"Spider Robinson - C1 - Callahan' s Crosstime Saloon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

stories, it's a pleasure to run across somebody like Spider: a new writer who
has a good story to tell. It makes all those lousy stories worthwhile. Almost.
It's a thrill to get a good story out of the week's slushpile-that mountain of
manuscripts sent in by the unknowns, the hopefuls, the ones who want to be
writers but haven't written anything publishable yet.
But the real thrill comes when a new writer sends in his second story and it's
even better than the first one. That happens most rarely of all. It happened
with Spider. He brought in the manuscript of "The Time Traveler," and I knew I
was dealing with a pro, not merely a one-time amateur.
We talked over the story before he completed the writing of it. He warned me
that he couldn't really find a science fiction gimmick to put into the story. I
fretted over that (Analog is, after all, a science fiction magazine), but then I
realized that the protagonist was indeed a time traveller; his "time machine" ,


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was a prison.
Just about the time the story was published, thousands of similar time
travelers returned to the U.S. from North Vietnamese prisons. Spider's story
should have been required reading for all of them, and their families.
Sure enough, we got a few grumbles from some of our older readers. One sent a
stiff note, saying that since the story wasn't science fiction atall, and he was
paying for science fiction stories, would we please cancel his subscription. I
wrote him back pointing out that we had published the best science fiction
stories in the world for more than forty years, and for one single story he's
cancelling his subscription? He never responded, and I presume that he's been
happy with Analog and Spider ever since.
Callahan's Place grew to be an institution among Analog's readers, and you can
see it-and the zanies who frequent Callahan's-in all their glory in this
collection of stories. What you're reading is something truly unique, because
the man who wrote these stories is an unique writer. It's been my privilege to
publish most of these stories in Analog. Several others are brand new and
haven't been published anywhere else before.
It's also been a privilege, and a helluva lot of fun, to get to know Spider
personally. To watch him develop as a writer and as a man.
He went from guarding sewers to working for a Long Island newspaper. When that
job brought him to a crisis of conscience-work for the paper and slant the news
the way the publisher demanded, or get out-his conscience won. He took the big,
big step of depending on nothing but his writing talent for an income. But
Spider writes; he doesn't talk about writing, he works at it.
It wasn't all that easy. He had personal problems, just like everybody else
does. Not every story he put on paper sold immediately. Money was always short.
One summer afternoon he met a girlfriend who was coming into town from Nova
Scotia. She had never been to New York before. Spider greeted her at Penn
Station with the news that his lung had just collapsed and he had to get to a
hospital right away, he hoped she didn't mind. The young lady (her name is
Jeanne) not only got him to a hospital; she ended up marrying him. Now they both
live in Nova Scotia, where city-born Spider has found that he loves the rural