"Mike Resnick & David Gerrold - Jellyfish" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

invent the hero of the story.

In the past, Filk had invented protagonists the same way he invented
planets. He paced around the room, putting together syllables until he
found a combination that he could pronounce in human words.

Today, he had a different idea.

Hi-ho!

It was something that Belvedere Atheling had said one time at a
science fiction convention, and Filk had always wanted to try it. Atheling had
been a well-respected English author who, upon succumbing to the frailties
of existence within a human body, had begun a series of books based on a
popular television series. His readership numbers had swelled enormously.
Instead of selling 5,500 copies of a book, his Hollywood sharecropping
moved 550,000 copies off the shelves. And even though he was splitting
the royalties with a gigan-tic faceless monolith on the left coast of the
continent, he was now earning almost twice as much as before.

But Filk was thinking about the Atheling that had existed before he
became the Atheling that was. That Atheling had said something that had
stuck in Filk’s mind like a fish bone caught in his throat. “Who does it hurt?
That’s who your story is about.”

On that same panel, another author, Robert Goldenboy, had said it
less succinctly. “What does your hero want, why does he want it, and what’s
keeping him from having it?” Filk had never been able to answer this
question. Indeed, he had never really considered it at length. The one time
Filk had thought about it at all, his answer was simply, “He wants to get to
the end of the story so I can get paid.”

Also on that same panel had been Harlow Halfweight, the
eighty-seven year-old enfant terri-ble of speculative fiction. He had seized
the microphone and ferociously declared, “What do you think writers do?
We’re specialists in revenge! We lie awake all night thinking of nasty things
to do to other people! Writers are the Research and Development division
for moral malignancy in the human species! What you do is put your hero in
a tree and throw rocks at him! Rabid coyote turds! Flaming asteroids!
Whatever! The worst that you can imagine! That’s what your fucking story is
about!”

In Filk’s mind—in that perambulated state that passed for
consciousness—Atheling’s original question had now been transmuted.
“Who does it hurt?” had become “Who do you want to hurt the most?” And
this was the kind of question that Filk enjoyed thinking about. Very much.
 Hi-ho.

There were a lot of people Filk wanted to hurt.