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AUGUST 2007
Dear Readers,
 It is official. We here in New York have stepped firmly into that mighty cathedral of August heat where the Sun delivers a sermon that dances like a beautiful pugilist. I know I mentioned the dog days of summer last month. You're possibly asking yourself if that is all your auteur thinks about. The weather? How shallow, you may be saying. How very bourgeois.
You may be right. But until you've walked a midtown mile in my temperate climate shoes, bobbing and weaving through the multitudes while heat rises from the asphalt in palpable waves, until you've stood shoulder to shoulder with the dark specter of rush hour in an unairconditioned subway car, you don't know what it means to be preoccupied with the weather. The weather is to me as the Dow Jones is to a banker. It is an indicator.
And this month, it is an indicator of what a hot group of books we have on sale. (I know, a long way to go for such a poor payoff.) In at the Death, Harry Turtledove's conclusion to his epic Settling Accounts series, is our latest New York Times bestseller, and also in hardcover we have Mary Jo Putney's romantic fantasy A Distant Magic. We also have an original paperback this month with Morgan Howell's King's Property, the first in a brilliant fantasy trilogy entitled Queen of the Orcs. What is great about this trilogy is that you won't have to wait years in between the books. It's completely finished and we're bringing them out in consecutive months beginning now.
Times are good. Read on.
Best wishes,
Fleetwood
frobbins@randomhouse.com
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DEL REY NEWS AND ANNOUNCEMENTS
TOP TEN ACCOLADE
Mary Jo Putney's A Distant Magic has been named one of the top ten romances of the year by Booklist magazine.
CONVENTION NEWS
Del Rey authors Naomi Novik, Kelly Link, and Gavin Grant, plus Del Rey editor-in-chief Betsy Mitchell, will attend the World Science Fiction Convention in Yokohama, Japan, August 30-September 3. All three authors are finalists for the Hugo, the year's top popular SF/Fantasy award. Naomi's His Majesty's Dragon is a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Novel, while Kelly and Gavin's Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet is up for Best Semi-Prozine. (And their new anthology, The Best of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, goes on sale from Del Rey at the end of this month.) Award-winners will be announced at a ceremony on September 1. Good luck to all!
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FEATURE: In at the Death - by
Harry Turtledove
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 With In at the Death, Harry Turtledove brings closure to the Settling Accounts series, and, ultimately, to an alternate history timeline that spans eleven books. Truly, this is a masterwork of alternate history, every bit as colorful and nuanced as our present-day history, even if somewhat less mutable. History, after all, is written by the victors and revised with time. Mr. Turtledove gives us a few words on the end of a saga, and a hint at what may be coming next.
When I first asked myself what would happen if Lee's courier hadn't lost the three cigars that led to the Battle of Antietam and the history we know today, I wasn't looking that far ahead. I thought, What happens a generation later, when many people who took part in the Civil War (the War of Secession in the new timeline) are still around. The result was HOW FEW REMAIN.
That book raised as many questions as it answered. If the Confederates, in bed with Britain and France, humiliated the United States for the second time in a generation, what would the USA do about it? The obvious answer seemed to be, Look for European allies, too. Which, of course, led to the GREAT WAR books.
Halfway through the GREAT WAR series, one of the characters began thumbing his nose in my general direction and yelling, "Hey, look at me! Look who I am! Look what I could be!" As I recall, Jake Featherston was drunk in a Richmond gutter on leave when I started seriously listening to him . . . and the rest is alternate history.
Yes, there are parallels between the CSA after the Great War in the invented timeline and postwar Germany in the real world. They seemed appropriate. Both were traumatized by defeat, their economies wrecked. Both had opponents who were almost as traumatized and wrecked, and lacked the will to oppose them as they rebuilt. Both had a handy internal group on whom they could blame everything that had gone wrong: the Jews in Germany, blacks in the Confederacy. And so, once the economy collapsed in the late 1920s, both had extremist groups, previously regarded as crackpots, who suddenly looked much more reasonable.
Read more. . .
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"Forget everything you ever read about Tolkien's orcs, because these beings are nothing like them," says reviewer Harriet Klausner of Morgan Howell’s new trilogy, Queen of the Orcs. "What Anne McCaffrey and Naomi Novik have done for dragons, Morgan Howell has done for orcs." King’s Property, on sale now, is the first in the trilogy. Morgan Howell offers a few words on how the Orc culture was developed.
"When we are gone, who will remember us? To humans, we are only monsters." —Kovok-mah, in Clan Daughter (Book 2 of Queen of the Orcs)
Orcs evoke powerful impressions. In The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien described them as so malicious that they hated their own kind: the epitome of cruelty and savagery. Tolkien's orcs have set a literary standard. In much of fantasy fiction, orcs are portrayed as crude, bloodthirsty warriors—often green and fanged—with massive muscles and tiny brains.
But in Queen of the Orcs, they are sympathetic characters. To explain how orcs could be so different from their accepted image, I turned to history's example. After every conflict, the victors write the losers' story. If orcs were a defeated race, their conquerors would naturally malign them. Such was the fate of Native Americans in the nineteenth century. The settlers and soldiers who slaughtered them to seize their lands considered them devils. The proverb “The only good Indian is a dead one” reflected the prevailing sentiment. In 1894, William Nye wrote in his History of the United States:"The real Indian has the dead and unkempt hair of a busted buggy cushion filled with feathers. He lies, he steals, he assassinates, he mutilates, he tortures."
I envisioned orcs as in a similar situation. Dispossessed of their traditional lands, they buy a measure of peace by fighting in the armies of their oppressors. There, they are feared, despised, and misunderstood.
Read more
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