"Robert A. Heinlein - Grumbles from the grave (Non Fiction)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

By the time Robert found himself too busy to do more than overhead work
(keeping up correspondence with his agents, keeping records, answering fan
mail, and all the other chores attendant on being a literary figure), I was well
enough acquainted with his business that I could
take over those chores for him. We worked together as a team, discussing
what to do about offers, and I would answer the letters for him.
With the juvenile series well launched, and selling many copies primarily to
libraries, Robert became the darling of librarians. He was asked to give
endless speeches, and when his annual books for boys came out, he did a
special program for general radio distribution on each new book.
But he still yearned to do serious writing for adults, rather than for the
specialized science fiction market. So, in 1960, he finished writing Stranger in
a Strange Land. That book became his best known work. When the boys
who originally read his juveniles grew up, they kept looking for more of the
science fiction which Robert had made so popular. So he set out to write
adult novels for them. For some years, he regularly wrote two books a year,
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one adult and one juvenile. In addition, there were always requests for other
things in the way of nonfiction. Many of those requests had to be turned
down for lack of time.
Between books, we did a good deal of foreign travel. We went around the
world four times, spent time in Europe. One of the most interesting, but not to
be repeated trips, was to the Soviet Union. In 1960, we saw the May Day
parade, then took off for Kazakhstan. Soon after our arrival in Alma-Ata, we
were told of the U-2 incident. Things turned frosty for us, but there was no
way out, so we continued the trip, going on to Samarkand, which was the real
reason we went all that way into the USSR. While we were in Vilno, just
before a summit conference between Khrushchev and President Eisenhower,
the Soviet Union sent up a rocket which to this day we cannot be certain was
unmanned. On the way down from seeing some castle in Vilno, we
encountered a group of Red Army cadets, who were extremely excited about
it and
had to tell us. We were heartsick about the development and returned to our
hotel.
In 1970, there was a serious illness, from which it took him two years to
recover his health. Then, he sat down at his typewriter and turned out Time
Enough for Love.
Always a man of fragile health, illnesses became more frequent, and there
was less time for writing. We both had a taste for travel, and we saw a good
deal of the world; anywhere there was transportation, we went. We visited
Antarctica and went through the Northwest Passage to Japan. When China
opened up to travel, we went there, among other parts of the East. To Sail
Beyond the Sunset was eventually published on Robert’s 80th birthday.
Questions began to come in—Was this to be the final book from his
typewriter? (But by this time it was a computer.) He had intended to write
more, but again illness intervened, and To Sail did become his final story.
I will leave it to others to evaluate the influence of Robert’s work, but I have
been told many times that he was the “Father of Modern Science Fiction.”
Those books have been published in many languages, in many lands, and
some of them seem to have been landmark stories.