The Lost Gygax Novel

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Ever since we started, there's been a question as to whether or not Planet Stories would begin publishing original fiction—and if so, when. After all, one of the structural foundations of the line to date is that we publish not just great sci-fi and fantasy, but important sci-fi and fantasy. How can you possibly know ahead of time that a new work of fiction is going to be culturally significant?

Turns out, sometimes that question is easier to answer than you think. When we set out to create Planet Stories, some of the first books we signed were the three Setne Inhetep books by Gary Gygax, The Anubis Murders, The Samarkand Solution, and Death in Delhi. Publisher Erik Mona had always enjoyed Gygax's Gord the Rogue stories (one of which we've now republished in Worlds of Their Own), and we felt that it was important to kick things off with Gygax, considering that, after Tolkien, he's probably had the most pervasive effect on modern fantasy of any author. If you stop to think about it, that's an enormous claim, but it's true—how many books in the fantasy section of your bookstore (or on your shelf at home) have their roots in Dungeons & Dragons? Certainly it was Gygax's work that had the biggest influence on all of us, and that put us in a position to one day start a fiction line of our own. And as Gary's health declined and interests had of late turned away from writing fiction, we believed that Death in Delhi, the last Gygax book to be published, would be his final literary legacy.

That is, until a year ago, when Erik called Gygax to see if he might perhaps have some unpublished short fiction sitting around that we could slip into an anthology somewhere. Obligingly, Gary dug around in his files, then came back and said that he did indeed have a few short stories—but he'd also discovered a complete unpublished novel he'd forgotten about, set in the same world as the Setne Inhetep books but far from Ægypt and starring completely new characters. Apparently TSR had turned it down for being too similar to Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar books (despite the fact that Leiber's son saw no problem with the manuscript), and the whole experience so frustrated Gary that he mothballed the novel completely. Would we, he asked, perhaps be interested in publishing it?

Needless to say, we leapt on the opportunity. Called Infernal Sorceress and introducing the characters of Ferret and Raker, the book is Gygax at his finest, chock-full of swashbuckling action, intricate magic, and strange monsters. And unlike Setne Inhetep, whose razor-sharp mind generally sees him on top of any given situation, this book's protagonists are more like Gord—smart and capable, but never quite to the extent that they think they are, always running from the situations their quick blades and loose morals get them into.

Written just after Death in Delhi, Infernal Sorceress is the true last Gygax novel in every sense, making it both the culmination of a life's worth of writing and the final adventure from the man who taught the world not just how to make believe, but that it was okay to do so. That, in fact, we should never have stopped. And that, more than anything, makes it an honor to be publishing this book.

How do you know an original novel will become important to an entire genre?

Sometimes it just starts out that way.

James Sutter
Planet Stories Editor