| Datum a misto | Program | Prihlaska | Seznam prihlasenych |
| Souteze | Vstupne | Ubytovani a stravovani | Doprava | Ruzne |

foto Mike Resnick

Narodil se v r. 1942, v letech 1959-1962 navstevoval Chicagskou univerzitu. Jeho spisovatelskou karieru je mozno rozdelit na dve obdobi. V letech 1964-1976 psal anonymni dila, ktera se ovsem dobre prodavala. Behem tohoto obdobi stihl prodat 200 romanu, 300 povidek a 2000 clanku. Rada del z tohoto obdobi byla "adult". Byl mj. take redaktorem nekolika panskych magazinu. V 80. letech prichazi druhe obdobi jeho kariery. Dale uz psal pod vlastnim jmenem. Od roku 1986 napsal asi 30 romanu, kolem 100 povidek, a sestavil vice nez dvacet antologii. Nejvice cenena dila - Kirinyaga, The Manamouki a Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge Ceny - Hugo (1989, 1991, 1995), Nebula (1994), Locus Poll Award (1996), SF Chronicle Award (1989, 1990, 1991, 1991, 1995), Homer Award (1990, 1992, 1995, 1993, 1994, 1995).

Born in 1942, he studied Chicago University. His writer career can be divided into two parts. He wrote as anonymous (1964-1976) - 200 novels, 300 stories and 2000 articles, some of this work was "for adults", he was also editor of adult magazines. He begun to write under his own name in eighties - he wrote about 30 novels, 100 stories and edited more than 20 anthologies. The most awarded works - Kirinyaga, The Manamouki a Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge Awards - Hugo (1989, 1991, 1995), Nebula (1994), Locus Poll Award (1996), SF Chronicle Award (1989, 1990, 1991, 1991, 1995), Homer Award (1990, 1992, 1995, 1993, 1994, 1995).

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od/from: 8.7.1998, 12:35
otazka: Libi se mi vas pseudoafricky cyklus. Muzete mi napat neco vice o romanu IVORY, ktery u nas nevyjde v dohledne dobe? question: I like your pseudoafrican series. Could you tell me something more about IVORY novel, which won't be published here in near future.
odpoved: preklad neni zatim k dispozici answer: AFRICAN GENESIS

The call has gone out for some Where-Do-You-Get-Those- Crazy-Ideas articles, and since the genesis of my forthcoming novel, _Ivory: A Legend of Past and Future_, is still fresh and clear in my mind, I decided to tackle it.
Back in 1983 or 1984, while I was researching something quite different about Africa, I came across a mention of an animal known only as the Kilimanjaro Elephant. It was an evocative name that seemed to have a mythic quality to it, so I began finding out what I could about this elephant -- and what I found fascinated me.
In the _Roland Ward Book of Big Game Records_, the top 200 trophy animals of every African species are listed. Usually the difference between the Number One and Number Twenty animals is half an inch, or a quarter of a pound. No so with the Kilimanjaro Elephant: his tusks weighed 237 and 225 pounds, and no other tusk in history ever went over 190 pounds. He was a monster among his own kind.
There was more, too -- or, rather, curiously less. With almost every other animal in the book, they know the date it was killed, who shot it, what kind of bullet was used, where it was shot, who the guide or white hunter was, what the animal's measurements were. Not so the Kilimanjaro Elephant: they think, but do not know, that he was killed on the northern slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro; they suspect, but do not know, that he was killed in 1898; they surmise, but do not know, that he was killed by an escaped slave. And that constitutes everything that is known about him.
Well, everything prior to his death, anyway. His ivory turned up for auction at Zanzibar in 1898. One tusk, the larger one, was bought by an American, who was to pick it up in Cairo. It was shipped north with a slave caravan, but the caravan was raided and the tusk disappeared for twelve years, finally turning up in Brussels. The other tusk went to Belgium, then India, and ultimately England. Finally the British Museum of Natural History bought the pair of them in 1932, and after an attempt was made to steal them in 1937, they were taken off exhibit and stored away in a vault beneath the museum, where they still reside. I wrote to the curator for permission to examine them, and finally got to see them in May of 1985. They are magnificent, each measuring more than ten feet long and two feet in circumference at the base.
I then began tracing every reference I could find in my volumimous African library, and finally plotted out a mainstream novel, which would follow the Kilimanjaro Elephant for the last month of his life, and then follow the ivory on an entirely fictitious journey until it wound up in the British Museum.
I called Eleanor Wood, my agent, bubbling with enthusiasm about the story. She listened politely, then told me that if I did a bang-up job on it, she might be able to get me as much as I could get for a short story for _Omni_. Whereas, she continued, if I would remember that I am supposed to be a science fiction writer and that that's where my audience is, and if I would follow the ivory not just to England but into space, and not just for a period of 34 years but for five or six millennia, she could get me 30 or 40 times as much as a short story for Omni.
A word to the wise was sufficient, and I began expanding the scope of the book -- and suddenly realized that I could tell a much more powerful tale with this approach. I created two framing devices -- a future researcher for the 64th-Century equivalent of Roland Ward, and the spirit of the Kilimanjaro Elephant -- and each told alternating sections of the book. The main novel, about 60,000 words, was a straight-line narrative by the researcher. But as he keeps searching for the ivory, the story segues into about a dozen incidents, perhaps 90,000 words total, in which the tusks appear at various times and places -- as stakes in a poker game, as objects of alien religious rites, as pawns in a scholarly battle between two paleontologists, and so forth. I told these tales of the ivory non-sequentially for reasons I hope will be clear to the reader by the time he finishes the book.
This approach allowed me to write about the foibles and nobilities of Man, which is the business of every writer, rather than some silly hide-and-seek adventure about a pair of elephant tusks, and the main continuing story allowed me to enlist the metaphysical as well as the factual in accessing the human condition.
Since a couple of the stories occurred during the elephant's lifetime, all that remained was to take a safari to Kenya in 1986 and retrace his steps on his last journey from the Tana River to the slopes of Kilimanjaro, which I did -- and which I also wrote up and sold as an article to _Swara_, the journal of the East African Wildlife Society.
Then it was just a matter of sitting down and writing _Ivory: A Legend of Past and Future_, which took about five months. I think the hardest part was creating differing technologies and backgrounds -- none of them important to the plot, but each of them vitally important to the versimillitude of the story -- for a dozen different future eras. The pre-publication reviews it has received thus far all agree that it is my best novel to date, and I have no serious argument with that assessment. When it is published by Tor this summer, it will not only have a jacket by Michael Whelan, but will also feature a photograph of the Kilimanjaro Elephant's tusks -- quite possibly the first time in history that a work of fiction will feature a frontespiece displaying its non-fictional source.

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