"L Ron Hubbard - Battlefield Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hubbard L. Ron)

magazine called Astounding Science Fiction. Other magazines were published by
other houses, but Street and Smith was unhappy because its magazine was mainly
publishing stories about machines and machinery. As publishers, its executives
knew you had to have people in stories. They had called us in because, aside
from our A. B. Dick rating as writers, we could write about real people. They
knew we were busy and had other commitments. But would we be so kind as to write
science fiction? We indicated we would.
They called in John W. Campbell, Jr., the editor of the magazine. He found
himself looking at two adventure-story writers, and though adventure writers
might be the aristocrats of the whole field and might have vast followings of
their own, they were not science fiction writers. He resisted. In the first
place, calling in top-liners would ruin his story budget due to their word
rates. And in the second place, he had his own ideas of what science fiction
was.
Campbell, who dominated the whole field of sf as its virtual czar until his
death in 1971, was a huge man who had majored in physics at Massachusetts
institute of Technology and graduated from Duke University with a Bachelor of
Science degree. His idea of getting a story was to have some professor or
scientist write it and then doctor it up and publish it. Perhaps that is a bit
unkind, but it really was what he was doing. To fill his pages even he, who had
considerable skill as a writer, was writing stories for the magazine.
The top brass had to directly order Campbell to buy and to publish what we wrote
for him. He was going to get people into his stories and get something going
besides machines.
I cannot tell you how many other writers were called in. I do not know. In all
justice, it may have been Campbell himself who found them later on. But do not
get the impression that Campbell was anything less than a master and a genius in
his own right. Any of the stable of writers he collected during this Golden Age
will tell you that. Campbell could listen. He could improve things. He could
dream up little plot twists that were masterpieces. He well deserved the title
that he gained and kept as the top editor and the dominant force that made
science fiction as respectable as it became. Star Wars, the all-time box office
record movie to date (exceeded only by its sequel), would never have happened if
science fiction had not become as respectable as Campbell made it. More than
that-Campbell played no small part in driving this society into the space age.
You had to actually work with Campbell to know where he was trying to go, what
his idea was of this thing called “science fiction.” I cannot give you any
quotations from him; I can just tell you what I felt he was trying to do. In
time we became friends. Over lunches and in his office and at his home on
weekends- where his wife Dona kept things smooth- talk was always of stories but
also of science. To say that Campbell considered science fiction as “prophecy”
is an oversimplification. He had very exact ideas about it.
Only about a tenth of my stories were written for the fields of science fiction
and fantasy. I was what they called a high-production writer, and these fields
were just not big enough to take everything I could write. I gained my original
reputation in other writing fields during the eight years before the Street and
Smith interview.
Campbell, without saying too much about it, considered the bulk of the stories I
gave him to be not science fiction but fantasy, an altogether different thing.
Some of my stories he eagerly published as science fiction- among them Final