（外文电子版资料）Walter M. Miller - The Soul Empty Ones.pdfVIP

THE SOUL-EMPTY ONES Walter M. Miller, Jr. Miller, to my mind, is a writer of exceptional power. He is the author of what may be my all-time favorite story, Vengeance for Nikolai, and the novel A Canticle for Leibowitz. When-ever / see his name on fiction, I know it will stir me. The pres-ent entry is not his best, for reasons explained in the introduction to this volume, but I remember it across three de-cades as a good, solid adventure. What distinguishes man from animal, apart from intelligence? Is it his soul? If so, what is the status of an android—that is, a creature crafted in the laborato-ry—who is made in the complete image of man, feelings and all? Fast action plus a good thematic question—this, to me, is the essence of conventional science fiction. —PA Miller had a sensational career beginning in 1951, published stunning novellas and short stories in the magazines (The Darfstellar, Astounding 1/55, won a Hugo), topped it off with the 1959 A Canticle for Leibowitz, considered by many to be the single finest science-fiction novel ever published (it is in everyones top ten), and then utterly ceased to publish. No one knows why. A mysterious, emblematic figure of science fic-tions most ambitious (and emblematic) decade, Miller lives in a southern state in virtual isolation from the genre to which he gave so much; there are vague rumors of a novel in progress. The Soul-Empty Ones, a characteristic story and apparently Millers only unreprinted shorter work, appeared in Astound-ing in 1952, incited praise from fames Blish (collected in his volume of criticism, The Issue At Hand), and has not been read by other than collectors and specialists in the last quarter of a century. Until now. They