标题: 《The Night We Buried Road Dog 》作者：- Jack Cady【EPUB】 [打印本页] 作者: zaq 时间: 2014-3-21 07:45 标题: 《The Night We Buried Road Dog 》作者：- Jack Cady【EPUB】 The Night We Buried Road Dog by Jack Cady Jack Cady, F&SF, and Road Dog By Kristine Kathryn Rusch Jack Cady never looked like a stereotypical writer. He looked like a Pacific Northwest fisherman. He had an angular, weather-toughened face, which he accented with a beard but no mustache. His deep voice was authoritative, but his eyes were always kind. And he was patient—oh, so very patient. He had to be. When he sent me “The Night We Buried Road Dog,” he walked into the middle of a battle zone. I, the thirty-two-year-old new editor of F&SF, and Edward L. Ferman, the magazine’s former editor and the publisher who had hired me, were in the midst of a war. I believe that novellas are the heart and soul of fantasy and science fiction at the short length. Ed didn’t like novellas at all—partly (mostly) because they cost so much and took up so much space in the magazine. Jack Cady’s “Road Dog,” which was how we referred to it in- house, was 30,000 words long—exactly half the length of an issue of the magazine. I controlled content, but Ed controlled the purse strings. Every time I sent Ed a novella, I had to justify both the story’s length and its quality. Fortunately, I had an excellent track record. I edited a novella line for Pulphouse Publishing, the hardcover press I’d helped found, and most of the novellas in that line had been nominated for the major awards in the field. I had an eye, and I knew it. But Ed had different priorities. If we were going to publish novellas (and he wasn’t even certain of that), he wanted each novella to be worth the space it took in the magazine. In other words, it had to be better than every other story in the issue. Four to five times better, since it took the space of four to five stories. A novella from an unknown, like Jack Cady