, perhaps, instantly grab the readers and shake the field into a new form, for it was a
little obscured by the nearly simultaneous appearance of the more spectacular and longer "Black
Destroyer," by A. E. van Vogt, another new writer, in the July 1939 Astounding. But Heinlein
con-tinued to write stories rapidly and Astounding continued to publish them. Within the year it became
quite obvious that Robert A. Heinlein was the best living science-fiction writer.
Again readers demanded more, and again almost every writer in the field (including myself) began,
more or less con-sciously and more or less thoroughly, to imitate Heinlein.
Robert A. Heinlein was the third nova.
In many ways, Smith and Heinlein were alike. Both, for instance, published their initial,
attention-capturing pieces in what was at the time the foremost magazine in the field: Amazing published
Smith's story, Astounding published Hein-lein's. (At the time of "The Skylark of Space," Amazing was,
indeed, the only science-fiction magazine being published.)
In both cases an important and seminal editor had created an exciting magazine within which the nova
could show its luster to the full. It was Hugo Gernsback in Smith' s case; John W. Campbell, Jr., in
Heinlein's.
In neither case was the writer a born writer in the sense that he had been fiddling with pen and paper
since he could toddle, had been submitting from the age of twelve and publishing from the age of sixteen.
Both Smith and Heinlein had engineering backgrounds, and neither had any intention of becoming a