"The Last Day of the War, with Parrots" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gardner James Alan)

Author’s Notes

A story from a woman’s point of view. People ask why I use female narrators so much. My answer is (a) I don’t use them any more often than I use male narrators, and (b) why shouldn’t I use female narrators, provided I’m not a jerk about it? To be sure, men often do lousy jobs of portraying women — but I have to believe that’s just sloppiness and inattention, not an inevitable fact of gender. I don’t accept that the only type of character I can legitimately write about is someone very much like myself... because frankly, I’m bored with middle-aged middle-class white men, and there are far too many of those guys in science fiction already.

Therefore, I resolved long ago that whenever I wrote about the future, I would show it containing just as many women as men, not to mention people of diverse cultural backgrounds, old, young, straight, gay, rich, poor, and every other variation I could make fit within the story’s logic. That’s the sort of future world I wouldn’t mind living to see.

One more thing about this story. It takes place in the League of Peoples universe, and readers who know about the League might be wondering how two groups of aliens could descend upon a planet and start waging war against each other. Isn’t that against the fundamental law of the League? Yes, it is; and someday, at the proper time, I may tell the story of what really happened on Caproche.