"Robert A. Heinlein - The Past Through Tomorrow (Collected Sto" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

Introduction by Damon Knight
Life-Line
The Roads Must Roll
Blowups Happen.
The Man Who Sold the Moon
Delilah and the Space-Rigger
Space Jockey
Requiem
The Long Watch
Gentlemen, Be Seated
The Black Pits of Luna
It’s Great to Be Back!
We Also Walk Dogs
Searchlight
Ordeal in Space
The Green Hills of Earth
Logic of Empire
The Menace from Earth
If This Goes On
Coventry
Misfit
Methuselah’s Children


Introduction by Damon Knight

The year is 1967, and in Carmel, California, a retired admiral named Robert
A. Heinlein is tending his garden. Commissioned in 1929, he served through
World War II with distinction, taught aeronautical engineering for a few years,
then became a partner in a modestly successful electronics firm. Aside from
his neighbors, his business associates and Navy friends, no one has ever
heard of him.
This is a likely story, but not true. What really happened is much less
probable: six years after graduation from the Naval Academy, while serving
on a destroyer, Heinlein contracted tuberculosis. He spent a couple of years
in bed, then was retired at the age of 27.
Like the consumptive Robert Louis Stevenson, like Mark Twain, whose
career as a river-boat pilot was swept away by the war, Heinlein turned to
writing almost at random, because he could not lead the more active life he
would have preferred. Cut adrift from the Navy and from the life-line that
would have led him to that rose garden in Carmel, he took graduate courses
in physics and mathematics, intending to pursue his old dream of becoming
an astronomer, but was again forced to drop out because of poor health. He
tried his hand at silver mining, politics, real estate, without conspicuous
success.
Then, in 1939, he happened across the announcement of an amateur short-
story contest in a magazine called Thrilling Wonder Stories. The prize was
$50, not a fortune, but not to be sneezed at. Heinlein wrote a story, called it
‚Life-Line’, and submitted it, not to the contest editor, but to John W.