"Del Rey Internet Newsletter #37" - читать интересную книгу автора

LATEST EXCERPTS ONLINE=============================================

Sample chapters of some of our upcoming and recent (and some of our
favorite, neither upcoming nor recent) books are now available online (for
free, of course). This month's books are FIRST KING OF SHANNARA, MAD AMOS,
THE WIND AFTER TIME, and STAR WARS: THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO VEHICLES AND
VESSELS by Bill Smith. Descriptions above in "What's New in the Stores."
And we also have a sample chapter of Julian May's MAGNIFICAT, third book in
the _Galactic Milieu Trilogy,_ which is out this month from Knopf in
hardcover.

You can get the sample chapters a few different ways: they're on the Del
Rey Web site (http://www.randomhouse.com/delrey/) and on the Panix gopher
(gopher.panix.com) in the Del Rey Books directory; you can request them via
e.mail from the Del Rey fileserver ([email protected]; SENDME
sample.first_king_shannara, sample.mad_amos, sample.wind_after_time,
sample.sw_guide_vessels, or sample.magnificat) and they'll be available in
CompuServe's SF Library 4 and AOL's SF and Fantasy libraries, too. (For a
list of all sample chapters available via the fileserver, send a message to
[email protected] with "LIST sample" as the body of the message.)

IN DEPTH========================================================

Terry Brooks, bestselling author of the Shannara series, is at it again
with FIRST KING OF SHANNARA, a prequel. Here Mr. Brooks tells us why he
wrote another book in the series, why it's a prequel and not a sequel, and
what he might be working on next.

ORIGINS OF SHANNARA

I wasn't going to write FIRST KING OF SHANNARA. Really I wasn't. I was
going to begin work on a new fantasy series, one that I had been mulling
over for almost five years, one that takes place in this world in present
time. With the completion of WITCHES' BREW in the Magic Kingdom series, I
was more than ready to tackle this newest project. But then my editor
intervened, as editors sometimes will, albeit in a kindly way, suggesting
that perhaps I should do another Shannara book first. What? Another
Shannara book? Already? I was flummoxed! Besides, I didn't have another
Shannara book to give him. The story after THE TALISMANS OF SHANNARA
requires a two book set, and I definitely wasn't about to do two.

Then I remembered my often considered, but still unrealized plan for a
prequel to the series. It was you, the readers, who kept asking for it.
Tell us about the time before coming of the Ohmsfords. Where were
Allanon's origins? How did he become a Druid? How was the Sword of
Shannara forged? How were the Druids destroyed at Paranor so that Bremen
became the last? Where did Jerle Shannara come from and how did he end up
with the Sword? Those were the kinds of questions I would receive on a
regular basis. But I steadfastly refused to answer them, saying that it
was better if the readers imagined it for themselves, thinking slyly that