"William Tenn - The Liberation of Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tenn William)

green weed, whenever the planet beneath us quivered in omen of a geological spasm that might bury us in
its burned-out body, or a cosmic gyration threatened to fling us into empty space.
Yes, even as we do now did we do then, telling the same tale, running the same frantic race across
miles of unendurable heat for food and water; fighting the same savage battles with the giant rabbits for
each other's carrion—and always, ever and always, sucking desperately at the precious air, which leaves
our world in greater quantities with every mad twist of its orbit.
Naked, hungry, and thirsty came we into the world, and naked, hungry, and thirsty do we scamper
our lives out upon it, under the huge and never-changing sun.
The same tale it is, and the same traditional ending it has as that I had from my father and his father
before him. Suck air, grab clusters, and hear the last holy obser-vation of our history:
"Looking about us, we can say with pardonable pride that we have been about as thor-oughly
liberated as it is possible for a race and a planet to be!"


Afterword


Though this story was read aloud during protests by students in the nineteen sixties at rallies opposing
our participation in the Vietnam War, it was actually written during and about the Korean War, a decade
earlier.
My feelings about that situation were really quite simple.
North Korea invaded South Korea across the thirty-eighth parallel. The United States, acting for the
United Nations (read, please, the Galactic Federation), came to the aid of South Korea, driving the
North Koreans all the way back. Thereupon, the People's Repub-lic of China, with the backing of the
Soviet Union, came to the aid of North Korea, driving the U.S. forces back in turn. The entire matter has
not been entirely resolved to this day, leaving the country in a kind of military stasis, with armistice and
peace talks coming up in a desultory fashion at Panmunjom, the approximate midpoint.
The period covered was roughly the same as the Red-Scare years that began with the Dies
Committee and ended with the Senate censure of Joseph McCarthy in 1954. As a re-sult, the organized
Left inveighed against what it called "Truman's War," and urged us to get the hell out of Korea; the
official Right not only supported the war but considered it perhaps the most crucial element in the battle
against the godless Communists.
 In writing the story, all I wanted to do was point out what a really awful thing it was to be a Korean
(and later a Vietnamese) in such a situation. (But recently I have come to the conclusion that if I had been
a Korean, North or South, under those same circumstances, I would very much have welcomed the U.S.
intervention. Am I growing old? Or just official?)
As was pretty much the case with "Brooklyn Project," absolutely none of the top sci-ence-fiction
magazines wanted to touch the story. It was finally purchased by Bob Lowndes of Columbia Publications
for his Future Science Fiction, then the butcher-paper bottom of the field.
When I at last read the story in print, I was quite proud of it. But nobody, absolutely nobody,
seemed to notice it.
Not even the F.B.I.


Written 1950 / Published 1953