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
No comments:
Post a Comment