Princess of the Chameln by Cherry Wilder and a Nod to a Longtime Colleague
January is over. Whew!
Unless you’ve been living in a closet that has no wi-fi, by now you probably know that a bunch of prominent rock stars died in January. David Bowie, Glenn Frey and Paul Kantner, of the Jefferson Airplane, all died last month.
January wasn’t nasty only to rock stars. We also lost a couple of marvelous actors. Alan Rickman was an actor who seemed never to give a bad performance. Certainly in his film roles, he always made a strong impression, whether it was as the slimy, viciously ruthless criminal mastermind of Die Hard, the cynical actor who turns out to have a heart of gold in Galaxy Quest, Professor Snape in the Harry Potter films, and other roles. Frank Finlay was not as well known, but was another gifted and versatile British actor. His career spanned five decades.
And science fiction lost David G. Hartwell. If you don’t know that name, it is probably because David was primarily a book editor, and the only books that had his name on the cover were the anthologies he edited. He edited or co-edited a number of those, a series of Year’s Best anthologies, and other very fine anthologies, some very big ones like The Dark Descent and The Hard SF Renaissance, (the latter co-edited with Cathryn Cramer) to mention just a couple. And he wrote an incisive book about science fiction, Age of Wonders. For the past week many people who have some connection to publishing or to SF and fantasy have been posting about him, and his obituary has been published by major newspapers and other media.
He deserves all this attention. He is widely considered the most influential editor in the field over the past forty years, and for good reason. He dedicated his life to the field in more ways than I can detail here. If you google his name, though, you’ll see just how wide was the scope of his interests and the list of his accomplishments.
He edited or published thousands of books over the course of his career. I don’t know how many thousands, but I know that he edited more SF and fantasy books at Tor Books than any other editor, in his years there.
I’ve been trying to write a blog post about Cherry Wilder for more than a week, and started drafting the post twice before finally realizing that I was having trouble doing so because I kept thinking about David Hartwell’s untimely death. David and I worked for the same publisher for around twenty years; we lived less than five miles apart for almost fifteen years, and we were fierce competitors at rival publishers for almost a decade. And through it all, we were friends. Sometimes our friendship was strained by our competitiveness, but even when we occasionally wrestled over the right to publish an author, there was always a mutual respect between us, and the understanding that we both were trying to do the same thing: help bring great books into the world.
One of the many authors he championed was Cherry Wilder. When I became Cherry’s agent in the mid-1990s, he was the first editor I thought of to publish her novel The Wanderer. And he bought the book, because he knew it would be terrific.
Years before, though, he published a number of her novels at Pocket Books, in the Timescape imprint he established there, including the Torin trilogy and her Rhomary novels. He didn’t publish A Princess of he Chameln or the other novels in the Rulers of Hylor trilogy . . . but that was only because of circumstances beyond his control. The Wanderer was to be the start of a second Hylor trilogy. Unfortunately, Cherry died before she could complete the book, which Katya Reimann finished from Cherry’s notes.
David and I discussed the e-booking of Cherry’s books last year, and he was very glad to see that her two trilogies were going to be finally have e-book publication. He also was interested in a new edition of Second Nature, which he published at Tor Books. As someone who reprinted many previously published books in new editions, he was all for seeing that good books from the past were made available to new generations of readers.
That’s what we’re doing with Cherry’s books with the e-book editions, and as of Groundhog Day, with the first trade paperback, print-on–demand edition of A Princess of the Chameln. In a couple weeks, the second book in the Hylor trilogy, Yorath the Wolf, will become available in its first e-book edition. Knowing that David won’t see the new cover for Yorath makes me sad. Editors are, as a great art director once said to me, supposed to take care of the insides of the books, and leave the covers to the art department. But David, like most of the editors I’ve known, always felt that the cover of a book was very important, because a good cover will help sell a book, and he, like the best of us, really wanted readers to discover the excitement he felt whenever he bought and edited a new book—and even an old book with a new cover. Sharing the joy of reading was his passion, as it is mine. I hope you’ll discover some of that joy in this new edition of A Princess of the Chameln.
