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

Tarulle's kinkier publications. There was also an author living in the
coastal wilderness. His production was weird and erratic— but worth an
extra stop. Except for these three landfalls, the Barge would sail straight
around the south coast, free of external problems. It would be thirty days
before they reached the Osterlais.
Thirty days, sixty wake periods. Enough time for the translators to
prepare the Osterlai and Tsanart editions, enough time for Brailly Tounse
to recondition the Tarulle printers. Rey surveyed his tiny office. Thirty
days. That might even be enough for him to dispose of his current
backlog: manuscripts were stacked from floor to ceiling behind him. The
piles on his desk blocked his view of Fair Haven harbor—and more
important, the breeze that seeped in from over the water. These were all
the submissions taken aboard during their passage through the
Chainpearls and Crownesse. There would be some first class stories here,
but most would end up as extra slush in Brailly's paper-making vats.
(Thus, as Rey had once pointed out in an editorial, every submission to
Fantasie eventually became part of the magazine.)
Rey jammed the tiny windows open, and arranged his chair so he could
sit in the breeze. He was about halfway through the desk stack: the easy
ones he could decide in a matter of seconds. Even for these, he made a
brief note in the submission log. Two years from now the Tarulle
Publishing Company would be back in the Chainpearls. He couldn't return
the manuscripts, but at least he could say something appropriate to the
submitters. Other stories were harder to judge: competent but flawed, or
inappropriate outside the author's home islands. Over the last few days, a
small pile of high priority items had accumulated beneath his desk. He
would end up buying most of those. Some were treasures. Ivam Alecque's
planet yarns were based on the latest research in spectrometry; Rey
planned a companion editorial about the marvelous new science.
Alas, he must also buy stories that did not thrill him. Fantasie
magazine lived up to its name: most of his purchases were stories of magic
and mysticism. Even these were fun when the authors could be persuaded
to play by internally consistent rules.
Rey grabbed the next manuscript, and scowled. Then there were the
truly revolting things he must buy, things like this: another Hrala
adventure. The series had started twenty years earlier, five years before he
signed on with Tarulle. The first few stories weren't bad, if you liked
nonstop illogical action with lots of blood and sex; old Chem Trinos wasn't
a bad writer. As was Tarulle custom, Trinos had exclusive control of his
series for eight years. Then Tarulle accepted Hrala stories from anyone.
The fad kept growing. Otherwise decent writers began wasting their time
writing new Hrala stories. Nowadays the series was popular all around the
world, and practically a cult in the Llerenitos.
Hrala the Barbarian Princess: over six feet tall, fantastically built,
unbelievably strong and crafty and vengeful and libidinous. Her
adventures took place in the vast inland of The Continent, where empires
and wars had no need to conform to the humdrum world that readers
knew. She was the idol of thousands of foolish male readers and a model
for thousands of female ones.
Rey paged slowly through this latest contribution to the legend. Hmph .