"Robert A. Heinlein & Spider Robinson - Variable Star" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

by the dead?

A similar situation occurs here for one of the first times on this planet. This book is a
posthumous collaboration, begun when one of its collaborators was seven, and completed
when the other was seventeen-years-dead. Spider Robinson discusses this at length in his
Afterword, but a brief explanation at the start may help readers to better appreciate what
they’re reading, and to decide by what standards they should evaluate it. After the passing of
Robert Heinlein’s widow, Virginia, in 2003, his archivist/biographer discovered a detailed
outline and notes for a novel the Grand Master had plotted in 1955, but had never gotten
around to writing, tentatively titled The Stars Are a Clock. Heinlein’s estate executor and literary
agent decided the book deserved to be written and read, and agreed that Spider Robinson was
the only logical choice to complete it.

First called “the new Robert Heinlein” by the New York Times Book Review in 1982,
Robinson has been linked with him in the reviews of most of his own thirty-two
award-winning books. The two were close friends. Spider penned a famous essay demolishing
his mentor’s detractors called “Rah, Rah, R.A.H.!,” and contributed the introduction to
Heinlein’s recently-discovered 1939 first book, For Us, the Living.

It was a pairing as fortuitous as McCartney and Lennon. You are about to read something
genuinely unique and quite special: a classic novel fifty years in the making, conceived in the
Golden Age of SF by its first Grand Master, and completed in the Age of Cyberspace by one of
his greatest students. Variable Star is Robert A. Heinlein’s only collaborative novel—and we
believe he would be as proud of it as Spider Robinson is, and as we at Tor are to publish it.

—Cordwainer LoBrutto, Senior Editor




One
«^»
For it was in the golden prime

Of good Harun Alrashid …

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Recollections of the Arabian Nights
I thought I wanted to get married in the worst way. Then that’s pretty much what I was
offered, so I ended up going trillions of kilometers out of my way instead. A great many
trillions of kilometers, and quite a few years—which turns out to be much the greater distance.
It began this way:

Jinny Hamilton and I were dancing.

This was something of an accomplishment for me, in and of itself—I was born on
Ganymede, and I had only been Earthside a few years, then. If you’ve never experienced three
times the gravity you consider normal, imagine doing your favorite dance … with somebody
your own weight sitting on each of your shoulders, on a pedestal a few meters above concrete.
Broken bones, torn ligaments, and concussions are hazards you simply learn to accept.