The Fall of The Kings (Riverside) (70 page)

The Fall of the Kings
is based on a novella of the same name, our first collaboration, published by Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagel in their landmark anthology,
Bending the
Landscape: Fantasy
. We thank them for their encouragement.

Both authors also thank the Somerville Genrettes—Laurie J. Marks, Rosemary Kirstein, and Didi Stewart—and all the other patient and creative souls who have read parts and versions of this work in manuscript over the years: Mimi Panitch, Patrick J. O’Connor, Sarah Smith, Kelly Link, Justine Larbalestier, Terri Windling, Anne Hudson, Paula Kate Marmor, Eve Sweetser, Alex Madonik, Shweta Narayan, Elizabeth Wein, and Deborah Manning. This book took a long time to write, so if we’ve lost some people’s names along the march, we hope they’ll forgive us and still accept our thanks. We do not forget our editor, Anne Lesley Groell, and our good agent and friend, Christopher Schelling.

In addition, Ellen is grateful to her
Sound & Spirit
colleagues at WGBH Radio—Jon Solins, Helen Barrington, Stephen Snyder, Jeff Nelson, Gary Mott, Titilayo Ngwenya, and Joellen Easton—for all their support and good work even when the host of the show was off in Riverside looking for action.

Delia thanks the staff and denizens of the Diesel Café in Davis Square, Somerville, for office space, salads, coffee, and occasionally, inspiration.

FOR THOSE WHO, LIKE US, GREW UP IN THE LAND OF BOOKS and still claim citizenship in that country, the influence of other authors is abundant and bountiful. Here we would particularly like to acknowledge the work of the late Dorothy Dunnett, a great historical novelist who leaves her mark on a whole generation of writers, and Ronald Millar, whose play
Abelard and Heloise
each of us turns out to have gone with our mothers to see in London in the summer of 1970.

Ellen Kushner & Delia Sherman
Boston & NYC
March 2002

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

ELLEN KUSHNER is a novelist, performer and public radio personality.
Swordspoint
was her first novel; her second novel,
Thomas the Rhymer,
won the Mythopoeic and the World Fantasy Awards. Her short fiction has appeared in
The Year’s
Best Fantasy and Horror.
In 1996 she created PRI’s award-winning public radio program
Sound & Spirit with Ellen
Kushner,
a weekly exploration of myth and music broadcast on national public radio and online (
www.wgbh.org/spirit
).

Ellen Kushner’s children’s story
The Golden Dreydl: a
Klezmer “Nutcracker” for Chanukah
(2001 Gracie Allen award for radio broadcast), which she performs live with Shirim Klezmer Orchestra, is available on CD from Rykodisc. For Rykodisc she also put together
Welcoming Children Into
the World
, a collection of songs from around the world celebrating new babies. Her adult performance piece,
Esther: the
Feast of Masks,
has been broadcast on public radio and tours the United States.

In her spare time, she complains about not having any spare time. She is a good cook and a terrible housekeeper. She likes to sing. Find out more at
www.EllenKushner.com
.

DELIA SHERMAN has spent much of her life at one end of a classroom or another, at Brown University where she earned a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies, and at Boston University and Northeastern, where she taught composition. Her first novel,
Through a Brazen Mirror
, was recently reprinted by Circlet Press. Her second novel,
The Porcelain Dove,
was awarded the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature in 1994. Her short fiction has apeared in numerous volumes of
The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror,
and in the young people’s anthologies
A Wolf at the Door
and
The Green Man.

In 1995, Sherman exchanged academia for publishing, becoming a contributing editor for Tor Books and co-editing the fantasy anthologies
The Horns of Elfland
and
The Essential
Bordertown.

She loves gardening and researching in libraries, and prefers cafes to home for writing (they bring you things to eat and the phone’s never for you) and traveling to staying put.

ELLEN KUSHNER AND DELIA SHERMAN share homes in Boston, Paris, and anywhere else they can get a key. They are currently working together on a musical theatre piece,
The Bone
Chandelier
, and on novels written by only one person. They are both active members of the Endicott Studio for Mythic Arts (
www.endicott-studio.com
) and are founding members of the Interstitial Arts Foundation, “artists without borders” dedicated to art made in the interstices between genres and categories.

And be sure not to miss the other novels by Ellen Kushner

SWORDSPOINT
A Melodrama of Manners
in a new edition, now containing three bonus stories
linking SWORDSPOINT to THE FALL OF THE KINGS

And coming in summer 2004

THOMAS THE RHYMER

the classic novel of music, magic, and ancient balladry

winner of the
World Fantasy Award for Best Novel
winner of the
Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Best Novel
New York Public Library’s Best
“Books for the Teen Age”

“Realistic enough to please the most sophisticated contemporary fantasy audience. Nobody is writing more elegant and gorgeous English these days than Ellen Kushner. Is there anything this writer can’t do well?”

—Orson Scott Card

“An elegant and beautiful book that manages both to create firmly real, breathing people and to evoke the magic of faerie . . . it’s a magical tour de force shot through with strange melodies. I loved it.”

—Neil Gaiman

THE FALL OF THE KINGS
A Bantam Spectra Book

PUBLISHING HISTORY
Bantam Spectra trade paperback edition published November 2002
Bantam Spectra mass market edition / October 2003

Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York

All rights reserved.

Copyright © 2002 by Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2002025560
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without the written permission of the publisher, except where
permitted by law. For information address: Bantam Books,
New York, New York.

Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of
Random House, Inc.

eISBN : 978-0-307-41846-3

www.randomhouse.com

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