Читать книгу The Farris Channel - Jacqueline Lichtenberg - Страница 5

THE STORY OF THE FOUNDING 400

As the list of Sime~Gen novels grew over the years, it was becoming very difficult for new fans to scrounge up copies of the Sime~Gen novels which were scattered across various publishers in hardcover and mass market paperback. So one of the editors of the Sime~Gen fanzine Ambrov Zeor, Anne Pinzow, who happened to work for Toad Hall, a publisher at that time, sold the idea of doing reprints of the novels along with a large, new novel.

But publishing was in dire flux (so what else is new?) and Toad Hall did some figures and decided the new novel needed a pre-publication subscription sale of 400 hardcover copies before they could publish it. We had been selling about a thousand copies of each of the Sime~Gen fanzine editions, so we thought that would be possible.

Jean Lorrah and I went to the fans, who at that time mostly connected with us via snailmail, though we had begun moving online to Simegen.com. It took a few years to get signed pledges from each of 400 people saying they’d pay $25 for a hardcover copy of The Farris Channel. Signing up also gave you the chance to have a character in the novel named as you’d wish. Some of those names have been used here.

By that point, the publisher had closed up shop. Even though The Farris Channel was mostly written, it wouldn’t get published.

But by then, we were well ensconced online, and with a form people could sign to join the 400 (list faithfully kept by Ronnie Bob Whitaker and Karen MacLeod). We forgot to take the form down from the Web. We ended up with over 500 subscribers, but no publisher.

So once again, we were shopping Sime~Gen around. We had a screenplay on the market by Anne Pinzow (yes, she’s a professional at that, too), and Jean was working on an e-book novel for the Romance e-book market. Fans were still writing Sime~Gen stories and novels and cooperative fiction (a kind of online gaming). New fans were introduced via the fan fiction, scouring online bookstores for used copies of the published novels.

Meisha Merlin approached us with a good offer, and we signed a deal with them for omnibus reprints and new novels, and they brought out the first volume, Sime~Gen: The Unity Trilogy, with a genuine trilogy of novels—House of Zeor by Jacqueline Lichtenberg, Ambrov Keon by Jean Lorrah, and Zelerod’s Doom by Jacqueline Lichtenberg and Jean Lorrah.

Those three novels are all about the same characters living the same lives, re-engineering society around them.

I wrote Personal Recognizance for one of those omnibus volumes and rewrote The Farris Channel to Meisha Merlin’s specifications.

But Meisha Merlin folded before they could bring out any more novels.

Then, at a convention, Robert Reginald, who runs the Borgo Press imprint of John Betancourt’s Wildside Press, approached us out of the blue. They wanted the novels.

We worked a deal, but it took a few years to get all the technicalities in place. Wildside already had two of my reprint novels, Molt Brother and City of a Million Legends successfully marketed as e-books and paperbacks. They were releasing reprints and e-book editions of Jean Lorrah’s Savage Empire Series. In addition, they’ve done collections of short stories by each of us. Now finally, with this volume, polished for this new market, they will have all the Sime~Gen Novels extant in print simultaneously.

All this has taken so long that we lost touch with many of the Founding 400+ subscribers who want this novel, and one fan in Australia has set up a SimeGen Group on facebook to try to connect with them. The List of the 400 is appended to the end of this volume.

If you know any of these folks who have lost touch, please tell them The Farris Channel is now available.