"Harlan Ellison - Pa" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

however great or small it may be--is based. Without all the words they have given the world on their own, some
larger part of the joy of having been a part of speculative fiction would never have been. Bloch and his psychos and
the Ripper; Bova’s clear view of the importance of space travel; Budrys and the Gus nobody bothers; Davidson and his
sentient coathangers; Delany and frelking; Hensley and his son, Randy; Laumer and Retief; Rotsler and a stack of
cartoons only slightly smaller than Everest; Sheckley and all his dimensions of wonder; Silverberg and thorns; Slesar
and the greatest short-story ever written; Sturgeon and...well, everything; Van Vogt and weapon shops and Jommy
Cross and the cortical thalamic pause; Zelazny and he who shapes.
All of them are masters, each of them writes only as he can write, and no two can ever be confused in the
minds of students of masterful sf. These are the extra special meanings for me of these superimportant people:
Laumer is strength, and Davidson is erudition, and Budrys is empathy, and Delany is youthful commitment,
and Sheckley is outrageous madness, and Sturgeon is both dazzlement and love, and Bova is the rationality of reality,
Silverberg is craft, Van Vogt is complex conceptualization. Rotsler is irreverence, Hensley is gentleness, Zelazny is
poetic intricacy, Bloch is coming to grips with terror, and Slesar is courage and pride and dignity.
I have learned these things from these men. So it is not merely by chance that we came together finally to
write. It is heady company and only a fool or an amateur would consider working with them without a full realization
of how good one must be to share the same story with each of them.
The individual introductions to the stories will tell you how the pieces came to be written, the method of
collaboration, any sidelights or anecdotes that informed them, any mishaps or contretemps encountered in their
making, their history and their success or failure as works of art, in my estimation. (Understand: just because a story
reaches print, or even sees repeated anthologization, does not mean that we, the authors, are totally delighted with
the outcome. Some of these stories fail in some of the areas where we considered it important to succeed. Some
started out as one thing, and wound up as quite another, thereby dampening our pleasure. But in rehashing the
histories of these stories with the men who were one half their origin, I have not found one who regretted the
experiment. That says some. thing; what, I’m not certain.)
It sounds like hype to point out that this is the first book of its kind ever published; in that one way it is the
most original book of stories ever published, and in the same way it is a monstrous literary joke. Throughout,
however, it is for me a delight. You cannot know what a joy it is, what a prideful thing it is, what a satisfying thing it
is, to have my name linked with these men.
I have a few regrets. I’ll name them. Norman Spinrad, Isaac Asimov, Michael Moorcock and Philip Jose
Farmer. I wanted to write stories with all of them, and somehow, through no real fault of anyone, they just didn’t get
written. I’m sorry about that. They’ll more than likely never get written now. And I think it a bad thing that there is
no Ellison/female collaboration here. What a strange mindfuck it would be to read a story on which I’d worked with,
say, Kate Welhelm or Ursula Le Guin or Joanna Russ. Yeah, I lament that.
And the lamentations are all that remain, because now having written the collaborative thing out of my
system--it was a thing to do, you see--I doubt very much that I’ll do it again. Oh, there may be one or two little
stories that chance ordains will be written in company with another, but a project like this? No, not again.
I think I speak for my collaborators when I say that we hope this book lightens your burdens, brings an
occasional smile to your lips, puts a twinkle in your eyes, a shiver down your spine, an idea or two in your heads, and
when you close the book finally, you will feel that our time--and yours--was not illspent.
For all of them, I say, thank you for dropping in on our little session, and for myself I say, thank you for
letting me coat-tail your talents; thank you gentlemen, one and all.

HARLAN ELLISON
Los Angeles
 Robert Sheckley and Harlan Ellison

I SEE A MAN SITTING ON
A CHAIR,
AND THE CHAIR IS
BITING HIS LEG