"Harlan Ellison - No Doors, No Windows" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

politicians and the financiers throttle the dreams of creativity. It doesn’t matter.

The mad ones win persist. In the face of certain destruction they will still speak of the unreal, the
forbidden, all the seasons of the witch.

Consider it.
Please: consider.

Enough philosophy. The preceding, in different forms, was an essay I wrote in defense of the nightmare
vision. Its title has changed from “Black / Thoughts” to “Dark / Thoughts” (for obvious contemporary
reasons), to “Blood / Thoughts,” which I think will remain on the piece forever. I’ve rewritten it and used
it as the opening of the introduction to this, my first collection of suspense stories,per se, because it
speaks directly to the intent of the works in this book: to scare you, to keep you guessing, and to
demonstrate how much fear can be generated in lives that have been bent and twisted so there are no
exits.

It’s a special pleasure to have a book of suspense stories published, at last. Even though a large segment
of my weirdo readership knows me as a “sci-fi writer” (and God how I hate that ghastly neologism! If
you ever want to see my lips skin back over my teeth like those of a rabid timber wolf, just use that
moron phrase in my presence), I was writing a good deal more detective and suspense fiction than
fantasy when I began my career. But that was in the middle and late Fifties, when there was a hot
truckload of magazines publishing that kind of fiction.Manhunt, The Saint Mystery Magazine,
Mantrap, Pursued, Guilty, Suspect, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Mike Shayne Mystery
Magazine, Trapped, Terror, Murder!, Hunted, Crime and Justice, boy the list just went on endlessly
with one lousy imitator after another; and of course, in a class by itself,Ellery Queen’s Mystery
Magazine .

But that was twenty years ago, and with the exception ofEQMM (still indisputably the fountainhead of
significant mystery fiction throughout the civilized world), most of the magazines I listed above are dead.
Crumbling yellow pulp relics in my files, dropping brittle little triangles from page corners.

After having been tagged a writer of sf for so many years — and having fought the categorization for the
past ten or twelve — with the help of Pyramid Books I’m breaking out of the corner at last. And it feels
good. Not only because I want to be judged on the merits of what I write, as opposed to being judged
as a representative of a genre that means one thing to one reader and quite another thing to someone
else, but because it permits the publication of a book like this. (The fight isn’t quite over yet, either. Nine
chances out of ten, when you bought this book it was in among the giant cockroach and berserk vacuum
cleaner books. It was in the “sf section,” right? And it isn’t even remotely a book of sf stories. Oh, there
are four stories out of the sixteen that could be called fantasies, but I guarantee thatnowhere in these
pages will you find a spaceship, a robot, an android, a mad scientist, a death ray, a bug-eyed monster, an
ecology parable, a malevolent computer, an alternate universe, an insect big enough to eat a city, a
menace from interstellar space, a lost race of super-scientific villains or even a mention of the planet
Mars. But there it was, right between a Philip K. Dick novel on one side, and a Philip José Farmer novel
on the other. Now those are pretty heavyweight guys in whose company to languish, waiting for you to
come along to buy me, but it’s a ripoff. They write sf, theysay they write sf, if you buy one of their books
with sf on the cover you’ll begetting sf of a high order, and no one will feel cheated. But think how
annoyed all those dudes are gonna be who picked up this book, paid for it, got it home and are now
reading what you’re reading. “What,” they’ll be saying, their fingers balling up into fists, “what the hell is
this? Not sf? Not my nightly fix of extrapolation? No sci-fi to wile away the hours?” And they’ll read, oh,
say, “Pride in the Profession,” which is a story about a little guy who always wanted to be a hangman,