"Robert A. Heinlein - For Us The Living" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

though unpublishable then, its completion was an event of almost inexpressible
importance in twentieth century English letters.
Because here, I think, is what happened:
On some unknown day in the first four months of 1939, Robert Anson Heinlein
sat looking gloomily at a carbon of the manuscript that had just been rejected
a second time and found himself thinking back over the whole long, painful
period of its creation--the endless hours hunched over a typewriter, staring
at a blank piece of paper until beads of blood formed on his forehead. And as
he did so, two revelations came to him, in this order:
First, he realized, with surprise and warm pleasure, that the most
enjoyable, almost effortless part of the entire experience had not been the
world-saving he'd set out to accomplish, not the logical theories,
mathematical proofs, or clever arguments of which he was so proud ... but the
storytelling part, that he had intended only as a come-on for the crowd. All
at once, I think, it came to him that the lecturer must remain standing in the
square, on a rickety soapbox, and speak at the top of his lungs, and be
heckled by boobs . . . but the storyteller sits in cross-legged comfort in the
shade, and his listeners crowd round to hear him whisper, offering beer for
his sore throat. And when he is done, they give him money, without him even
asking.
Second, he looked back over the lengthy and detailed imaginary future he had
just thrown together as a set decoration, and saw the ideas stacked all round
its empty stage ... and realized it offered him a canvas so broad that, given
enough time, he might contrive to spend all the rest of his working days in
the sheer joy of telling stories, creating friends and heroes out of nothing,
leaping across galaxies and inside hearts--and still end up putting across
every insight and opinion he felt the world needed to hear.
In that moment, he understood for the first time that he wanted to be a
storyteller. That he wanted to be a science fiction writer. No, I'm wrong: he
realized that he was a science fiction writer--and accepted his doom. In the
terminology of Roger Zelazny's immortal novel Lord of Light, he took on his
Aspect, and raised up his Attribute, and was born a god. In that moment, he
ceased being Bob Heinlein, shipwrecked sailor and unemployed engineer, and
became RAH, the Dean of Modern Science Fiction--the Man Who Sold The Moon--
Lazarus Long, who cannot die. In my dreams, I can almost imagine what it must
have felt like.
When he was good and ready, he announced the news to the rest of us, by
sitting down in April and producing, first crack out of the box, one of the
most unforgettable pieces of short fiction in the English language,
"Lifeline." Two years later, he was the Pro Writer Guest of Honor at
Denvention, the Third World Science Fiction Convention in Denver, and everyone
in that banquet hall already knew he owned the field. Five months after he
gave his famous Guest of Honor speech on time-binding, "The Discovery of the
Future," Japan blindsided Pearl Harbor. But once that pesky distraction had
been dispensed with, Robert turned his attention to the wow-science fiction
literary world, and conquered that, too, with an ease, elegance, and speed
that Hitler and Tojo could have learned from.
But everything began on that unknown day or night sometime in early 1939,
when Robert had his own personal equivalent of the blinding flash in which
Nikola Tesla suddenly saw in his head a complete 3-D working model of the