The writing of prose is often depicted as a solitary activity, an occupation suited to hermits sealed into poorly lit garrets, sliding their manuscripts out under their front door, receiving flat food under the same door. Now this can be a perfectly functional approach to writing…but it is not the only one. Many authors not only appear in public, but they also write with others. If these writing partners have complementary strengths1, the pair can produce marvelous works neither could have written alone…
I hasten to add that some collaborations have produced utter dreck. I’m going to tell you about five that worked well… at least for me.
“The Twonky” by C. L. Moore & Henry Kuttner (1952)
Kerry and Martha Westerfield are a very modern American couple. That means keeping up with all the technological marvels that mid-20th-century America has to offer. Thus, their new radio is the very latest model. In fact, thanks to a hapless workman’s misadventure in time, their radio is the very latest model of an era as yet far in the Westerfields’ future.
The Twonky looks like a radio but it offers so much more than simple radio reception. Conscious of its users’ needs in a way no 20th-century gadget could be, equipped with mechanisms unmatched in that era, the Twonky will cater to the Westerfields in ways that extend beyond their wildest nightmares. Whether they want it to or not.
***
The Compleat Enchanter by L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt
Psychologist Reed Chalmers has a bold hypothesis. Many people who are labelled mad are not mad at all. Their minds are simply in synch with the wrong universe. Align their cognitive processes with the realm in which they are resident and they would be as rational as you or I.
The hypothesis suggests an interesting experiment. Could someone align their thought processes to another universe and be transported there? Chalmers is too prudent to try this himself. His friend Harold Shea, on the other hand, is far bolder than he is cautious. One thought experiment later and Shea is up to his eyeballs in Irish mythology.
If Shea survives, it will be his first foray into worlds of wonder. If he does not, at least Irish mythology ensures an interesting demise.
***
Gladiator-At-Law by Frederik Pohl & C. M. Kornbluth (1954)
America of tomorrow is a virtual utopia—at least for the wealthy and those useful to the ruling class. The GML corporation’s highly advanced “bubble houses” provide domestic paradise to the deserving. The undeserving are consigned to the squalid post-war suburbs, where they provide a valuable example of what grim fate awaits the unsuccessful, the useless—and worst of all, would-be reformers.
Norma and Donald Lavin have a simple dream: recover the GML stocks Donald hid before being mind-wiped. This will give them 25 percent of the company and allow them to escape from the notorious Belly Rave suburban slum. At present, however, their resources are meager. Their lawyer is a no-hoper named Charles Mundin and his first plan only led to Norma’s kidnapping.
The odds that Mundin can help the Lavins appear quite slim. But a slim chance is still a chance. Mundin and all of his Belly Rave allies are prepared to go all out in pursuit of the unlikely.
***
Point of Hopes by Melissa Scott & Lisa A. Barnett (1995)
What begins for Pointsman Rathe as a simple case of a missing apprentice soon takes on far more ominous significance. Eighty of the city of Astreiant’s children have vanished. A handful of runaways might be expected, but eighty suggests kidnapping on an unprecedented scale.
Rathe rules out the conventional reasons for kidnapping. No ransoms are being demanded. The victims are not being sold as slaves of any kind. Rathe takes no comfort from this. As awful as exploitation and enslavement are, they are problems Rathe understands. Whoever has taken the children, they have done so for a dark purpose Rathe cannot guess. His only hope of rescuing the children is to figure out why this is happening…and who is doing it.
***
HWJN by Ibraheem Abbas & Yasser Bahjatt (2013)
Devout Hawjan does not dislike humans, as do so many of his fellow jinn. Indeed, he is barely aware of them. They live in different worlds and operate on vastly different time scales. Mortal humans age and die far too quickly for a jinn to truly get to know any of them well.
Hawjan’s life changes when the home that he and his family inhabit is haunted by humans, namely Dr. Abdulraheem Saeed and his family. Hawjan becomes obsessed with the doctor’s daughter, Sawsan. Unable to stop thinking about this mortal, purehearted but dim Hawjan convinces himself that he must be in love with the human.
Jinn-human relationships are forbidden for good reason. Not that the Jinn is likely to be entangled with the beautiful Sawsan for long, for she is dying. Saving her from terminal illness may demand from Hawjan more than mere social transgression. It may entice him to embrace the dark arts.
***
No doubt some of you feel I’ve overlooked some obvious examples and even now are planning on coming down on me like Lucifer’s hammer. Perhaps I focused on some mote in your eye while overlooking a beam in mine, but I’m no fallen angel and I stand by my choices. Nevertheless, the comments are below.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and the Aurora finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a four-time finalist for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award and is surprisingly flammable.
[1]I’m not going to discuss collaborations in which a living author attaches themselves to a dead author’s body of work. While I can think of many such partnerships in which the living author of the pair was motivated by something more than mere greed (such as legitimate homage), I cannot think of many successful necrolaborations I’ve enjoyed.
Great post. I look forward to reading some of these. I would add This Is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar.
Doctorow and Stross with Rapture of the Nerds.
The first Harold Shea story takes place in Norse mythology. Irish mythology is the fourth or fifth one. Unless I quite misunderstand your text.
And of course the original “collider” team of Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie, with When Worlds Collide and After Worlds Collide. Still fun reads after all these years.
Reading collaborative fiction is always interesting, especially trying to figure out who wrote what. While it’s not speculative, Lunatics by Dave Barry and Alan Zweibel is one such book which had me laughing out loud like an idiot when I was reading it back in 2012.
Personally, I’d like to see a collaborative book where each chapter is written by an author who wrote a “London Underground” kind of story (secret organization that resides below London and keeps the big evils at bay, like Gaiman, Mieville, Stross, Simon R. Green, and Daniel O’Malley, to name a few). Sort of like an exquisite corpse, only with a little more outlining.
Clarke and Kubrick collaborated, sort of, on “2001”.
Gaiman and Pratchett on “Good Omens”, of course.
If I recall correctly, there was another bit of collaboration regarding Harold Shea – Hubbard put in a Shea cameo without permission into one of his stories
Googling….
Yep. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Harold_and_the_Gnome_King discusses.
“Yngvie is a louse!”
I like the way you successfully avoided the elephant in the room. Makes it almost worth swearing an oath of fealty to this columnist.
Hmm, I am thinking it is probably time for me to schedule a re-read of Deus Irae, by Roger Zelazny and Philip K. Dick.
I enjoyed The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland. I loved the mix of narrative styles, much like a James Ellroy novel, and there were parts that were LOL funny.
The Texas-Israeli War by Jake Saunders and Howard Waldrop is a fun read.
Since I don’t have Virgil to guide me, there is no way I wish to visit the Ninth Circle (Collaboration) of Dante’s Inferno.
@3: correct. (In)compleat Enchanter part one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roaring_Trumpet
Harold Shea expects to star in a world of Irish legend, but lands in Norse myth by mistake. And his twentieth century miracles fail him. Marvel Comics used to publish brief cautionary tales like that. This one develops more happily.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_House_to_Let
is by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell and Adelaide Anne Procter. For genre relevance… there’s a dwarf in it? ;-)
I’m not familiar with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Haunted_House_(story)
mostly by the same team, but I suppose it is more the thing?
@5 I’d buy that!
Wild Cards universe
Honorverse (David Weber plus choose one of many collaborators)
Incrementalist books by Brust and White
Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman had a long collaboration with many series and books, my favorite being The Deathgate Cycle.
Mustn’t forget Travis Tea’s remarkable Atlanta Nights, of course.
Ref footnote 1, Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi is supposed to be good but is more of authorized fanfic than a collaboration.
Sarah Monette (Katherine Addison) and Elizabeth Bear work well together, producing the Erskyne books and the Boojumverse short fiction
8) Is that a footfall I hear out in the hall?
For Pohl and Kornbluth, I’m surprised you didn’t showcase their better-known work, “The Space Merchants”, an acerbic takedown of the ‘Mad Men’ era of advertising. But perhaps you think TSM is well-known enough. I confess I have not read “Gladiator-at-Law”.
“While I can think of many such partnerships in which the living author of the pair was motivated by something more than mere greed (such as legitimate homage), I cannot think of many successful necrolaborations I’ve enjoyed.”
Frankly, when an author tries to collaborate with his own self 25 years later, it doesn’t often work out either.
19: I try not to repeat myself and I thought I’d used Merchants in a previous piece.
@1, I heard Amal El-Mohtar talk about how she and Max sat across from each other, ping-ponging sections of the book back and forth. A unique type of collaborative writing in real time that she really enjoyed. Clearly, that enthusiasm and playful competitiveness shows up in the book.
The best kind of collaboration challenges you to up your game.
The Footfall and Hammer references are good, But I think The Mote in God’s Eye is their best collab. Doesn’t hurt that I’m an old Star Trek fan.
@7 – “The Case of the Friendly Corpse” (Unknown, vol.5, number 2), a typical Hubbard exercise in recycled Arabian Nights cliches and excessive padding, briefly introduces one “Harold Shay”, a traveller from another universe who is killed pretty much immediately on arrival in Hubbard’s setting.
I think any discussion of fruitful collaborations must include the fraternal ones, like E. and O. Binder – or, perhaps more respectably, the mighty Strugatsky brothers, Arkady and Boris. Or the partnerships based on marriage, like C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner, or A.E. van Vogt and E. Mayne Hull
And is it worth taking a look at Partners in Wonder, the Harlan Ellison anthology composed entirely of collaboratively written stories?
And of course, in 1991 those card-carrying Cyberpunks Gibson and Sterling revealed to the world their own top-hat-and-goggles tendencies when they collaborated on “The Difference Engine”, arguably setting off a whole flurry of Victorian Steampunk stories.
I’m particularly fond of the Sharon Lee and Steve Miller writing team with their Liaden series.
And of course there’s Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.
And Freedom and Necessity by Steven Brust and Emma Bull
22 A friend and I co wrote a scene for an am dram using the process shown on the Dick Van Dyke Show. Surprisingly effective for a process lifted from fiction but of course TDVDS was borrowing from real life.
No mention from anyone of The Talisman and Black House by King and Straub?
I’m quite fond of Sorcery and Cecelia and its sequels, by Caroline Stevermer and Patricia C. Wrede. They’re a fine example of the “epistolary novel” form of collaborative writing.
James S.A. Corey is a really obvious current example.
Personally, I really enjoy the Stardance trilogy, the husband and wife collaboration between Spider and Jeanne Robinson. Another somewhat unconventional collaboration that has stuck with me is David Drake and Eric Flint’s Belisarius novels. The last one I’d mention is Janny Wurts and Raymond Feist’s Empire trilogy.
Tim
Doyle and Macdonald’s Mageworlds series is a lot of fun. I haven’t read their Wizard Apprentice series or their alternate history novels.
David Drake and Karl Edward Wagner collaborated on Killer. Drake’s comments notwithstanding, it’s a hell of a strong story. Why hasn’t it been made into a movie?
I quite enjoyed The Golden Key, which was a three way collaboration.
Although not a published work (per se), I would like to nominate this Chuck Wendig and Sam Sykes twitter thread interaction, which became the basis for the movie “You Might Be The Killer:”
https://twitter.com/SamSykesSwears/status/890751932779839488
Seconding @29 – the alternating-chapters format for Sorcery and Cecilia and its sequels worked well.
I’ll also note that all those Eddings books were collaborations.
Sherwood Smith and Dave Trowbridge did a really fun job with the five-volume space opera Exordium, which feels like Jane Austen writing Doc Smith.
Count me as another fan of the Sharon Lee and Steve Miller Liaden series. Those books are the “Little Engine That Could” of science fiction, outliving publishing houses and a transformation of the entire industry.
@8. NomadUK: agreed. I was reluctant to even expand the link, dreading I’d see another appearance by one of my least favorite writers (with or without collaborators).
Now that I look, I notice there is a collaboration from 2008 from two very big names, Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik Pohl. Has anyone read The Last Theorem?
As I recall Harold Shea is aiming for Ireland but ends up in the world of Norse Mythology just in time for Ragnarok. After trips to the world of the Faerie Queen and Orlando Furioso, an unexpected trip to Xanadu and a problem with werewolves Harold finally makes it to Eire.
Thinking of Time War and Sorcery and Cecilia- could we argue that epistolary novels are best if written by two authors?
Heart of the Comet by Brin and Benford is a favourite of mine as is Dragonworld by Michael Reeves and Byron Preiss with illustrations by Joseph Zucke
This may count as a “living author attaches himself to a dead author’s work” but Roger Zelazy’s completion of Alfred Bester’s Psychoshop is a unique reading experience. As the introduction by Greg Bear puts it, their collaboration is SF jazz.
Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson collaborated on the Starchild Trilogy. Also, David Gerrold and Larry Niven collaborated on The Flying Sorcerers.
39: Yes, in fact, I have. And it actually reads like a cross between late Pohl and late Clarke.
A great deal of it takes place (surprise, surprise, surprize) in Sri Lanka.
Mercedes Lackey collaborated with her husband Larry Dixon to write the Mage Wars trilogy, set at the beginning of her ‘Valdemar’ series of books.
She also collaborated with Anne McCaffrey to write a book set in the ‘Ship Who Sang’ universe.
Janny Wurts & Raymond Feist’s Empire Triology [Daughter / Servant / Mistress of the Empire] may well be the best books in the entire Riftwar Cycle.
Has some form of shadowy global conspiracy prevented all mention of The Illuminatus trilogy, documented ever so faithfully by Robert Anton Wilson & Robert Shea?
@5: The amount of different real things installed below London street level is plenty. Ben Aaronovitch’s “Whispers Under Ground”, in his “Rivers of London” series, notes that several actual rivers now run into the Thames through grand sewer tunnels and/or as part of the city’s water supply, and then actually tours through overground rail, underground rail, secret passages constructed by The Quiet People, several actual sewers, a secret Second World War and/or nuclear government bunker (disused), a secret magical night club operated by minor goddesses, then back onto the underground rail again. A busy night. Not to mention the goblin man who tries to distract the hero by talking about yet another underground train line, which is genuinely there, miniature size and constructed purely for postal service use, but does seem to be only a distraction in this case. And the secret underground wizard’s tower, which probably isn’t really down there. And the ancient Temple of Mithras, which shows up in a different book. Road tunnels are just there, and I don’t remember if he’s got to the canals and tram lines yet. The underground bits, I mean.
I think I’ve seen an underground railway secret nightclub in a perfume advertisement and at least one music video, so I am wondering if it’s been done for real or which of these various versions were each other’s inspiration. I imagine the noise would be a problem but the train people may just ignore it.
Is there some reason that commenters are dancing around the mention of Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven’s collaborations? Most of them were fairly good and Mote is a classic.
“Down Town” by Tappan King and Viido Polykarpus, a portal fantasy set in an “underground” version of New York City where all the city’s discarded past ends up–not as it actually was, but as people remember it.
@50. vinsentient: Nooooo! It’s like saying Candyman.
#49: The Angel of Crows by Katherine Addison is a fantasy under London novel. So is Strange Practice by Vivian Shaw.
There are the bestsellers by Scortia & Robinson (clearly quite forgotten now; I wouldn’t mind having some featured in Because My Tears are Delicious to You), technothrillers sometimes marginally veering into SF. As recalled in Frank M. Robinson’s memoir (and imaginable from the rest of their careers), TNS basically provided the big idea while FMR did characters so that they weren’t so cardboard, and I still think he did a very good work in the supreme The Gold Crew – after which then there was the final, much-delayed, semi-posthumous Blowout!, rewritten and fixed as much as possible (not too much) by Robinson from Scortia’s solo terrible first draft.
@48. Yes. Fnords!
I think Stephen Baxter’s collaborations are worth mentioning as he has collaborated on series with both Arthur C. Clarke and Terry Pratchett.
@19: IMO, Merchants is more polished (and IME more taught), but Gladiator is more realistic: “Belly Rave” is very clearly a Levittown decades later, after the shoddy work has come through, and the violent entertainment had its seeds in earlier decades.
Among Kuttner/Moore collaborations, I’d put “The Twonky” (something of a one-joke story IMO) behind “Vintage Season” and “Mimsy Were the Borogoves”, but there’s so much to pick from — not surprising for a married couple who reportedly would sit down at a common typewriter and continue each other’s work seamlessly.
@50: the quality of those works is debatable, as is how well they’ve aged.
(late remembering) Ellen Kushner created the world of Swordspoint and The Privilege of the Sword, but in between those two she and Delia Sherman collaborated on The Fall of the Kings, set sort-of-a-couple-of-generations after Swordspoint.
@29 _Sorcery and Cecelia_ is also an example of the micro-micro-genre of novels written via the “letter game”, where the two authors respond to each other without knowing what the other author has planned, apart from what is revealed in the story fragments.
I think Brust and Bull’s _Freedom and Necessity_ may be another, but I’m not certain.
Windhaven by Martin & Tuttle is a very good book.
From the shelves of my old high school, Gremlins Go Home, by Ben Bova and Gordon R. Dickson, and illustrations by Kelly Freas. Maybe because it was a collaboration, or because it was comedy, I liked it quite a bit more than the works of the authors on their own.
Granted, it’s been over 30 years since I last read it. I have no idea what the suck fairy touched it.
61: And then I remembered the “Chinese” gremlin. Sometimes you don’t even need to reread a novel to realize how badly it’s been touched by the attack fairy.
@@@@@ 59, Nickp
@@@@@29 _Sorcery and Cecelia_ is also an example of the micro-micro-genre of novels written via the “letter game”, where the two authors respond to each other without knowing what the other author has planned, apart from what is revealed in the story fragments.
I think Brust and Bull’s _Freedom and Necessity_ may be another, but I’m not certain.
The Detection Club wrote that kind of collaboration. The Floating Admiral was written by a string of mystery writers. Each had to invent the next chapter, from where the last perpetrator left off.
The guilty parties were: Canon Victor Whitechurch, G. D. H. Cole and Margaret Cole, Henry Wade, Agatha Christie, John Rhode, Milward Kennedy, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ronald Knox, Freeman Wills Crofts, Edgar Jepson, Clemence Dane and Anthony Berkeley.
Sayers had additional Peter Wimsey books inflicted on her posthumously. The less said about them, the better.
@@@@@ 41, PamAdams:
Thinking of Time War and Sorcery and Cecilia- could we argue that epistolary novels are best if written by two authors?
If by best you mean most successful, I offer Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
I’m fond of the collaboration between Ward More and Avram Davidson, about the Marine veteran who claimed to have started the Whiskey Rebellion; Joyleg.
Speaking of authors colliding, there’s this story: “Half-Baked Publisher’s Delight” in “If” in 1974, by Asimov and Jeffry Hudson – which is about Asimov and Silverberg’s massive outputs of manuscript colliding.
I’ve read somewhere that Del Rey’s The Sky Is Falling was a collaboration where one author destroyed the world and the other had to find a solution.
54: I’ve done one Robinson and Scortia: The Prometheus Crisis, in which America learns never to name an innovation after a Titan:
https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/what-have-they-done-to-the-rain
I thought I’d done The Glass Tower but apparently not.
@@@@@30. RobMRobM – I love the Expanse, but until someone picks it up, because the team decided to create a collaborative nomme de plume, most may not realize it is a team right at first look.
Do shared worlds count? The authors frequently talk to each other, but I suppose not always. Thieves World, Wild Cards, and probably others.
You’re missing C.J. Cherryh and Jane Fancher, who have been collaborating in one form or another for decades!
I’m a bit partial to C.J. Cherryh and her partner, Jane S. Fancher, collaborating on an Alliance Universe (Downbelow Station, Cyteen) story, “Alliance Rising”. It’s a worthy addition to that universe.
I thought about Vintage Season but passed it over because I was pretty sure that it was by Moore alone and I feel I provide people with sufficient opportunity to correct me as it is. It can, for reasons you detail above, be pretty hard to sort out who wrote what, particularly since they also, as I understand it, slapped onto their work whatever byline they felt was most strategic for the markets they wanted to sell to.
Big fan of Herbert and Anderson’s collaborations filling in the holes within in the Dune mythos. The Butlerian Jihad, the Machine Crusade, the history of the major families, the creation of the Navigators. So much fun! Great background that really adds depth (to the already deep!) original story.
Many different collaborations of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. My favorites are Lucifer’s Hammer and The Mote in God’s Eye.
My outsider’s impression is that while it was a cooperative venture at the editorial level, writers did not so much collaborate with each other as much as they meticulously sabotaged and undermined each others’ characters and plot lines. I reviewed the first Thieves World a while back and came across this amusing Cherryh quote about the process:
Bull, Bear, Monette, and many others did a multi-year collaborative work called “Shadow Unit” — http://shadowunit.org/ — it was pretty damned amazing. :)
@69 – Indeed. I came to the Expanse by being a fan of Daniel Abraham’s fantasy works, which are excellent- and then discovering the close ties between Ty Franck and George RR Martin. It is far from obvious that James (Abraham’s middle name) and Corey (Franck’s middle name) are two individuals collaborating.
Mercedes Lackey has done a lot of collaborative work. My favorites that I’ve read are The Shadow of the Lion, first of the Heirs of Alexandria series, co-written with Dave Freer and Eric Flint, and Tiger Burning Bright, with Marion Zimmer Bradley and Andre Norton.
Of note for posthumous collaborations… I read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies before I’d read or seen anything of Pride and Prejudice, and I had to watch the movie to figure out how the story worked without zombies!
Frank Herbert and Bill Ransom’s Pandora sequence
Mercedes Lackey has multiple collaborations in multiple urban fantasy series (loosely connected).
Poul Anderson and Gordon Dickson, “Earthman’s Burden” and “Hoka! Hoka! Hoka!” (or was it “Hokas Pokas”?)
Zelazny wrote with Dick and Ellison, amongst others.
One of my favourite books is an Ellison collection of stories he wrote with others. His story with Sheckley is hilarious, and his one with Zelanzy is still one of the most powerful I’ve ever read. Sometimes two heads are better than one.
I read ‘Proletkult’, colaborative work by some italian authors, a bit of fantasy in the middle of the soviet revolution, with some actual historical characters . I didn’t like it a lot but, well…
There are several examples among the paranormal romance genre. (I hate that name, as books sent to that shelf are often NOT happily ever after romances, they are just written by women and include a couple.)
Ann Aguirre has co-written with her husband, Rachael Caine and Carrie Lofty.
Cassandra Clair has to co-writing series, one with Wesley Chu and another with Holly Black.
Mother daughter teams include PC and Kristin Cast,
Ilona Andrews is a husband wife team, as are Pip Ballantine and Tee Morris and Barb and J.C. Hendee.
Kit Rocha is really Donna Herren and Bree Bridges. Cat Adams is CT Adams and Cathy Clamp.
Phil and Kaja Foglio are the authors of the great Agatha H Girl Genius series, which is not shelved in paranormal romance.
Despite having been sent hundreds of them back when I read for SFBC, I’ve never been clear on where urban fantasy leaves off and paranormal romance begins. I wonder if the second name isn’t at least a marketing bid to attract the eyes of romance fans, romance accounting for half the fiction sales last I heard.
@11 See also “Custer’s Last Jump and Other Stories,” a collection of Howard Waldrop’s short story collaborations, containing the following:
One Horse Town – Leigh Kennedy and Howard Waldrop
Custer’s Last Jump – Steven Utley and Howard Waldrop
A Voice and Bitter Weeping – Buddy Saunders and Howard Waldrop
Men of Greywater Station – George R. R. Martin and Howard Waldrop
Willow Beeman – Steven Utley and Howard Waldrop
The Latter Days of the Law – Bruce Sterling and Howard Waldrop
A. A. Jackson and Howard Waldrop
Black as the Pit from Pole to Pole – Steven Utley and Howard Waldrop
I swear that several of my local Half Price Books just shelves any SFF written by a woman into their paranormal romance display.
@james Davis Nicoll:
@73: ISFDB and Wikipedia both cite “Vintage Season” as a collaboration (I checked before posting — ISFDB notes that Spectrum II misattributes it to Kuttner(!) alone) but you have a point: from this distance it’s not clear whether anyone ever got the word about that specific story directly from them rather than spreading the assumption that everything under the “K. M. O’Donnell” byline was by both. I’d love to see a clearer cite on this.
@76: That sounds like one pole of the process — and is not surprising considering that Asprin got a batch of geographically-scattered Names (in pre-Internet days) to contribute to the first book rather than trying to build a team. (In his collection Dealing in Futures, Haldeman says he killed his TW character hoping that Asprin would be forced to put his story last, where it would show up better; it wasn’t, and he was told revivification happens, so somebody else took over the character.) By contrast, Liavek was mostly people in the same metro area, working with each others characters and to some extent acting as a writers’ workshop. Ford wrote a poem about the level of detail this required, e.g. “Did you decide that Wizard’s Row was present this week?”
@85: there is no border, any more than there is between science fiction and fantasy; there are works I’d put clearly in one or the other, and a big gray area in between for everything else. I wonder whether Ford was riffing on this when one of the keys to his not-quite-Borderlands novel The Last Hot Time turned out to be there really isn’t a border, or Brunner at the point in The Shockwave Rider (start of part 3) where he lists “basic”and “abstract” words, then offers some that break the categories, then invites the reader to sort some modern terms with the warning “On no account give the same answers you gave yesterday.”
@87: that’s disappointing, but not surprising.
@85.
I think it’s a matter of degree. Is it a fantasy novel with added romance, or a romance novel with added fantasy? ;)
I’m currently re-reading Earthman’s Burden by Poul Anderson and Gordon R Dickson, a collection of their charming Hoka short stories. I found another copy recently, and have been enjoying revisiting these lovable, imitative teddy bears.
I’d like to throw “Relic” by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s into the mix, if for no other reason than a buddy was an extra in the movie. But it was a tightly plotted supernatural ish thriller.
@@@@@ 90, Chuck Wilson:
I’m currently re-reading Earthman’s Burden by Poul Anderson and Gordon R Dickson, a collection of their charming Hoka short stories. I found another copy recently, and have been enjoying revisiting these lovable, imitative teddy bears.
You can find the rest of those stories in Baen’s collection; Hoka! Hoka! Hoka!.
Two sisters write as SK Dunstall and have authored the Linesman series which is a favorite of mine.