Читать книгу Songs of the Dying Earth - Gardner Dozois - Страница 19

I WAS eleven years old. It was the mid 1970s and I lived in a small, bucolic city in the West of England. I longed to travel to the Gobi desert, to Siberia, to South America, but options for doing so were…limited. So I voyaged through books instead, and by the time I was eleven, I was already widely traveled—to Narnia, Prydain, Green Knowe, Prince Edward Island. Then one day my mother grew bored with the Gothic novels she’d been reading and brought back something different from the local library—a novel called City of the Chasch. I read it, very quickly. Then I read it again. After that, we went back to the library and returned, over time, with Planet of Adventure and the Demon Princes books, and with The Dying Earth.

Since then I have been to the Gobi, and to Siberia. I’ve never taken a spacecraft or a time-machine to Tschai, or the Dying Earth, but I know they’re real places—I’ve been there, too, after all. And when I was eleven, I started writing the novel that would, years later, become Ghost Sister. I was nominated for the Philip K Dick Award, some years ago in Seattle, for that book. And, during the convention, I interviewed Jack Vance. I told him it was all his fault. “Godammit,” he growled, “you gotta be so careful with stuff like that.”

—Liz Williams