kathy@gsg.UUCP (Kathryn Smith) (12/27/85)
A while ago someone posted a warning about a new Gordon Dickson collection called Beyond the Dar Al-Harb, which contained one new story and two old ones. This is beginning to be a disturbing trend in his books. Some time ago I bought a book by Dickson, entitled "The Last Master". The blurb on the back wasn't really very descriptive, but left me with the im- pression that it was a sequel of some sort to one of his earlier books, "The R-Master". Much to my disgust, I got it home and discovered that for all practical purposes they are the same book. (If there was any rewriting done on "The Last Master" I didn't notice it in reading it, but I do concede that I haven't bothered to do a word-by-word comparison of the two). What prompted me to post this was a collection of short stories entitled "Steel Brother" which was just released. I looked at the table of contents and saw that it contained several repeats, but thought there was enough new stuff to make it worthwhile. However, after reading it I find that it is almost a complete reprint of the collection "Dickson!" which NESFA Press published for the WorldCon two years ago. (It contains two addititional stories, one of which appeared in a collection published a month previously). They even reprinted the same introduction by Poul Anderson. The thing that really annoys me about this is that nowhere in the book does it say anything about this stuff having appeared previously. The publishing history for the stories list only their original magazine publication, and the introduction is listed as copyright by the author. I suppose it does make sense to reissue the material, much of which hasn't been collected outside of the NESFA book, since NESFA is a small press with a limited audience, but it seems downright dishonest not to mention the fact somewhere. It is really disappointing to see a fine writer like Dickson stooping to such underhanded tricks to boost his sales. Kathryn Smith (...decvax!gsg!kathy) General Systems Group, Inc. Salem, NH