Warrior of the Altaii has been sold twice, but has never been published. Until now.
How could this happen?
As Wulfgar will say, draw near and listen.
I first read the manuscript in 1978—forty years ago—just a year or so after I had relocated from New York, where I was Editorial Director of Ace Books (and Tom Doherty was Publisher), to my hometown, Charleston, South Carolina. I had a one-page contract with a guy named Richard Gallen, who played a much larger part than I knew in the founding of small publishing companies. My deal with Gallen was, I would find the writers,
Gallen would invest the advance money, and we would split the profits. Profits? Hah. But that’s another story.
So, where would you go to find writers? A bookstore! I went to a store owned by the local magazine wholesaler, where you could find paperback books, magazines, and newspapers from all over the place. Sure enough, the manager said there was a guy who came in for paperbacks and said he was writing something. She didn’t remember his name.
I asked for an index card and a pencil, wrote my name and phone number on it, and asked her to give it to him when he next came in. She did.
He stared at it in disbelief—pencil? index card?—and was about to tear it up when she told him that I had been Editorial Director of Ace. I had told the manager I was looking for writers—actually, I wanted a new Kathleen Woodiwiss, a writer who could write bodice rippers, sexy historicals aimed at a female audience.
He called me. And made up a bodice ripper synopsis on the drive to my house. OMG, it was awful. All I remember was that the obligatory sex scene involved a duck. I thanked him and couldn’t wait to close the door behind him. Turned out he had as much estrogen in him as Conan the Barbarian.
Twelve months went by. Unbeknownst to me, he had sold Warrior of the Altaii to DAW Books in August 1977. He had received the contract and asked for some changes in it. DAW had withdrawn their offer in September 1977. First sale, first reversion of rights.
After those eight months, I hit a slow patch and thumbed through my Rolodex looking for new prospects. I called him. He said he had written a barbarian fantasy called Warrior of the Altaii, and I asked to see it. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end, and it was good.
Meanwhile, Tom Doherty had agreed to have Ace distribute the books of my imprint. Tom had a splendid science fiction editor, Jim Baen, and it seemed to me that this kind of book was exactly what Tom wouldn’t want in my imprint.
I sent it to Tom, asking if he was interested in publishing it in Ace. Baen bought it in 1979. Sort of. The contract was dated April 1980. Second sale.
Meanwhile, Ace didn’t stand still. It became part of “Berkley Publishing Group, Publishers of Berkley, Jove, Ace Science Fiction, Charter, Tempo and Second Chance.” A myth floated around the industry that someone on the switchboard answered a call by saying “Pac-Man Books” and was out of a job by sunset.
Anyway, the editor in chief of science fiction at this unwieldy entity said she wanted some revisions. He said, just let me know what you want me to do—and then she didn’t send any requests for said revisions.
He wrote to her in January 1983, “My manuscript is fast becoming a mushroom farm on a back shelf in some dark corner of your offices. In that fashion it is doing neither of us any good.”
Berkley gave the rights back in June 1983. Second reversion.
Now, turn back to 1979.
Robert Jordan—then James Oliver Rigney, Jr., the name he had from birth—who was about to morph into Reagan O’Neal—told me that he had some new ideas. I made a date for a meeting. He came in and overlapped with my earlier appointment, who wanted to write a novel about Joseph of Arimathea taking the Christ child to the west of England. She was known for her historical expertise, and I had been hoping she’d want to write a historical novel set in South Carolina, but not in Civil War days, and said so in Rigney’s presence.
So he said he was passionately interested in doing a South Carolina novel set in the American Revolution. (I am pretty sure he had no such idea when he entered the room.) He promised me an outline the next day.
He delivered an outline of a novel telling the adventures of one Michael Fallon during the Revolution. Two more Fallon books would follow, roaming through the War of 1812 to the founding of the Republic of Texas.
I gave him a contract for the first Fallon, to be written by Reagan O’Neal, on March 20, 1979.
A sale made because of Altaii. Most people who start a first novel never finish it, but he had done so. And he had written a good novel, head and shoulders above most first novels.
Well, he and I married on March 28, 1981.
Not so long after that, Tom Doherty got the rights from Conan Properties to do a new Conan novel, but Tom wanted to publish it in time for the first Conan movie, and Baen didn’t have any writers who could do a credible Conan. So I told him Rigney could (because of Altaii), and I asked Rigney to do it.
He said no.
I hoped Tom would forget about it, but that is not his way. Weeks later, he came back to me.
I went back to Rigney, pleading with him. He said, “Harriet, don’t wiggle that thing” (my trembling chin) “at me. I’ll do it.”
So he did. Under the name Robert Jordan, his work was reviewed as “the best of the modern Conans,” thus establishing a name in fantasy. He liked doing it, and did six more.
And all the while he was writing them, as in the time he had been writing the Fallon books, he was thinking of the themes and shadows, the people and events of The Wheel of Time.
When I reread Warrior of the Altaii this winter, after this long intermission, I was amazed at the foreshadowing of The Wheel of Time. You will find many hints of what is to come. One of the most obvious is the name of the major mountain range—the Backbone of the World. In The Wheel, it is the Spine of the World. I think you’ll have fun finding them as you read this brand-new Robert Jordan—a fine wine that has reached its perfect maturity.
