Читать книгу Songs of the Dying Earth - Gardner Dozois - Страница 16

AFTERWORD:

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JACK’S WORK had an enormous impact on me as a teenager. I first encountered it when I was fifteen with “The Dragon Masters” in the August 1962 issue of Galaxy magazine, and thereafter quickly tried to find everything by him that I could. He went straight to the top of a small list of distinctive SF and fantasy voices I was discovering at the time, among them Ray Bradbury, J.G. Ballard, Cordwainer Smith and Philip K. Dick. He seemed to be doing something very special, or, perhaps more to the point, seemed to be doing familiar things in a very special way.

While I didn’t discover The Dying Earth until ten years later, that linked collection confirmed everything I already loved and admired about Jack’s work: the elegance and euphony of the writing, the distinctive cadences and rhythms, the sheer inventiveness and antiquarian caste, the way less was so often more and how the standard writing corollary of ‘Show Don’t Tell’ effectively became: ‘Don’t Just Show, Suggest.’

Being introduced to Jack and his family by Tim Underwood at the end of 1980 meant the world to me, and led to the start of a very special friendship, one which has never ceased to be a source of great pleasure. One moment I’m a soldier sitting on a doorstep at the 3TB army base in 1968 reading Star King and The Killing Machine, then thirty years later I’m drifting off to sleep to the words of Night Lamp, Ports of Call, and Lurulu coming through the walls as Jack “reads” through his current work in progress using his talking computer program. One moment I’m a steadfast fan, a fledgling storyteller refining my craft in faraway Sydney, trying to land my first sale, then I’ve become “The Smuggler” and one of Jack’s closest friends, making annual visits to the wonderful house in the Oakland hills, switching on the navigation lights in the bar whenever he announces that the sun is well and truly over the yard-arm, making sure there’s not a trace of zucchini to spoil a meal, taking enormous pains when playing washboard to Jack’s banjo, ukelele, and kazoo always to finish at the same time. As Jack has said on many occasions, usually when several glasses of tipple have come and gone: “Vance deposes, Dowling disposes!” Neither of us is sure what it means, but it makes for a fine toast.

As well as sharing many unforgettable adventures with Jack and Norma over the years, among them our momentous road trip to Three Rivers in January 1984 where we visited a genuine (we insist!) haunted house, we’ve spent hours discussing projects, process and storytelling in general. In a special sense, “The Copsy Door” is the result of years of rich and sustained exposure to Jack’s work, and of countless hours chatting before the fire, working at the kiln, listening to the Black Eagle Jazz Band, and choosing who, among friends and notables, would make the wholly imaginary voyage from Oakland down to Sydney on the fine Vance ketch, Hinano.

On a more specific note, I once unwittingly “borrowed” the name Amberlin from Jack’s Rhialto the Marvelous as a name for a café in my Tom Rynosseros stories. Jack in turn took my coining “shatterwrack” for the extinct volcano Shattorak in Ecce and Old Earth (unwittingly, he insists!). It seemed fitting that my contribution to this book had to concern a particular wizard named Amberlin.

How did the story come about? Why, it was very much a case of painting myself into a corner. I simply had Amberlin step into his workroom one fine morning to deal with something called a Copsy Door, then saw where it went from there. I like to think that, in more ways than one, Jack himself helped with the writing.

—Terry Dowling

Songs of the Dying Earth

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