"David Gerrold - The Trouble with Tribbles - The birth, sale, and final production of one episode" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gerrold David)

matte line nor jerkiness, and absolutely no way at all to tell
how the shot was done.)
I used to read a book a day. Like vitamins. I would take
them to school and read them in class. School bored me—I
was too busy exploring the universe to care about conjugating
verbs. And I was discovering that I knew more odd little bits
of information about the world than my teachers did. (Like
a math teacher at Van Nuys High who made fun of me in
front of the whole class because I asked him to explain the terms
googol and googolplex. They’re mathematical terms for a couple
of umpty-ump numbers—I still don’t know for sure—but he’d
never heard of them, so he just said, “Well, that’s what you get
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The Trouble With Tribbles

from reading all that science fiction—”) (From that day on, I
stopped listening to the man. I ended up with a D in the course
and had to repeat it in summer school.)
I used to haunt the newsstands and bookstores. I would
make a point of stopping by Van Nuys’ biggest stand every
Tuesday and Thursday mornings to see if there were any new
titles; and later on, I used to go down into Hollywood to the big
stand at Hollywood and Cahuenga (it’s still there)—and if
there was anything on the racks I hadn’t read yet, I would
go burrowing for the copy that was in the very best condition.
I collected and read and dreamt my way through junior high
school and high school (first Van Nuys, then U.S. Grant) and
six years of college. I was one of those kids who are called
“walking encyclopedia” and “Einstein” and “egghead” and a lot
of other things, less nice. I tried to ignore them. I didn’t believe
in fighting—can you imagine a pacifist in junior high school? In
1958? I got beat up a lot. But I felt superior because of all the
wondrous things I had in my head, given to me by my special
friends in the books and magazines—things that all those
mundane-type people would never know. Never. They just
couldn’t get the message—and I wasn’t going to try to share
my private dreams with them because I didn’t want to have
to defend those dreams. And even so, I still had to. “Are you
still reading that crap?” Science fiction just wasn’t respectable.
It still isn’t very. Most people still equate science fiction with
space opera, something for the kids, and smirk a bit about
their intellectual “superiority.”
But it was a normal condition of adolescence, and everyone
solves the problem of growing up in his own way. Somewhere
along the line, a little boy was deciding who he wanted to be and
what he wanted to do—and one of those things would be to
someday, somehow, join the ranks of the “special dreamers.”
In short, science fiction was not just a casual decision for
me. I did not stumble accidentally into it.
It was the logical culmination of a self-induced condition-