"Vernor Vinge - The Barbarian Princess" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vinge Vernor)

THE BARBARIAN
PRINCESS
Vernor Vinge

I believe there are writers who have never been comfortable with short
fiction, even when they were beginners. I had the opposite problem. For
the first five or ten years of my career, it was almost impossible for me to
write novel-length stories. I think I benefited from this disability. Short
fiction is a wonderful medium for speculative fiction. Even though science
fiction short stories normally make less money per word than novels, the
SF magazines are an ideal place for the new writer: many magazines are
wide open to unsolicited submissions. At the same time, most new writers
collect a number of rejections before they can sell consistently. So each
short story is a kind of "small experiment." A writer can get lots of
feedback quickly.
Eventually, a short fiction writer can grow into writing book-length
stories. In my case, this happened in especially easy steps. In 1968, Damon
Knight published my novella, "Grimm's Story," in his Orbit series. Around
that time, Damon was also editing science fiction novels for Berkley books.
He told me that if I felt like writing an extension of "Grimm's Story," he
could get me a book contract for the combination piece! (The preceding
exclamation mark reflects my feelings about this offer. Here I had never
sold a novel and now I was being solicited to write one. I thought that I
had finally arrived.) I wrote the extension, and in 1969 Berkley books
published the expanded story as Grimm's World.
Years passed. I learned that my first book sale had been unusually good
luck; selling my second novel was hard. But by the mid 1980s, I'd had
success with several novels. Jim Baen offered to reprint Grimm's World
but with some new material. The result was Tatja Grimm's World (Baen
Books, 1987), consisting of a new piece, "The Barbarian Princess," and a
revised version of Grimm's World.
Returning to one of my earliest story settings was a lot of fun. I was
surprised that I had new things to say—and now I had the ability to say
those things well. I think "The Barbarian Princess" stands well by itself. It
appeared separately in Analog in 1986, and made it onto the Hugo ballot.



Fair Haven at South Cape was a squalid little town. Ramshackle
warehouses lined the harbor, their wooden sides unpainted and rotting.
Inland, the principal cultural attractions were a couple of brothels and the
barracks of the Crown garrison. Yet in one sense Fair Haven lived up to its
name. No matter how scruffy things were here, you knew they would be
worse further east. This was the nether end of civilization on the south
coast of The Continent. Beyond South Cape lay four thousand miles of wild
coast, the haunt of littoral pirates and barbarian tribes.
Rey Guille would soon sail east, but the prospect did not bother him. In
fact, he rather looked forward to it. For obvious reasons, there weren't
many customers along the south coast run. The Tarulle Barge would put in
at two of the larger barbarian settlements, villages with a taste for some of