The Mysterious Adam Corby -- Revealed
Here’s the age-old question: when is internet stalking not actually internet stalking?
Why, when you’re a literary historian doing journalism, of course.
Many weeks ago, I composed a long entry called “The Mysterious Case of Adam Corby.” My real interest lay in how two major fantasy editors from the 1980s, David Hartwell and Lester del Rey, treated one particular fantasy manuscript by a little-known fantasist, Adam Corby. At the time, I had only read the two Corby novels Hartwell officially published, The Former King (1981) and The Divine Queen (1982), and in my post I publicly gushed about the latter.
Since then, however, I waded into Corby’s remaining Doom-quest of Ara-karn novels, specifically the ones he self-published almost thirty years later. Now my gushing has transformed into awe. These books are genuinely amazing. They’re powerful; dark; grim. They’re maybe the single most “literary” fantasy of the entire decade, and I’m fully prepared to defend Corby as among the half-dozen best prose stylists in late twentieth-century fantasy.
All of which, naturally, made me determined to discover Corby’s real identity.
My friends, the “real” Adam Corby has now been found.
As you maybe remember, the only thing I knew for sure was Corby’s true name: Stephen Pond. That came from a random archival discovery, an unpublished interview with Judy-Lynn del Rey. In this interview, she casually mentions her husband Lester’s current fantasy line at Del Rey Books:
So that’s how things stood while I composed “The Mysterious Case of Adam Corby.” The question kept bugging me, though, especially once I realized the full brilliance of the entire Doom-quest tetralogy. So I kept digging.
My next clue came from trying to determine the relationship between Adam Corby and “asotir.” In 2009, Corby self-published his full tetralogy on Bookreadfree.com—back then, undoubtedly a legitimate website, but now mostly a venue for distributing pirated editions of bestseller novels & porn. In these self-published novels, though, Corby makes several references to “asotir,” but he never explains who asotir is.
From Corby’s comments, asotir certainly seems like a separate person. Both he and asotir have their own author pages on Boodreadfree.com, and in Corby’s author’s note to Darkbridge, he mentions “asotir’s assistance” in helping him self-publish the final two Doom-quest novels. As I discovered, furthermore, asotir apparently published a few more novels on Apple Books. The author’s note to A Wolf on the Island of Lost Women claims that “they” are an artist collective who shares several principles in common. Namely:
To all which Detective Dennis responds with the brilliance of hindsight, “Baloney!”
Oh, asotir’s claims about artistry and anonymity are fully genuine. Indeed, asotir works even harder to maintain his anonymity than even the mysterious Elena Ferrante, who at least publishes her books with major publishers. But all this hullabaloo about an “artist collective”? Or asotir being a different person from Adam Corby? That’s pure nonsense. It’s nothing but unbridled obfuscation. Corby/Pond is asotir, and everything written by asotir is also written by Pond/Corby.
For proof, we must turn to asotir’s blog Asotirica. From 2007-2016, but mostly during the earlier years, asotir composed over 200,000 words of entries on various matters relating to art, politics, fantasy, and “talesmanship.” It’s actually a fascinating document. Asotir is amazingly well-read, and he’s as comfortable discussing Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time as he is the drama criticism of 19th-century German critic Gustav Freytag.
And asotir would have made a fantastic undercover spy. For someone so prolific, he’s shockingly reticent with personal details. After scouring hundreds of thousands of words of commentary, I could only discover two unambiguous biographical statements. First, asotir admits that his father was an engineer. (That explains, he says, his own “engineering” attitude to talesmanship, i.e., craft.) Second, asotir also offers a brief personal aside on why he left commercial publishing:
What about finding the correct Stephen Pond, though? Well, again, this puzzle relies on unraveling a miniscule clue. You see, among asotir’s published works on Bookreadfree is one anomaly called Crawlspace. It’s a collection of poetry, not prose, and its real title—at least according to the title page—is From the Tangled Wood. But this book isn’t by asotir. The title page indicates the author as “Barbara Jewell Pond,” who copyrighted the material in 1946.
A google search quickly revealed several facts about Barbara “Bobbi” Ann Jewell Pond (1928–2013). For one thing, a self-published Amazon version of From the Tangled Wood appeared in 2014—one year after Barbara died. And she was a homemaker married to Franklin “Pat” Pond (1925-2025), an engineer, and in 2003 Barbara realized her life-long literary ambition by self-publishing a long historical novel called Falcons of Ormond: A Novel of Medieval England.
Barbara Pond also lived in Rhode Island. The Little Compton Historical Society provides a nice biographical sketch on her. This sketch also reveals that Barbara had two children, one of whom was named … Steven Pond.
Bingo.
Given Pond’s extensive covering of tracks, it’s probably no surprise there’s virtually no public information on him. So far, my attempts to contact him personally have fallen short.
Perhaps that’s a good thing. I’m not sure he’d appreciate a random literary biographer having sleuthed him out. And only somebody with my peculiar literary interests would have even bothered. The bread-crumb trail is astoundingly thin:
So there you have it, folks. At this point in history, nobody but me even cares who authored The Doom-quest of Ara-karn. Indeed, I’m probably the only professional critic who’s even read the published Timescape novels, much less the full tetralogy. But Doom-quest is truly a forgotten fantasy masterpiece, fully on par with Peake’s Gormenghast or Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. I hope that, someday, the books will receive their due.
Why, when you’re a literary historian doing journalism, of course.
Many weeks ago, I composed a long entry called “The Mysterious Case of Adam Corby.” My real interest lay in how two major fantasy editors from the 1980s, David Hartwell and Lester del Rey, treated one particular fantasy manuscript by a little-known fantasist, Adam Corby. At the time, I had only read the two Corby novels Hartwell officially published, The Former King (1981) and The Divine Queen (1982), and in my post I publicly gushed about the latter.
Since then, however, I waded into Corby’s remaining Doom-quest of Ara-karn novels, specifically the ones he self-published almost thirty years later. Now my gushing has transformed into awe. These books are genuinely amazing. They’re powerful; dark; grim. They’re maybe the single most “literary” fantasy of the entire decade, and I’m fully prepared to defend Corby as among the half-dozen best prose stylists in late twentieth-century fantasy.
All of which, naturally, made me determined to discover Corby’s real identity.
My friends, the “real” Adam Corby has now been found.
As you maybe remember, the only thing I knew for sure was Corby’s true name: Stephen Pond. That came from a random archival discovery, an unpublished interview with Judy-Lynn del Rey. In this interview, she casually mentions her husband Lester’s current fantasy line at Del Rey Books:
We’ve had books like those by Brian Daley ... oh, lots of good things, many by new writers. For example, coming up is a book by a fellow by Stephen Pond. Lester hasn’t been so excited about a writer since he discovered Donaldson.On the next page appears the title of Pond’s manuscript: The Doom-quest of Ara-Karn. The first two books Hartwell published with Timescape, and they appeared under the moniker of “Adam Corby.”**Nonetheless, I still didn’t know who “Stephen Pond” actually was. Unfortunately, it’s not a terribly uncommon name. My best guess had been the oceanographer Stephen Pond (1940-2026), who spent several decades teaching at the University of British Columbia. When I contacted this person’s family, they denied their father wrote any fiction. Still, they couldn’t quite rule out the possibility. As an oceanographer, their father would have known about tidal-locking, a phenomenon important to Corby’s world-building, and they did confirm that Professor Pond read science fiction exclusively.
So that’s how things stood while I composed “The Mysterious Case of Adam Corby.” The question kept bugging me, though, especially once I realized the full brilliance of the entire Doom-quest tetralogy. So I kept digging.
My next clue came from trying to determine the relationship between Adam Corby and “asotir.” In 2009, Corby self-published his full tetralogy on Bookreadfree.com—back then, undoubtedly a legitimate website, but now mostly a venue for distributing pirated editions of bestseller novels & porn. In these self-published novels, though, Corby makes several references to “asotir,” but he never explains who asotir is.
From Corby’s comments, asotir certainly seems like a separate person. Both he and asotir have their own author pages on Boodreadfree.com, and in Corby’s author’s note to Darkbridge, he mentions “asotir’s assistance” in helping him self-publish the final two Doom-quest novels. As I discovered, furthermore, asotir apparently published a few more novels on Apple Books. The author’s note to A Wolf on the Island of Lost Women claims that “they” are an artist collective who shares several principles in common. Namely:
asotir is the name taken by a group of writers who together hold a few common principles on art, society, and life: that the basic building block of society is the mother and child; that artists should not create for money or gain but primarily for the joy of the act of creation, and secondarily for the joy of sharing the results with kith and kin; that humanity is better advised to improve itself rather than its tools (and that concentrating on improving its tools results all too often in the degradation of humanity); and various other crackpot, quaint, and downright weird notions better left unsaid, but above all that the artist’s creation should take precedent over his name. Hence, the acronym asotir.
To all which Detective Dennis responds with the brilliance of hindsight, “Baloney!”
Oh, asotir’s claims about artistry and anonymity are fully genuine. Indeed, asotir works even harder to maintain his anonymity than even the mysterious Elena Ferrante, who at least publishes her books with major publishers. But all this hullabaloo about an “artist collective”? Or asotir being a different person from Adam Corby? That’s pure nonsense. It’s nothing but unbridled obfuscation. Corby/Pond is asotir, and everything written by asotir is also written by Pond/Corby.
For proof, we must turn to asotir’s blog Asotirica. From 2007-2016, but mostly during the earlier years, asotir composed over 200,000 words of entries on various matters relating to art, politics, fantasy, and “talesmanship.” It’s actually a fascinating document. Asotir is amazingly well-read, and he’s as comfortable discussing Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time as he is the drama criticism of 19th-century German critic Gustav Freytag.
And asotir would have made a fantastic undercover spy. For someone so prolific, he’s shockingly reticent with personal details. After scouring hundreds of thousands of words of commentary, I could only discover two unambiguous biographical statements. First, asotir admits that his father was an engineer. (That explains, he says, his own “engineering” attitude to talesmanship, i.e., craft.) Second, asotir also offers a brief personal aside on why he left commercial publishing:
To start, I must say I was not at the time much in the commercial traditional publishing world. I had sold and published two fantasy novels, years back (actually they were the first parts of one novel, whose end has never been published). Since then I wrote a few more books that were not published, and went on writing other tales that I could never bring myself to finish.
All-righty-roo … as far as veiled descriptions go, that’s about as good as it gets for Corby’s two Timescape novels. Corby is asotir, and vice-versa.
What about finding the correct Stephen Pond, though? Well, again, this puzzle relies on unraveling a miniscule clue. You see, among asotir’s published works on Bookreadfree is one anomaly called Crawlspace. It’s a collection of poetry, not prose, and its real title—at least according to the title page—is From the Tangled Wood. But this book isn’t by asotir. The title page indicates the author as “Barbara Jewell Pond,” who copyrighted the material in 1946.
A google search quickly revealed several facts about Barbara “Bobbi” Ann Jewell Pond (1928–2013). For one thing, a self-published Amazon version of From the Tangled Wood appeared in 2014—one year after Barbara died. And she was a homemaker married to Franklin “Pat” Pond (1925-2025), an engineer, and in 2003 Barbara realized her life-long literary ambition by self-publishing a long historical novel called Falcons of Ormond: A Novel of Medieval England.
Barbara Pond also lived in Rhode Island. The Little Compton Historical Society provides a nice biographical sketch on her. This sketch also reveals that Barbara had two children, one of whom was named … Steven Pond.
Bingo.
Given Pond’s extensive covering of tracks, it’s probably no surprise there’s virtually no public information on him. So far, my attempts to contact him personally have fallen short.
Perhaps that’s a good thing. I’m not sure he’d appreciate a random literary biographer having sleuthed him out. And only somebody with my peculiar literary interests would have even bothered. The bread-crumb trail is astoundingly thin:
- An unpublished, archived interview with Corby’s real name;
- The Asotirica blog that reveals asotir long ago published two fantasy novels with a commercial publisher;
- (Asotir’s attribution of Crawlspace’s authorship to Barbara Jewell Pond.****
So there you have it, folks. At this point in history, nobody but me even cares who authored The Doom-quest of Ara-karn. Indeed, I’m probably the only professional critic who’s even read the published Timescape novels, much less the full tetralogy. But Doom-quest is truly a forgotten fantasy masterpiece, fully on par with Peake’s Gormenghast or Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. I hope that, someday, the books will receive their due.
----------------------------------------
**After my friend Douglas A. Anderson read my earlier Substack article, he showed me how to find the public copyright information for The Former King and The Divine Queen. Both records confirmed what I already knew: “Adam Corby” is a pseudonym. Interestingly, Pond registered himself as “A. Adam Corby.” I suspect that initial stands for asotir; more on that in a moment.
****The fact that asotir’s father was an engineer, and that Barbara was married to an engineer, is nice confirmatory evidence, but probably not decisive.
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