From: Jim Jordan <jbjordan@gnt.net>
Subject: (urth) LB Foreword
Date: Tue, 02 May 2000 12:17:25 

OOOOOKAAAYY.
	So, I read LB in a Quality Paperback Club omnibus edition (which contains
*Beasts* and ES). But the book fell apart as I read it, so I ordered the
"hardcover" from the SFBook Club, published by Bantam, and it just came.
	The QPBC edition has a different pagination, and includes a 1990 Foreword.
I don't have a scanner and don't feel like typing it all in, but here is
the gist of it and most of the second half of it. JC says that he worked on
the book from 1969-1978. He says that he began with writing a long family
chronicle, and then came up with "the idea, for instance, of a fairy
religion. Marianne Moore defined poems as 'imaginary gardens with real
toads in them'; I thought I would try to create an imaginary garden with
real fairies at the bottom of it.
	"I came upon a Persian parable called _The Parliament of the Birds_, which
supplied me with a plot remarkably -- uncannily -- suited to what I had
altready thought up.
	"Lastly, I had toyed for some time with the idea of writing a story, or a
series of stories, about a powerful mage who solves crimes or puzzles like
a detective, puzzles that turn out to be cosmogonic or otherwise
earthshaking: the reawakening of a sleeping emperor, for instance -- or
something like that.
	So, this all came together. A last quotation: "... Among the very first
images I had had of my family was of a man packing his married life in a
bag and setting off on a final journey: and some eight years later I wrote
down that scene, close (at last!) to the end of the book, the book you have."
	So, there it is for those who don't have it. 

Nutria, the Kind  and Helpful


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