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The Mysterious Case of Adam Corby; or, Two Great 1980s Fantasy Editors at Work

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NB: this post first appeared on my Substack (September 8, 2026) If you’ve never heard of Adam Corby, the 1980s fantasy author who wrote The Former King (1981) and The Divine Queen (1982), well, don’t worry too much – nobody else has heard of him, either. But if you take a moment, the Corby case demonstrates how two major fantasy editors from the 1980s, Lester del Rey and David G. Hartwell, each a polar opposite in terms of editorial vision, approached the nascent fantasy genre. For me, the mystery began about two years ago. While reading Stephen R. Donaldson’s unpublished correspondence with ole’ Lester, I came across a passage where Lester started harrumphing about the demands on his time. Among the various time-sucks, he mentions the following: Then I get a novel [from the slush pile] that’s 35 percent brilliant, 65 percent disaster--and I spend an extraordinary amount of time by letter and in person trying to get it rewritten. (Eventually, the writer felt that he had to preserve h...
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Tracking Down Primary Sources from Editors

It's pretty wild what can happen if you just ASK. In my endless trek to track down editorial correspondence from Judy-Lynn and Lester del Rey, I've naturally scrawled through dozens of special collections across the country. And I've had some pretty decent luck, too. But you know what's REALLY wild? Most SFF authors have obviously never had their literary works put into an archive. So what I've done is .... you guessed: cold-emailed anyone who published a book with Del Rey in the 1970s and 1980s. And this morning I got my *third* successful hit .... this time, 22 pages of editorial correspondence sitting in the author's attic, that no one has read in 46 years. W00t.
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UPDATE on my book on Del Rey Books

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Well, I don't know how you write your books, but when I write books apparently, I seem to go more than a little overboard. So, as many of you probably realize, I've been researching Judy-Lynn and Lester del Rey , the founders of Del Rey Books and the modern fantasy genre, and it's been several years in the works. This monography is one-half literary biography(s), one-half institutional history, and another one-half argument about how our interpretations of literary texts is based on institutional factors -- i.e., the publishing industry -- that most critics don't know anything about. Working title is The Dark Lords of Speculative Fiction: Del Rey Books and the Making of a Genre Empire . Some of my blog entries for this include: Genre Fantasy Bestsellers through 1990 The Gender of Genre Fantasy during the Del Rey Era Defending Del Rey Books: The Misunderstood Hero How to Market a Genre that Doesn't Exist : Simak's THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE TALISMAN (1978) Three Fant...
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"Swiiing, batta, batta": Editor of FOUNDATION

Ah, shucks .... another swing and a miss! Once upon a time, years ago, I wrote about " Golden Opportunity Nearly Missed (But Nonetheless Flubbed "), my first application to become a co-editor at Fafnir . As it happened, I re-applied the following year, and although still wasn't selected, the committee liked me enough to make me the journal's first-ever reviews editor, which I happily did for five years. (And we won a World Fantasy Award in the process!) Ever since leaving Fafnir , though, I've kept my eyes half-peeled for further editorial opportunities. Even got an offer from  MOSF Journal of Science Fiction, although I did end up declining that offer because I wasn't interested in doing reviews again .... Been there, done that, as they say. Anyway, last spring, I saw that Paul March-Russell of  Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction was stepping down as editor after a 10+ years, so once again threw my name into the hat. And was very pleasan...
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Long Alliterative Poem by Christopher Paolini in the Works

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My friend Doug Anderson, who manages the blog Wormwoodiana  on old forgotten fantasy texts, just informed me about an interesting new alliterative development: fantasy author Christopher Paolini, author of the Inheritance trilogy, is coming out with a long alliterative poem called  The Book of Remembrance . It's being funded on Kickstarter , apparently, and will feature seven "in-world" texts on "seven of the major battles throughout the history of Alagaësia." The alliterative poem will cover the fourth battle, "The Ambush at Stavarosk." Although I've never read Paolini, I know he's most famous for publishing  Eragon (2002) when only 19 years old. But much like Terry Brooks, I'm sure he's matured from his early efforts -- dude's been around for over two decades now! Either way,  any long new alliterative poem is bound to set my whiskers a-quiver. Here's an tidbit posted by Paolini on Twitter ( here and here ): So. When our gran...
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Fiction Reading List (January - December 2025)

It's a new year .... so time for the my reading-list recap for 2025. The majority of this cycle's books were Del Rey SF/F novels from the 1980s. (The special surprise was Clifford D. Simak's Mastodonia , which is by far my favorite by him.) I read a few other period-relevant texts, such as Tad Williams's first novel, but yeah, given my deep immersion in researching Judy-Lynn and Lester del Rey, that was my wheelhouse last year. Otherwise, my non-project related reading was relatively sparse. I read one long nonfiction book, A Civil Action , for my Law & Literature class that was cancelled. I read a few books for the ENGL 380: Literary Analysis class that replaced it. And I finally did Percival Everett's novel Erasure, and although some might find this sacrilegious, it's still true: the movie was better. FINAL STATS : Altogether, I read 9175 pages  (or 31 books) this semester. So, that's about the same as my total from last year . As per usual, except for...
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Analyzing the Mistakes in Grokipedia's Entry for Alliterative Verse

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Apparently, Elon Musk has just launched Grokipedia , based off GenAI, as a way to compete with wikipedia (which it's probably plagiarizing). But given that the Modern Alliterative Revival is a hobby of mine, I decided to check out Grokky's entry on Alliterative Verse , particularly its sections on the Modern Revival. Everyone knows GenAI is prone to hallucations, so I wanted to see how well it did with something I know well. MY VERDICT : Grokipedia is ... surprising accurate ... but also dangerously  almost  accurate . Solely as a predictive algorithm, Grokipedia said many true things about the Modern Alliterative Revival. (Unsurprisingly, it cites my work frequently, not to mention Paul Deane's website Forgotten Ground Regained. ) In fact, it says enough true things that if Wikipedia were to disappear tomorrow, any lay person might even find Grokky helpful. Nor did I find any outright GenAI hallucinations. I checked every passage of poetry from Tolkien, Lewis, and Auden th...
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