Chapter 20, FIRSTBORN (TSR, 1991)

Modern comments in red.

Next: Liberty, Qualinesti, Fraternity.

The Great Twin Brethren: FIRSTBORN (TSR, 1991)

"These be the great Twin Brethren." (Macaulay, 

The Battle of Lake Regillus)

My fifth book, and fourth collaboration with Toni was FIRSTBORN (TSR, 1991).

The original 1991 cover of FIRSTBORN.

Art by Brom.

The 1991 back cover.

The cover of the 2004 Wizards of the Coast reprint. 

They wisely kept the Brom artwork.

The Preludes done, Toni and I were asked to begin an epic trilogy about the twin princes of the Silvanesti elf kingdom, Sithas and Kith-Kanan. Sithas is the elder by mere minutes, so he's the heir apparent to the throne of his father, Sithel.

The twin dilemma is popular trope in myth and legend. Sometimes twins represent opposites, like Apollo and Artemis, the twin Greek deities of the sun and moon respectively. Apollo stands for light, music, and art; Artemis for the moonlit nights, magic, and the mysteries of nature. Other roles filled by twins include the Rightful Heir vs. the Best Man. Think Romulus and Remus; Esau and Jacob; or in Dragonlance ("DL"), Raistlin and Caramon. 

Romulus and Remus enjoy a milk break.

The whole fictional twin thing veers from cute to creepy, with identical twins predominating at the creepy end. Their only rivals are those incestuous fraternal twins who pop up now and then, mostly to lever their creators onto the bestseller list.

In the Dragonlance elves pre-story, Sithas is destined to rule Silvanesti (the name of the race and the kingdom, by the way), and Kith-Kanan lives a footloose life until destiny challenges him to found his own kingdom, Qualinesti. (These names are from the original DL Chronicles and gaming sourcebooks.)

In 1990, with the goofy DARKNESS & LIGHT and the rock'em, sock'em RIVERWIND THE PLAINSMAN on the shelves, the folks at TSR asked Toni and me to outline the first book in a proposed trilogy about the elven twins. Naturally we were excited to do so, thinking that if the company liked the proposal, we'd get a contract to do the whole trilogy. Three books, three advances equals lots of work, equals happy writers.

I recall Toni doing most of the research needed for the outline. Sithas and Kith-Kanan were historical characters in the "current" series of DL novels, the Preludes, Chronicles, and Legends. This suited us well, as it allowed us distance from the complex Weis & Hickman continuum--room to create, as it were. We added a romantic triangle to the repressed rivalry between the twin brothers in the form of Hermathya, Kith-Kanan's sweetheart. Kith's dad, Speaker of the Stars (i.e., king) Sithel, chooses Hermathya to marry his heir, elder twin Sithas. Kith-Kanan therefore leaves the country heartbroken. He ends up in the woodland, where he meets a foundling elf-boy, Mackeli, and a fey female elf, Anaya. Anaya is the story's Strong Female Character. She doubles as a Very Dangerous Female as well, being an uncanny hunter, tracker, and all-round survivor. She's at one with the spirits of the forest, too, practically an incarnation of Artemis herself (not that any Greek gods appear in Dragonlance!)

Artemis (by Ingri & Edgar d'Aulaire):

the original VDF

After idylls and adventures in the greenwood, Kith-Kanan's destiny asserts itself. Anaya sacrifices herself to save him from villains, but the gods of the forest change her into a tree. Kith returns to Silvanost (the elves' capital city) in time to take part in failing negotiations with the elves' human rivals from the Ergoth Empire. When his father Sithel dies in a suspicious hunting accident, Sithas succeeds him, and war breaks out between Ergoth and Silvanesti. 

Kith learns from his experience. He realizes Hermathya is not the woman for him after all. She shows up poorly compared to Anaya, now a tree, but with a strange surprise sleeping within.

FIRSTBORN is fashioned like a grand opera, right down to scenes constructed like arias and choruses. It's more Puccini than Wagner, but Toni and I cast the epic, symbolism-laden story in an archly romantic style, and it seems to work. Of all the Dragonlance books we wrote, before or afterward, FIRSTBORN is probably the best loved by fans. I don't consider it the best one we wrote, but it is well liked. 

We were able to introduce characters that would recur like dark threads through the rest of our Dragonlance tales. One is a shady sorcerer Vedvedsica (I love that name). Vedvedsica is a distinctly subversive character in the perfect elven kingdom, an aphid on the rose that is Silvanesti. He's not so underhanded in FIRSTBORN as he later turns out to be. Suffice it to say, he's not what he appears to be, and he lives a long, long time, practicing his special brand of mischief.

We introduced other noble elf families, such as the Ambrodel clan. Ambrodel ancestors and descendants would finger prominently in our other DL projects. It gives a nice sense of continuity to have family names recur, adding history to the mix of sword & sorcery.

A note about names and pronunciations: when you write fanciful names, you always have your own idea how they should be pronounced. Often there were differences even between Toni and I, as well as between us and the editors or readers. Later, when many of our DL books were turned into audio books, the variation in name pronunciation could be quite startling.

Vedvedsica should be pronounced "ved-ved-SEEK-uh." 

Ambrodel is "Am-bro-DELL."

Hermathya is "Her-math-EE-yuh."

Anaya is "Uh-NYE-yuh"

Mackeli is "Meh-KELL-ee"

And so on. Toni and I have never been touchy about readers saying our characters' names the "right" way, but it's interesting to hear how other people choose to render our fanciful nomenclature.

The cover art for the first 1991 edition of FIRSTBORN was done by a new artist for us, Gerald Brom. He's usually just credited as "Brom." His style for the book was icy cold and precise, just as the Silvanesti elves are reputed to be. The cover shows Sithel standing over the crystal sarcophagus of the first Speaker of the Stars, his father Sithas, who otherwise does not appear in the story. When Wizards of the Coast reprinted FIRSTBORN in 2004 they wisely retained Brom's art, dispensing with the dark border of the first 
edition.

The French edition.

The color separation is a

bit different.

The Turkish edition. 

Toni got first billing there.

FIRSTBORN is dedicated to Toni's brother, Marty, and his wife Reneé.

Obviously, Toni and I got the contract to write volume 1 of the Elven Nations trilogy. Oddly, the second book went to a different author, Douglas Niles. Niles is an excellent writer, but splitting the series between separate writers was strange, and made for some frantic work. To meet deadlines, we had to feed Niles manuscript chapters of FIRSTBORN so he could account for events of the first book in the second, his THE KINSLAYER WARS. When it came time for the third novel (THE QUALINESTI) in the trilogy to be written, Toni and I would do it, and Niles had to pass manuscript pages of his book to us! This awkward system was never repeated. Later, when Toni and I did DL trilogies (the Barbarians, the Ergoth Trilogy, the Elven Exiles), we would do all three books.

Next: Chapter 20, FIRSTBORN

Chapter 1, RIVERWIND THE PLAINSMAN (TSR, 1990)

Modern comments in red.

Next: Elves have left the building: FIRSTBORN (TSR, 1991).

Way Down Under: RIVERWIND THE PLAINSMAN (TSR 1990)

My fourth published book and third collaboration with Toni was RIVERWIND THE PLAINSMAN (TSR, 1990).

The original 1990 TSR cover. Cover art by Clyde Caldwell.

The 1990 back cover.

The cover of the 2003 Wizards of the Coast reprint.

Art by Matt Stawicki. 

Notice the change from 

"Preludes II Volume 1," to "Preludes Volume Four."

After the appearance of DARKNESS & LIGHT in 1989, things were pretty lively for Toni and me. We received a request from TSR to submit an outline for a Forgotten Realms novel. Forgotten Realms is a self contained RPG universe created by game designer Ed Greenwood.  We responded promptly and just as promptly learned our outline wasn't accepted. (At this late date I remember nothing of this proposed story.) Someone at TSR decided that Toni and I were to be Dragonlance authors and nothing else.  This author branding (no, not that kind of branding) applied to other writers too. With the exception of Douglas Niles, I don't know of anyone who wrote both DL and Forgotten Realms novels. Corrections to this impression are welcome.

There followed a lull. We busied ourselves with other projects. I was still trying to sell my SF novel RAIDEN. This was made easier by the fact that I had acquired a literary agent in the interval between RED SANDS and DARKNESS & LIGHT. Diana Finch, then with the Ellen Levine Agency, took me on. Having an agent meant I could avoid the dreaded unsolicited manuscripts slushpile that lies, like a malodorous mound, in the offices of every publisher.

RAIDEN had an interesting path through the halls of various New York publishing houses. In one sense it was a solid space opera, with hardware, space voyages, interstellar conflict, and lots of people in spacesuits. The awkward part was the personal story. My protagonist, Caspian Geyer, having joined the top-secret project to develop the first faster-than-light spacecraft, meets and falls in love with a Very Dangerous Female, ex-war pilot Lavender "Lav" Jax. One prominent editor actually told me, "I don't know how to sell a lesbian SF novel," which RAIDEN really wasn't. It just happened that the two lead characters involved with each other were women. In the end, everyone passed on RAIDEN, and it sits quietly in my files, smoldering with unfulfilled potential. 

Abruptly--very abruptly--in the fall of 1989 we got an urgent message from TSR. Could Toni and I write a Dragonlance novel for the upcoming Preludes II series? Uh, sure. Who about? Riverwind, the strong, silent "plainsman" in the original Weis & Hickman books. OK, sure.

Can you do it on a tight deadline?

How tight?

Five weeks?

Five weeks! (Hurried consultation between Thompson and Carter). Yes. Yes, we can. 

At a minimum length of 80,000 words and a maximum of 100,000, this was quite a task. We were in pulp magazine territory now, where writers like Lester Dent ("Doc Savage") or Erle Stanley Gardner ("Perry Mason") wrote full novels every month for magazine publication. Dent's Doc Savage novels, for example, averaged around 50,000 words each. Gardner's avowed intention was to write and publish 1.2 million words a year (100,000 words a month!) Why write so much? At first Dent was paid $500 for each novel he wrote, a penny a word (later this went up to $750 per novel, or 1.5 cents a word.) Gardner was paid 3 cents a word in the 1930s, much more later when Perry Mason became a publishing phenomenon.  In 1990, Toni and I were writing for roughly the same rate--in advance. We would get royalties too, which pulp magazine writers didn't usually get.

Lester Dent: what a pulp writer should look like.

The man at (uncharacteristic) rest:

Erle Stanley Gardner.

(I want that room!)

One factor making the Riverwind job possible was the fact that I had left the university library and was now a full-time, freelance writer. This was not a step I undertook lightly. By going freelance I gave up the security of regular paychecks, health insurance, retirement, sick leave, the whole nine yards. It was a gamble, but not a pointless one. I had written six books in four years (two with Toni) and published three of them. I was a self starter, and prolific. Under no illusions, I was aiming to make a living as a writer. That meant I had to write a lot, and often. I was also deeply involved with my future wife, Elizabeth, by this time and looking forward to getting married and starting a family.

As a Prelude story, RIVERWIND had the seed of a plot already sewn. Somewhere it was mentioned in print (in the Chronicles?) that Riverwind had undertaken a quest to find evidence the gods still exist. This was an obvious hook on which to hang our prequel. 

Inspired by thoughts of pulp writers and pulp tales, RIVERWIND is structured like a 1930s adventure yarn. One famous pulp format is The Lester Dent Formula, which is designed to accommodate a 6,000 word short story. Why not a novel? We set up Riverwind in his home village, introduce him and his lady love, Goldmoon, and give him a crazy/wise sidekick, a soothsayer named Catchflea. Riverwind is a straight arrow--no pun intended, as his people are largely modeled on Native Americans--but Catchflea may be nuts. Nuts like a fox. 

Some tribal cultures revered mentally ill or deformed people as "touched by the gods." Other primitive peoples euthanized defectives. Fortunately Riverwind's Que-shu tribe fall into the former camp.

Charged with the vague quest of proving the gods still exist, Riverwind and Cathflea end up falling down a magic hole into an underground world. Toni and I were never really comfortable with Weis and Hickman's Krynn. No one knows a world as well as its creators, so early on (as in DARKNESS & LIGHT) we solved our discomfort by removing our DL stories from familiar times and places. Throughout our career with Dragonlance, we sought distance in time, as in the prehistoric Barbarians Trilogy (CHILDREN OF THE PLAINS, BROTHER OF THE DRAGON, SISTER OF THE SWORD), or distance in place, as in RIVERWIND THE PLAINSMAN.

Slowly falling down a deep hole is a trope I've always liked. It occurs in ALICE IN WONDERLAND, of course, which was originally called "Alice's Adventures Under Ground." There is an old movie starring Tom Poston called Zotz!, part of William Castle's oeuvre. Poston's character finds a magic coin that can slow down any movement (including falling) when he utters the magic word "Zotz!" This trick saves his life when he falls off a tall building. The movie was based on a forgotten 1947 novel by Walter Karig. In RIVERWIND, the title character and Catchflea fall down a vertical tunnel that magically impedes their progress so they arrive far underground intact.

After finding a lost race of elves, and overthrowing a sinister, sorcerous queen (the novel's Very Dangerous Female), Riverwind, the soothsayer, and a love-struck elf girl try to ascend to the surface. Unfortunately they arrive at the upside down city of Xak Tsaroth, a surface metropolis overthrown by the great Krynnish Cataclysm. More trouble follows as our heroes discover a secret base of draconians (warlike lizard-men) and a mad alchemist who is breeding a super-draconian warrior using snakes and forbidden alchemy. This snake-man (we called him an "Ophidian") is supposed to lead an army of draconians against the non-reptilian peoples on the surface of Krynn. Thouriss the Ophidian dies in single combat against Riverwind, and our hero finds the Blue Crystal staff of Mishakal, the goddess of healing. Saved from death by the goddess, Riverwind gets the staff--and proof the gods still live. Things don't quite work out the way he wants, however . . . 

It's a lively, two-fisted tale, written in haste. If Toni and I had just another month to work on it, we could have made the story even better. Despite the short schedule, RIVERWIND is a better novel than DARKNESS & LIGHT. It sold well, but garnered the now-usual reader criticisms of not being properly Dragonlance-ish. It's true, I admit. We were still learning our way into the world, and hadn't had much time to assimilate the subtleties. In time our grasp of the milieu would grow stronger.

The first edition cover was done by Clyde Caldwell, who did the famous cover art for RED SANDS. It's vintage Caldwell, glossy and detailed. Riverwind looks manly and capable, and a bit like Victor Mature in profile:

Victor Mature, 1913-1999

Thouriss, the Ophidian, is pretty damn scary. He looks ready to eat our hero, but he has a weakness that the canny Riverwind correctly deduces.

The French edition.

Good as Clyde Caldwell's cover is, the Wizards of the Coast reprint is fun too (Matt Stawicki did the honors). It depicts our hero, Catchflea, and the elf girl Di An battling Thouriss while a massive green dragon rears up above them. The shattered city of Xak Tsaroth fills the background. Not an accurate depiction from the novel, but an exciting one. 

Toni's dedication of the novel was to her parents and her fiance Greg Cook. I dedicated my work to "the SFWG, 1988-89/Mutatis mutandis." 

The SFWG was the Science Fiction Writers' Group I helped organize at the University of North Carolina in 1988. The Latin phrase means :  "with the necessary changes having been made; with the respective differences having been considered." I let some of the students in the group read RIVERWIND in manuscript and critique it. Later the SFWG would be part of a much larger project when we decided to publish our own magazine, FORBIDDEN LINES.  

The second series of Dragonlance Preludes was called "Preludes II" in 1990. The millennium reprints renumbered everything with the first Preludes series, making RIVERWIND book four in the complete series. The other two Preludes II titles were FLINT THE KING, by Mary Kirchoff, and TANIS THE SHADOW YEARS by Scott & Barbara Siegel. 

The 1990 edition of RIVERWIND also features our first author photos.

Next: Chapter 1 of RIVERWIND THE PLAINSMAN

Chapter 10, DARKNESS & LIGHT

Modern comments in red.

Next: RIVERWIND THE PLAINSMAN (TSR, 1990).

To the Moon! DARKNESS & LIGHT (TSR, 1989), co-written with Tonya R. Carter

My third published book, and second collaboration with Toni, was also our first Dragonlance novel: Preludes Volume One: DARKNESS & LIGHT.

The original 1989 cover.

Art by Jeff Easley.

The 1989 back cover.

The cover of the 2003 Wizards of the Coast reprint.

Art by Matt Stawicki.

The back cover of the 2003 WOTC edition.

Everyone was happy with the reception RED SANDS received, so TSR decided to have Toni and me take on the world of Krynn. By 1989 Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman were no longer writing for TSR. The popularity of Dragonlance was still rising, so the time was ripe for new Dragonlance ("DL") books. The first three titles in this new series were styled the Preludes. They were prequels to the events described in the original Chronicles trilogy. (The other two Preludes titles are KENDERMORE, by Mary L. Kirchoff, and BROTHERS MAJERE, by Kevin Stein.) As I recall, by this time Mary Kirchoff was fiction editor at TSR.

Specifically, Toni and I were asked to write about two of the major DL Chronicles characters, noble and knightly Sturm Brightblade, and DL's own Very Dangerous Female, Kitiara Uth Matar. DARKNESS & LIGHT is set five years before the events in the Chronicles. By the way, the ampersand in the title is official, as it appears on the published book cover. 

The basic premise was, Sturm would undertake a quest to find his father, who had vanished years before. Kitiara, as befits a footloose adventuress, decides to tag along and see what happens. This was not an unusual start for a heroic fantasy novel. Then things took a weird turn.

As a historian by training and by inclination, I'd always liked the pre-Jules Verne, proto-science fiction written before 1860. Most antique SF is satirical rather than predictive, and grew out of the earlier, parallel tradition of traveler's tall tales. Two tales I particularly liked were Cyrano de Bergerac's COMICAL HISTORY OF THE STATES AND EMPIRE OF THE MOON (1657) and Bishop Francis Godwin's MAN IN THE MOONE (1620s?). These relate flights to the moon by the most fanciful means--Cyrano by fireworks rockets, Godwin by a frame lifted by trained geese.

Toni and I knew the gnomes in the Dragonlance universe were conceived as half-baked inventors and crackpot mad scientists. What could be more natural than to have Sturm and Kitiara encounter a band of gnomes who've built a flying ship? Our plan was to get our heroes to the red moon of Krynn, Lunitari, by means of a giant hydrogen balloon propelled by great flapping wings.

Makes sense, right? Maybe not, but it was a fun conceit. When we pitched this idea to TSR, they were nonplussed. Was space travel possible in Dragonlance, even fanciful space travel? The question was put to one of the senior masters of Krynn lore at TSR, whom we only knew as "Big Jim." Can Thompson and Carter send Sturm and Kitiara to the red moon, he was asked?

"Why the hell not?" That was good enough for us.

The real Cyrano de Bergerac:

it's partly his fault.

(The epigraph reads: "The earth was unwelcome to me/I took my flight to Heaven/To live on the Sun and the Moon/And now I speak to the Gods.")

"F.G. B of H" = Francis Godwin, Bishop of Hereford.

Sturm, Kitiara, and a boatload of silly gnomes accidentally fly to the moon. They're only trying to get to Solamnia on Krynn, but gnomish inventions rarely work properly. After suitably nutty adventures on Lunitari with a race of giant ants, a demented "wizard," and a suave dragon trapped in an obelisk, the gang returns home. Leaving the gnomes, Sturm and Kit find they've landed in Solamnia, not far from their original destination. They split up. Kit grows tired of Sturm's stuffy nobility and unbending sense of honor. The balance of the book consists of Sturm aiding some downtrodden peasants who are being preyed upon by the sinister Lord Merinsaard.

We were asked to write a novel 150,000 words long. This was quite long for an average paperback in those days--more in the John Jakes mode than say, a typical Michael Moorcock novel. Toni and I were young and full of fire, and we pounded out 150,000 words as requested. In those days our method was, after hatching the plot and characters together, I would write a complete first draft and Toni would re-write it as the second. Our deadlines seldom allowed us more than two drafts to start with, though there were always revisions requested by the publisher later. This method worked so well it remained our approach for all our subsequent books.

I wrote on an IBM Selectric typewriter. Previous to that, I used a manual Smith Corona portable. Typing on a manual typewriter was like using a mallet to drive tent stakes. Going from an electric typewriter in high school to the Smith Corona, then back to a feather-touch IBM ruined my touch typing technique, and I've been a six finger typist ever since. Toni was more advanced; she used an up-to-date (for 1989) Apple Macintosh. Typing 150,000 words at an average of 300 words per page resulted in a 500 page manuscript, a full ream of typing paper. When this landed on the desk at TSR, they were appalled. They realized 150K was much too long for their format and asked us to cut 50,000 words.

(Toni writes, "As I recall, they asked us to cut 30K words after the MS. was done as you say, and then they asked us to cut more when it was in proof pages.  In proof pages!")

Think about that--cut 1/3 of an entire novel out, leaving enough to be a coherent narrative. We also had a close deadline of just a couple weeks to do this.

You can't cut 33% of a story by line editing. We cut whole chapters, deleted characters, and dumped entire subplots. When you cut a story this much you have to follow through the surviving text with a fine tooth comb to make sure the deleted references are completely expurgated--"following the cuts," it's called. Toni really shone at this. She is a superb editor. 

The screwy Lunitari moon flight was our favorite part, so we preserved it as best we could. It made up about two-thirds of the 100,000 word novel. The balance of the book was, I fear, a bit mangled, and it some places perfunctory. We trimmed it down as required, sometimes with a scalpel and sometimes with a chainsaw.

The title, DARKNESS & LIGHT, was TSR's. Toni and I wanted to call it THE GUARDIAN OF LUNITARI, or A VOYAGE TO LUNITARI, in homage to Cyrano and Bishop Wilkins, but it was TSR's book, so we got TSR's title. Later, when Spanish publisher Timun Mas came out with their splendid hardcover edition of DARKNESS & LIGHT, they called it EL GUARDIAN DE LUNITARI. 

DARKNESS & LIGHT appeared in April 1989, and it was an immediate sales success. It is the best selling book Toni and I (or I alone) ever wrote. It sold 100,000 copies or so its first months and is still available as a e-book today. It appeared on several best seller's lists and has been reprinted several times. In 2003 it was given a new edition with new cover art by TSR's successor company, Wizards of the Coast. Each time it was reprinted Toni and I offered to edit it, to fix errors or narrative clunkers, but this wasn't done. As far as I can tell, the last print editions and the current e-book have the same text as the April 1989 edition.

Although it sold well, DARKNESS & LIGHT garnered a lot criticism from fans. Current ratings online hover around three stars out of five. Some of this criticism is aimed at the choppy nature of the story, natural enough given the severe editing it received before publication. Other negative views derive from aspects not related to the difficult birth of the novel.

A surprising number of fans disliked the concept of fantasy space flight. For them (I guess), space flight is irrevocably a part of science fiction, and they do not like their dream-metaphors mixed. Toni and I have at various invoked the spirits of Cyrano, Defoe, and Wilkins in defense of fantasy space flight, but some fantasy fans are very conservative when it comes to their beloved genre. Swords and sorcery, yes. Flapping, winged ships traversing space, no.

Another group of fan critics objected to our characterization of the existing Weis & Hickman characters: Sturm, Kitiara, Caramon, et. al. Our depictions of Sturm and Kit inevitably differ from Margaret and Tracy's because Toni and I are different people, different writers. We tried to keep the flavor of the original characters but shade them according to the situations we put them in. Some readers were fine with that. Others weren't. That's only to be expected. Working in a shared universe like Dragonlance, this would be a recurring concern.

A few readers just don't like any Dragonlance stories not written by Weis & Hickman. They say so outright. They refuse to read any non-W&H books. Oh well.

Later, DARKNESS & LIGHT was criticized because of a retcon in events preceding the Dragonlance Chronicles. In 2002 Weis & Hickman wrote THE SECOND GENERATION and DRAGONS OF SUMMER FLAME, which revealed that Kitiara and Sturm did more than fly to the red moon that fateful year. Kitiara seduced Sturm, and later gave birth a son, named Steel Brightblade, who figures prominently in the 2002 stories. Obviously, some readers declared, the absurd events in DARKNESS & LIGHT did not happen. It's all a "kender tale"--Dragonlance lingo for a leg-pulling tall tale. 

That's OK. Cyrano would understand. People said the same thing about his story too.

The first edition of DARKNESS & LIGHT features artwork by TSR artist Jeff Easley. The 1989 cover is a bit obscure. It shows a poodle-headed Kitiara standing over a fallen Sturm--a scene from the very first chapter. They're only sparring at that point, and the image says little about the rest of the novel. The 2003 reprint has a livelier cover by Matt Stawicki. Kitiara has better hair and perfect lipstick. I'm not sure what the rest of the 2003 cover has to do with the novel. There are still no gnomes or a flying ship to be seen.

DARKNESS & LIGHT has been widely translated. I own copies of the French, Italian, Spanish, and Russian editions. I've heard there are German and Japanese editions, but I've not seen them. There may be other foreign editions too. TSR and Wizards of the Coast used to pass along sample copies of foreign editions when they had spares, but I don't think they always got enough copies to both keep on file and share with the authors.

L'édition francais.

Juste pour toi, Cyrano

The best edition is the Spanish hardcover, published by Timun Mas in 1990. An artist finally put the gnomes' flying ship, Cloudmaster, on the cover. Bravo!

DARKNESS & LIGHT has no dedication.

In 1992, when my wife Elizabeth and I were on our honeymoon in Europe, we happened to spot an array of Dragonlance books in a store window in Ghent, Belgium. In the midst of them were our two titles, DARKNESS & LIGHT and RIVERWIND THE PLAINSMAN (1990). They were British paperbacks, published by Penguin Books. It was a nice surprise seeing your books on sale in a far-off place like that.

Next: Chapter 10 of DARKNESS & LIGHT