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

splendor of farm life. (Me, I stay in the wilds of Manhattan, where all you've
got to worry about is strikes, default, muggings and equipment failure. Nova
Scotia? In winter? Ugh!)
Meanwhile, Spider's stories kept getting better. He branched out from
Callahan's. He turned a ludicrous incident on a Greyhound bus into a fine and
funny science fiction story. He wrote a novel with so many unlikely angles to it
that if I gave you the outline of it, it would probably drive you temporarily
insane. But he made it work. It's a damned good novel, with bite as well as
humanity in it. We'll publish a big slice of it in Analog, and it will come out
both in hardcover and paperback later on.
And his stories were being noticed, appreciated, enjoyed by the science
fiction fans. At the World Science Fiction Convention in 1974 he received the
John Campbell Award as Best New Writer of the Year. At that time-he had only
published three or four stories, but they were not the kind that could be
overlooked.
What does it all add up to? Here we have a young writer who looks, at first
glance, like the archetypical hippie dropout, winning respect and admiration in
a field that's supposed to admire nobody but the Heinleins and Asimovs.
It just might be that Spider Robinson represents the newest and strongest
trend in science fiction today. He's a humanist, by damn. An empath. He's
sensitive to human emotions: pain, fear, joy, love. He can get them down on
paper as few writers can. -
The SF field began with gadgeteers and pseudoscience. It developed in the
Thirties and Forties with writers such as Heinlein and Asimov, who knew and
understood real science and engineering, and could write strong stories about
believable people who were scientists and engineers. In the Fifties and Sixties
we began to get voices such as Ted Sturgeon, Fred Pohl, Harlan Ellison-writers
who warned that not everything coming from the laboratory was Good, True and



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Beautiful.
Now here's Spider Robinson, writing stories that are-well, they're about
people. People in pain, people having fun, people with problems, people helping
each other to solve their problems. Spider is a guy who can feel other people's
emotions and help to deal with them. He's like a character out of an early
Sturgeon story-kind, down-to-earth; very empathic. Literarily, he is Sturgeon's
heir.
That's the good news. He is also an inveterate punster. You'll see his puns
scattered all through the Callahan stories. In fact, there are whole evenings at
Callahan's devoted to punning contests. Nobody's perfect.
I remember getting a newspaper clipping from Spider which showed a NASA
drawing of the design for a toilet to be used under zero gravity conditions in
the Skylab satellite. (NASA has problems that thee and me can't even guess at.)
The cutaway drawing of this engineering marvel showed that there was a rotating
blade inside the toilet bowl, to "separate the liquid from the solid wastes," as
NASA's engineers euphemistically put it.