Back | Next
Contents


THE JOE'S WORLD SERIES

 


Author's note:

I started the Joe's World series with my friend Richard Roach way back in 1969, over one-third of a century ago, when we were college students. In the decades that followed, both of us got involved in other things and the writing pretty much languished. Now and then, we'd pull out the manuscripts and work on them for a while, but for the most part the material just lay idle in desk drawers and cardboard boxes.


Then, in 1992, I decided to start writing fiction seriously. The first thing I did was pull out one of the intended episodes for the Greyboar and Ignace sub-plot of the series and rewrite it as a stand-alone short story. I entered the end result, "Entropy and the Strangler," in the Writers of the Future Contest—and it won first place in the contest for the winter quarter of 1992.


A few years later, after deciding to separate most of this sub-plot and publish it as an independent novel, I included a slightly rewritten version of this story as the Prologue to The Philosophical Strangler, which was published in 2001. That's the version I'm including in this anthology.


The second story included in this section of the anthology is "The Realm of Words." I wrote this several years ago, intending it to be included as one of the episodes in a later volume of the Joe's World series. Which, indeed, it will be. But, in the meantime—professional writers really, really hate to leave perfectly good stories lying around not earning any money—I sold it as a standalone story to Jim Baen's Universe magazine. It was an easy sale, since I was able to apply the principle of Ultimate Nepotism—seeing as how I'm also the editor of that magazine.


Cheating, I suppose, but I can't say I feel any guilt over the matter. It really is a very entertaining tale, so who cares?


For those of you interested in looking into the Joe's World series, the books either published or projected as part of the series are included in the appendix.


 


Back | Next
Framed