"Timothy Zahn - Star Song and Other Stories" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zahn Timothy)

Star Song and Other StoriesStar Song and Other Stories
Timothy Zahn

For Dr. Stanley Schmidt:
Who, 24 years ago, rescued me from the slush pile.
Thanks, Stan.

Table of Contents
Introduction
Point Man
HitmenтАФSee Murderers
The Broccoli Factor
The Art of War
The Play's the Thing
Star Song

Introduction
I've always liked short stories. I've especially always liked short story
collections.
That's not just because you're holding a collection of mine in your hands
right
now, deciding whether or not to dive into it. It's also not just because I
started my career with short stories, though that is in fact what I did. For
me,
short fiction was a great way for a novice writer to learn the craft of
putting
narrative and character and plot together, rather like climbing a series of
foothills before tackling the awesome and slightly terrifying mountain of a
full-fledged novel. I published seven stories before even beginning my first
novel (and wrote a lot more that were never published), and had published
twenty-two of them before that novel finally saw print.
No, my love of short fiction is a lot older than that. It goes back to the
days
of my youth, back when I first began my exploration of the universe of
science
fiction. My pattern then was to pick a new author off the local library's SF
shelves and try a book by him or her. If I liked it, I would read the shelves
dry, and then (if I had any spare money that month) hunt up whatever newer
works
might be available at the bookstore.
But unless there was a novel by Author X that looked particularly intriguing,
I
always preferred to start with a short-story collection if one was available.
Why? Very simply, because a collection gave me a better idea of the author's
range than a single novel ever could. It let me see variations in style and
character, plus a wider sampling of the kind of ideas he or she liked to play
with. The full extent of the author's sense of humor was often better
represented, too. Whereas humor might be almost totally absent in a
particularly
grim novel (or overly lavished in a deliberately silly one), a collection