"Debra Doyle & James MacDonald - Mageworlds 06 - The Stars Asunder" - читать интересную книгу автора (Doyle Debra)

In memory of Vickie Bunnell, Dennis Joos, Les Lord, and Scott Phillips;
and with gratitude to Jeff Caulder, John Fifer, Robert Haase, and Wayne Sanders.
Lives spent in service, and not forgotten.

Author's Preface
(for those who have been here before)
I. So There We WereтАж
In the Republic of Panama. It was the mid-eighties. Macdonald was nearing the end of a career
in the US Navy and Doyle was teaching freshman composition at the University of Florida extension
campus. And new English-language science fiction wasn't easy to find. The tropical sun did something to
our brains, and we started writing short stories, mostly for our own amusement. Or, to be more accurate,
Doyle started writing them.
One of the stories-a vignette, really-dealt with a young lady named Beka who'd just been given a
spaceship by her father. Odd and exciting doings were hinted at. Macdonald enjoyed reading the story
(as did our friend Sherwood Smith, a writer in California with whom we shared our manuscripts).
Macdonald got to like Beka, and pestered Doyle for the next story about her. Doyle, who was absorbed
by that time in another project, said words to the effect of, "If you want another story, write it yourself."
So Beka landed her spaceship, and spent some twenty double-spaced pages working through all
the routine of clearing a cargo through customs in a foreign port, before a booted foot slammed
unexpectantly into her knee, knocking her to the ground so that an assassin's shot would miss her head.
The boot belonged to a mild-mannered, elderly gentleman with a mysterious past. He and Beka went on
to have adventures together.
Doyle took the manuscript, cut out the twenty-page meticulously detailed depiction of filling out
paperwork in a government office, poured a bottle of bleach over the purple prose, and said, "Well, go
on." The first part of the story went off to California, where Sherwood likewise read it and called for
more.
Two hundred pages later, we were still calling the piece "the short story" (being at that point still
unclear on the concept of "novel-length") and the older gentleman had gained a name. He was the
"Professor." The Prof and Beka continued to have adventures, mailed off to California at the rate of one
every couple of weeks, with each episode ending with a cliff-hanger. The new episode would go off by
mail to California, Sherwood would reply "Arrrgh!" and we'd be off for the next round.
Move forward a few years of real time. Macdonald was out of the Navy, and was living with
Doyle in New Hampshire, far removed from the tropics. They had written and published eight
young-adult novels. Their method was pretty much the same one that they had developed while working
on the "short story." Macdonald would write a first draft/outline, Doyle would put it into English, and then
they'd argue about the details. They were both between projects and that collection of pages about Beka
and the Professor looked like it could be made into a real novel.
So, as they say, it came to pass. The Price of the Stars was published as a paperback original
in 1992. By the end of the novel, the Professor was dead.
But you can't keep a good character down. The Prof had a lot of mysterious past to explore. In
the third Mageworlds book, By Honor Betray'd we finally learned his true name-Arekhon Khreseio
sus-Khalgaeth sus-Peledaen-and in the prequel volume, The Gathering Flame, we met him as Ser
Hafrey, Armsmaster to House Rosselin. His influence extended, in fact, throughout the entire series, so
that Doyle eventually asserted that if she ever wrote another Mageworlds book, it would be about the
Professor as a youngтАж well, as a young whatever he really was, way back then on the other side of the
galaxy.

II. The Dark on the Other Side

Which brings us to the present work. When we came to write this volume, we realized that in the