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

spelling and grammar errors. He would pick a cover that he thought would
sell, regardless of whether it matched the book or not—and if it had a
near-naked girl being ravished by Things, so much the better—and then he
would hand both cover and manuscript to his wife, who would manage the
actual process of production.

Approximately six months after the receipt of the manuscript, copies
of the book would arrive in the bookstores. The books would stay on the
shelves for three-and-a-half weeks, when they would be removed and
replaced by the new books for the following month. The copies that had not
sold would have their covers ripped off. The cov-ers would be returned to
the publisher as proof that those copies hadn’t sold.

A book with Dillon K. Filk’s name on it would only sell a paltry 90,000
copies, grossing only a half-million dollars in reported sales. Although
Helmholtz always paid Filk a generous two per-cent of the net (minus the
original advance, the cost of production, distribution, advertising, and
various miscellaneous expenses called “over-heads”), this rarely amounted
to more than a few hundred dollars at a time.

Filk understood that Helmholtz was cheating him. Because publishers
always cheated authors. But he assumed that any other publisher would
probably cheat him a lot more than Helmholtz. And at least, Helmholtz paid
him immediately. Of course, the royalties were always two years late, but
Helmholtz assured Filk that was due to slow reporting by the bookstores
and distributors.

So Filk sat alone in his room and talked to him-self. And after he
finished talking to himself, he typed.

Hi-ho.

See?

So it goes.

****

ON THE PARTICULAR day that this story begins, Filk was thinking about a
planet. He didn’t know anything about this planet yet. He wouldn’t know
anything about it until he found the right name for it.

Whenever Filk had to name a planet, he would pace around his room,
speaking deliberately mean-ingless syllables, assimilating the flavors they
suggested. The name of an alien planet had to sound exotic to a human
ear, and it had to suggest the nature of the people who came from that
plan-et.

Today Filk was saying things like “Tralfadormin” and “Trantilusia” and
“Tryspanifam.” He didn’t like those names. They sounded ante-diluvian and