"James Gunn - Crisis" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gunn James E)

year it was reprinted in Donald A. Wollheim'sThe 1978 Annual World's Best SF and I got a letter from a
production company at Universal Studios asking if the television and motion-picture rights were
available. The production company bought a year's option. I exchanged several letters with the producer
about developing the idea into a possible television series, including outlining some twenty other
pressing problems that could be turned into series episodes.

As it happened, the production company at Universal was disbanded before the year was over, and the
option was allowed to lapse. Several years later, after I had written and published half a dozen other
books, I decided to return to the situation behind "Child of the Sun," with the thought that its television
potential might have been handicapped by the inability of producers to believe that other dramatic
episodes were possible. I turned to the crisis mentioned in the note read by Bill Johnson in "Child of the
Sun"—"You have just saved the world from World War III, and you don't remember.…" Now, it was
easy enough to write that kind of one-sentence statement for "Child of the Sun," but I didn't have the
least idea how to save the world from World War III. One of the principles of writing I have learned,
however, is that the most difficlt problems make the best stories. So I wrote "End of the World," saved
the world from World War III, and it was published inAnalog.

I followed that up in fairly short order with "Man of the Hour," "Touch of the Match," "Woman of the
Year," and "Will of the Wisp," all of them published inAnalog. Along the way I set myself other
problems. One of the first, as early as "Child of the Sun," was to write everything as if it had been filmed
by a camera: nothing was to be subjective. That way, I thought, potential producers could not fail to
perceive its cinematic qualities, and, in any case, doing it this way represented a technical challenge. I
also included a dramatic opening situation, that in televisin terminology is called a "teaser," and an
identifying series scene for each story. In this book those became "Prelude: Man in the Cage."


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 Crisis!


The second challenge I posed to myself was a minor one, to make all the titles match; all the titles have
the same pattern- "blank of the blank"- and that took some thought, particularly for the last one:
challenges get increasingly difficult as they stack up. Then I looked at Bill Johnson's predicament and
asked myself why he believes those messages he finds, and in one episode he questions the messages
and his own sanity, and decides to seek psychological help and get cured.

I also took up what I considered to be the major problems facing humanity today. Nothing easy. After
world war came the energy shortage, political leadership, terrorism, over-population, and pollution. I
had to come up with reasonable solutions for all of these, not that Bill Johnson could solve by himself
but that he could persuade others to solve because it was in their best interests, and the interests of all
humanity, to address. I had mentioned to CBS when we discussed a possible series that there had been
too many television shows in which the world had been saved for the rest of us by heroes like the Six-
Million-Dollar Man or James Bond or Superman; what I wanted to create was a series in which there
were no heroes, just someone so obscure he bears the most common two names in many telephone
books, who would act as a catalyst to initiate reactions and show others (including readers and, I hoped,
viewers) that it was everybody's responsibility to do what was right for humanity and a livable future.

I don't know whether I succeeded, either in the solution of the problems or the message to the readers.
Crisis! was published as a novel by Tor Books in 1986. It may say something about the state of science-
fiction criticism that no review mentioned the camera's eye viewpoint or the titles or the narrative