Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (495 page)

“About face!” Vibulenus calls through the indecisive hush, “and pivot on your left flank. There’s some more barbs want to fight the Tenth!”

The murderous cheer from his legionaries overlies the noise of the cohort executing his order.

As it swings Vibulenus runs across the new front of his troops, what had been the rear rank. The cavalry, squat-bodied and grim in their full armor, shows sense enough to guide their mounts toward the flank of the Ninth Cohort as Vibulenus rotates his men away from it. Only a random javelin from the native lines appears to hinder them. Their comrades who remained with the Commander have been less fortunate.

A storm of javelins has disintegrated the half-hearted charge. Two of the mounts have gone down despite their heavy armor. Behind them, the Commander lies flat on the hard soil while his beast screams horribly above him. The shaft of a stray missile projects from its withers. Stabbing up from below, the orange warriors fell the remaining lancer and gut his companions as they try to rise. Half a dozen of the bodyguards canter nervously back from their safe bolthole among the infantry to try to rescue their employer. The wounded mount leaps at one of the lancers. The two beasts tangle with the guard between them. A clawed hind leg flicks his head. Helmet and head rip skyward in a spout of green ichor.

“Charge!” Vibulenus roars. The legionaries who can not hear him follow his running form. The knot of cavalry and natives is a quarter mile away. The cohorts of the right flank are too heavily engaged to do more than defend themselves against the new thrust. Half the legion has become a bronze worm, bristling front and back with spearpoints against the surging orange flood. Without immediate support, the whole right flank will be squeezed until it collapses into a tangle of blood and scrap metal. The Tenth Cohort is their support, all the support there is.

“Rome!” the fresh veterans leading the charge shout as their shields rise against the new flight of javelins. There are gaps in the back ranks, those just disengaged. Behind the charge, men hold palms clamped over torn calves or lie crumpled around a shaft of alien wood. There will be time enough for them if the recovery teams land—which they will not do in event of a total disaster on the ground.

The warriors snap and howl at the sudden threat. Their own success has fragmented them. What had been a flail slashing into massed bronze kernels is now a thousand leaderless handfuls in sparkling contact with the Roman line. Only the leaders bunched around the command group have held their unity.

One mount is still on its feet and snarling. Four massively equipped guards try to ring the Commander with their maces. The Commander, his suit a splash of blue against the gravel, tries to rise. There is a flurry of mace strokes and quickly riposting spears, ending in a clash of falling armor and an agile orange body with a knife leaping the crumpled guard. Vibulenus’ sword, flung overarm, takes the native in the throat. The inertia of its spin cracks the hilt against the warrior’s forehead.

The Tenth Cohort is on the startled natives. A moment before the warriors were bounding forward in the flush of victory. Now they face the cohort’s meat-axe suddenness—and turn. At swordpoint and shield edge, as inexorable as the rising sun, the Tenth grinds the native retreat into panic while the cohorts of the right flank open order and advance. The ground behind them is slimy with blood.

Vibulenus rests on one knee, panting. He has retrieved his sword. Its stickiness bonds it to his hand. Already the air keens with landing motors. In minutes the recovery teams will be at work on the fallen legionaries, building life back into all but the brain-hacked or spine-severed. Vibulenus rubs his own scarred ribs in aching memory.

A hand falls on the Tribune’s shoulder. It is gloved in a skin-tight blue material; not armor, at least not armor against weapons. The Commander’s voice comes from the small plate beneath his clear, round helmet. Speaking in Latin, his accents precisely flawed, he says, “You are splendid, you warriors.”

Vibulenus sneers though he does not correct the alien. Warriors are capering heroes, good only for dying when they meet trained troops, when they meet the Tenth Cohort.

“I thought the Federation Council had gone mad,” the flat voice continues, “when it ruled that we must not land weapons beyond the native level in exploiting inhabited worlds. All very well to talk of the dangers of introducing barbarians to modern weaponry, but how else could my business crush local armies and not be bled white by transportation costs?”

The Commander shakes his head in wonder at the carnage about him. Vibulenus silently wipes his blade. In front of him, Falco gapes toward the green sun. A javelin points from his right eyesocket. “When we purchased you from your Parthian captors it was only an experiment. Some of us even doubted it was worth the cost of the longevity treatments. In a way you are more effective than a Guard Regiment with lasers; outnumbered, you beat them with their own weapons. They can’t even claim ‘magic’ as a salve to their pride. And at a score of other job sites you have done as well. And so cheaply!”

“Since we have been satisfactory,” the Tribune says, trying to keep the hope out of his face, “will we be returned home now?”

“Oh, goodness, no,” the alien laughs, “you’re far too valuable for that. But I have a surprise for you, one just as pleasant I’m sure—females.”

“You found us real women?” Vibulenus whispers.

“You really won’t be able to tell the difference,” the Commander says with paternal confidence.

* * * *

A million suns away on a farm in the Sabine hills, a poet takes the stylus from the fingers of a nude slave girl and writes, very quickly,
And Crassus’ wretched soldier takes a barbarian wife from his captors and grows old waging war for them.

The poet looks at the line with a pleased expression. “It needs polish, of course,” he mutters. Then, more directly to the slave, he says, “You know, Leuconoe, there’s more than inspiration to poetry, a thousand times more; but this came to me out of the air.”

Horace gestures with his stylus toward the glittering night sky. The girl smiles back at him.

* * * *

Copyright © 1975 by UPD.

Jim Baen was born October 22, 1943 and died of a massive stroke on June 28, 2006. In the time between, he had an career as a major editor in science fiction during the last three decades of the twentieth century and most of the first decade of the twenty-first, during which time, he edited one of the field’s most important magazines, went on to become editor of the field’s major paperback publisher, moved from there to be editor of a new publishing company, and finally founded his own publishing company, as publisher and editor in chief, which he led to great success for twenty years. Like John W. Campbell, he was the kind of editor everyone had an anecdote about, who inspired strong feelings (in many directions, some conflicting), among both fans and professionals in the field.

Baen’s first encounter with science fiction was at the age of nine when he read
Fire-Hunter
by Jim Kjelgaard, a story of the stone age, about which he said in an interview for the Chicon program book, “though I didn’t realize it was SF then.” (Much later, he arranged with David Drake to expand the novel in a posthumous collaboration, published as
The Hunter Returns
.)

In addition to the Kjelgaard young adult novel, another book which hooked eleven-year-old Jim Baen on science fiction was Arthur C. Clarke’s
Against the Fall of Night
. In the Chicon interview, he called it the first “totally Science Fiction story” which he read, and “it really knocked me over. That got me into reading the stuff, and I was fairly intense about SF from the age of eleven until my late twenties, as a reader. After a misspent youth, if you will, I decided to go into publishing.”

David Drake, one of the authors most closely identified with Baen and perhaps his closest friend, has commented that, “The theme of both [
Fire-Hunter
and
Against the Fall of Night
] is that a youth from a decaying culture escapes the trap of accepted wisdom and saves his people despite themselves. This is a fair description of Jim’s life in SF; he was always his own man, always a maverick, and very often brilliantly successful because he didn’t listen to what other people thought.”

After service in the U.S. Army and subsequently attending City College of New York on the G.I. Bill, his first job in publishing was in the complaints department of Ace Books. When he was offered a promotion to head of the department, however, he declined because he wanted to be an SF editor.

He got his wish in 1973 when he was hired as assistant editor of
Galaxy
and
If
magazines. Both magazines had an illustrious history. When
Galaxy
debuted in 1950, it immediately became one of the “big three” science fiction magazines, along with
Astounding
(later renamed
Analog
) and
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
in a boom time for SF magazines, with 20 or more such publications on the stands. If had been one of the most popular magazines in the 1960s, repeatedly winning the Hugo Award for best SF magazine. By the 1970s, however, both titles had been acquired by a publisher who was slow to pay writers, and the best writers had gone elsewhere.

The magazines’ editor, Ejler Jakobson, eventually departed, and Baen was promoted to editor. He refurbished
Galaxy
, getting novels by Roger Zelazny, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (both individually and in collaboration), Frank Herbert and Frederik Pohl, and adding a science column by Jerry Pournelle and a very personal book review column by Spider Robinson.
Galaxy
published the first of David Drake’s Hammer’s Slammers stories, and a story by Ursula K. LeGuin, “The Day Before the Revolution,” which won the Nebula award for best short story of the year. Ironically, both stories had been rejected by Jakobson, then hastily recovered and bought by Jim Baen, upon becoming editor.
If
was similarly being upgraded when the publisher decided to cancel it, “combining” it with
Galaxy
. Then a new opportunity arose.

Ace Books was probably the leading book publisher of science fiction in the 1950s and 1960s; it was certainly publishing the most SF books in the field. Like
Galaxy
, it had been sold to a company which was slow to pay authors, and its knowledgeable editors, Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr, had gone elsewhere. When Ace was again sold, this time to Charter Communications, Tom Doherty was hired as publisher, and in 1978 he hired Jim Baen as editor. Baen immediately began another program of refurbishing, bringing back books which the previous administration had let go out of print, as well as excellent SF books which other publishers had let go out of print, such as H. Beam Piper, and publishing promising new writers. Most important to the imprint’s owners, if not the readers, was that he made Ace profitable again. He also started Destinies, a “magazine in book form,” in which he did much of what he wanted to do in Galaxy, but had been stymied by a small budget. Another significant change he brought to Ace was paying writers all the royalties which the previous regime had owed them.

By this time, Jim Baen’s name was well known to the readers, and when Doherty and Baen left Ace a few years later to start up Tor Books, many of the Tor SF books had “Jim Baen Presents” at the top of the cover. However, Baen’s stay at Tor was rather short. Pocket Books, which had become a Simon & Schuster imprint, needed an SF editor, and asked Jim Baen to take the position. However, he made a counteroffer: start up his own company, with himself as publisher, and let Simon & Schuster distribute the books. Simon & Schuster agreed, and Baen Books was born in 1983, shipping its first books in 1984.

The new company at first offered a mixture of books which had appeared previously under the Pocket Books imprint (notably, several novels by Keith Laumer) and new books, many of them by new writers. The first important new writer who was “discovered” by Baen Books was Lois McMaster Bujold, who had been rejected by nearly every other publisher in SF. Bujold went on to be a multiple Hugo and Nebula Award winner, and a New York Times best-selling author. Not long afterward, Baen Books published the first novels of David Weber, who became one of the most popular writers in SF today. Other best-selling authors whose career began with Baen Books under Jim Baen include Elizabeth Moon, Eric Flint, and John Ringo, with more best-sellers.

In the Chicon interview, Jim Baen was asked if there is such a thing as a “Baen writer,” as at one time readers spoke of “John W. Campbell writers.” He commented that, “Baen writers are interested in the story. And in the SF aspect of it…SF is what they want to be writing, by God.” He also distinguished himself as editor
and
publisher from those who were only editors. “Any editor you work with is just as likely to be at another house in two years. So they have a disincentive to keeping faith with the writer, or thinking beyond the next dollar. Whereas in our case, the goal is way down the road with many books in between, each of which is a stop on the staircase to heaven.”

One impact on the field which Jim Baen achieved was taking military science fiction from an occasional rare appearance to a full-fledged subgenre, spearheaded by his publishing
Hammer’s Slammers
, a collection of David Drake’s stories of a future company of mercenary soldiers at Ace. The Drake collection was one of the most successful Ace books that year, leading to other works of military SF by Drake published by Jim, at Ace, then at Tor, then at Baen Books, where Drake continued the Slammers series, and began a new military SF/space opera series about Lieutenant (later Captain) Leary of the Republic of Cinnabar’s space navy. Other Baen writers (notably, John Ringo) made their writing debuts in the military SF category. And other publishers began publishing more military SF.

Baen was conscious of carrying on a certain conservative and libertarian (in the older meanings, not necessarily today’s politicized sense) strain in the field that had been represented by Heinlein and others but was in danger of being marginalized in the 1970s. Regardless of where folks are politically, the field has always been strongest with a broad spectrum of ideas in play, and he did a lot to keep that spectrum wider than it would have been. The field is richer because it’s so much wider today, but at a moment when it was widening in one direction, it really might have narrowed in the other if not for Baen giving opportunities to a lot of writers who weren’t “fashionable” but were commercial and had interesting ideas. One of the few big missteps he had as a publisher was by trying too hard to widen the field, as with the alternate history novel,
1945,
conceived and cowritten by politician Newt Gingrich.

Readers tended to have a very personal relationship with Baen books, which was typical with SF magazines but not with publishers, and nurtured by Baen at the start of the Internet era by Jim’s personal forums on BIX (the Byte Information Exchange) and later at Baen’s website with the creation of a reader’s forum called “Baen’s Bar.” Baen had a specific talent for making readers feel they had a personal relationship with him and what he edited and published (even though they’d likely never met him). His favorite forms of communication were the pontification and the argument, both of which he shone at online. He would also attend science fiction conventions when asked, but was an essentially shy man, so both the pontification and argument aspects of his discourse were heightened in person.

Baen acted as his own art director, and the covers he chose helped keep alive an illustrator’s approach to SF and fantasy that went back to the pulps, using such illustrators as Steve Hickman, David Mattingly, Larry Elmore, Tom Kidd, Bob Eggleton, Gary Ruddell, and other award-winning artists. Baen covers have a very specific and personal relationship to the book’s contents. If what was on the cover was appealing, you weren’t going to be disappointed by what was inside.

Baen also pioneered selling books in electronic form. Unlike most other e-publishers, Baen used no encryption. Jim Baen’s opinion was that if a publisher made its books hard to read, sales would suffer. Unlike most other publishers’ e-lines, Baen’s ebooks made significant money from the start in 1999, providing evidence for Baen’s argument. In fact, some Baen titles were made available online for
free
, since Jim Baen felt that free samples helped sales—if a reader read a free book and liked it, he would want to read more by the same author. He might even want to buy the same book he had just read online. Over 120 titles are available in the Baen Free Library as of January 2011.

The offer demonstrably hasn’t hurt sales, which are still booming as Baen approaches the end of its third decade. It might be that Jim Baen’s championing of unencrypted e-books will be his most significant effect on the publishing industry. In any case, the publishing company bearing his name is still going strong under the leadership of his long-time friend, executive editor, and now publisher, Toni Weisskopf, who shares his editorial approach, and will likely still be going strong well into the twenty-first century.

* * * *

Henry T. Davis
, Baen Senior Editor, was born in the heart of coal country in the tiny town of Benham, KY, in 1944. Whether it’s science fiction, mystery, jazz or classical music, he brings insight, knowledge and wit to those subjects which are his passion. Hank had stories published in both Frederik Pohl’s
If
and John W. Campbell’s
Analog
in 1968 a few months before being drafted into the Army. While in uniform, he sold an ill-fated tale to Harlan Ellison for
The Last Dangerous Visions
. On his return he sold two more stories to
Orbit
and
F&SF
, then bounced back and forth between Kentucky and New York City on various jobs, including a brief stint at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency. He has been an editor with Baen Books for more than twenty years. His latest project for Baen has been the compilation of Poul Anderson’s Technic Civilization series in a seven-volume set.

* * * *

Toni Weisskopf
succeeded Jim Baen as publisher of Baen Books, a leading publisher of SF and fantasy, in 2006. She has worked with such authors as David Weber, David Drake, Lois McMaster Bujold, Eric Flint, John Ringo, Sarah A. Hoyt, Larry Corriea, and many others. With Josepha Sherman she compiled and annotated the definitive volume of subversive children’s folklore,
Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts
, published by August House. For Baen she’s edited three original hard SF anthologies:
Cosmic Stories: Adventures in Sol System
,
Cosmic Stories: Adventures in Far Futures,
and
Transhuman
, with SF author Mark L. Van Name.
Weisskopf is a graduate of Oberlin College with a degree in anthropology. The widow of Southern fan and swordmaster Hank Reinhardt, she is the mother of a delightful teenaged daughter.