"Niven, Larry - Limits (SS Coll)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

I've been rewriting speeches into articles for the Philcon. Where would I find time to write short stories?

But I did.

In 1983, Fred Saberhagen wrote me with a strange proposal. How would I like to write a Berserker story?

The idea: Fred will ask half a dozen friends to write tales of human Berserker encounters. Fred will shuffle them into the order he likes, and write a beginning and an ending to turn it all into a novel.

Sure I wanted to write a Berserker story! I didn't have to do any research; it was all in my head. I've been reading them long enough. I wrote "A Teardrop Falls" and sent copies to Fred and to Omni, which bought it for an indecently large sum considering that I hadn't even built my own background.

I've since seen other Berserker pastiches in the magazines, and I await the novel with some eagerness.

There was to be a new magazine on the stands, a meld of fact and fiction aimed at the general reading public. Its name: Cosmos. Its editor:
Diana King.

Diana commissioned a story for that magazine from me and Jerry Pournelle. Topic: probably asteroid mining. Tone: space advocacy, and light. "What we'd really like to be writing," I said, "is 'To Bring Home the Steel,' by Don Kingsbury. Only it's already done."

Call it a character flaw: I have to be inspired. Jerry and I gathered one evening to plot the story. I didn't get going until we realized who it was that scared Jackie Halfie into leaving Earth.

What happened? Cosmos became Omni Diana King resigned and was replaced by Ben Bova. Ben rejected "Spirals" because it was too long. The story ultimately appeared in Jim Baen's Destinies.

Collaborations are hard work. The only valid excuse for collaborating is this: there is a story you would like to write, and you don't have the skills you'd need to write it alone.

Exceptions? Sure! Jerry and I wrote "Spirals" together because it was more fun that way. And there is a classic exception, a way of collaborating that holds no risks at all.

Here's how it works. You've got a story in your trunk. Somewhere in there is a terrific story idea; but it never jelled. You broke your heart over it when you didn't yet have the skills, and now you can't throw it away and you can't bear to look at the damn thing either.

Then you meet a writer who seems to have the skills you would have needed. Hand him the manuscript! "Can you do anything with this?"

Look: you've already done your share of the work, and it's earned you
nothing. He's done no work at all. If he says "No," you've lost nothing. He's lost nothing. If he says "Yes," it's his risk. Maybe you can get reinspired.

It was that way with "The Locusts." I'd only recently met Steven Barnes. The direction he was taking, he would soon become the best of the New Wave writers. Well, I couldn't have that

I handed him "The Locusts," and he made it work. Ultimately I watched that story lose him his first Hugo Award. We've since written two novels together.

At the Phoenix World Science fiction convention in 1979, I told James Baen that I had run out of anything to say about the Warlock's Era.

Jim made me a proposal. "We'll invite some good people to write stories set in the Warlock's world. You be editor. I'll do all the work, you take all the credit."

I don't think either of us believed it would work out that way, and it didn't. (I didn't expect Jim to leave Ace Books!) I also had my doubts as to whether one writer would want to work in another's universe. But we tried it. I hoped, wistfully, that reading stories set in my own universe might reinspire me.

It did. Dian Girard is an old friend, and writing "Talisman" with her was a delightful experience. I wrote "The Lion in His Attic" on my own, by moving my favorite restaurant and restauranteur 14,000 years into the past. (That's Mon Grenier, in Reseda, owned and run by Andre Lion.) Both stories have appeared in More Magic, three years overdue.

"The Roentgen Standard" was party conversation among some of the crazier members of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society. Most of what I did that night was listen. When Omni bought the article, I earmarked half the money as a LASFS contribution.

The LASFS turned the money over to the Viking Fund, lest mankind sever communications with Mars.

Beginning around 1970, Harlan Ellison enlisted a team to build a solar system and to write stories within it. The project was to become a book, Harlan's World: Medea. When the book appears, Harlan will assuredly tell the tale of Medea's creation in detail; and so I need not.