One or more copyeditors for the first edition did a spot-on job of changing almost all my very carefully chosen alternatives back into our contemporary idioms. Luckily (at least to my way of thinking), I had a chance with the copyedited pages before they went to typesetting, and changed them all back again.
I think the part of the world where Torin lives was once, long ages ago before the holocaust, Russia. Certainly “Horodek” is recognizably Slavic for “city.”
Having set this Gentle World up, let me reveal that it really all started with Torin; and that Torin came into existence because of an editor who refused to buy any of my fictions about one of my favorite literary characters (from another author’s works long in Public Domain), and I determined that editor would, and so I created an alternate-world version of that character. Several Torin the Toymaker short stories made it into print. In crafting his novel, I drew the main plot so directly from his original’s story—for many formative decades my absolute favorite piece of musical theater—that I am amazed it is not obvious to everybody from the initial relationships of Torin, Talmar, Valdart, and Sharys. But then, the setting is so very different, as are most of the plot details and the mood and tone in general. Nor does Sharys so greatly resemble her original, so about all that really remains is the personalities and relationship of the three men, in whom I think their originals really are visible; but without the framework of parodic crime and curses, even this might be harder to recognize. And, while fundamental to my own literary outlook, the play may not be so widely known to the world at large. Dilys is the author, though with a certain amount of daydreaming re. popular success: in putting myself into the story, I changed the play’s romantic pairings. And, though the starting relationships are from the play, my plot as a whole was inspired by Van Gulik’s Judge Dee novels—each one containing three separate mysteries which may or may not be interlinked—except that I eliminated murder because it is out of keeping with the Gentle World and because my own feeling is that other crimes ought to be legitimate bases for whodunit fiction. After all, several Sherlock Holmes and two of the three August Dupin stories rest on something else; and one can even argue that neither “The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane” nor “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” concern crime in the human definition.
The rest of the characters are my own; and please notice that Judge Alrathe’s gender is never identified. This is deliberate. The above-mentioned copyeditor threw in one masculine pronoun, but I took it out again. I drew my inspiration here from L. Frank Baum, who never told us whether John Dough’s sidekick, Chick the Cherub, is a boy or a girl. But my understanding is that Baum may have done it partly for publicity—they made quite a contest of it, and awarded the prize jointly to one reader who argued for “girl” and one who argued for “boy.” I did it to emphasize that the judge’s sex really makes no difference, especially in the Gentle World. (I have another character, a minor figure in my R.S.A. series as resurrected in 2011, with whom I’ve been doing the same thing: Chris Grunewald; but in Chris’s case, I simply have never felt the need to decide.) My feeling is that Alrathe is an hermaphrodite, and that they are becoming more common in the Gentle World; the sex drive is also becoming a bit weaker, as the race develops along more spiritual lines.
“At Amberleaf Fair” is an editor’s title, though author-modified. My own title was “The Marriage Toy Puzzle.” At a certain point, I got a phone call from the editor telling me with delight that they had found the perfect title—“At Amberlea Fair.” Somewhat embarrassed, I protested, “But it’s set in a forest, and a ‘lea’ is an open field or meadow.” But she sounded so tickled with the sound of “Amberlea,” so disappointed with my objection… I think the inspiration struck me almost at once, “We’ll just add an ‘f’—make it ‘Amberleaf’—the season being autumn, that fits right in!” So “Amberleaf” it became, and I for one have always felt highly satisfied. I think during that same phone call, she raved to me about the cover art, “belly dancers and everything.” I stammered, “But—but—but—belly dancers are completely out of keeping with this world! They just—they just would never have belly dancers!” Rather to my surprise, no belly dancers appear on the finished cover: there are acrobats instead. I must confess that the original paperback cover still doesn’t look a bit to me like my own image of a fair in a Gentle World forest. But it looks like a great “Renaissance Fair”; and I was so taken with the little fellow leading a dog cart on the back of the wraparound cover that I seriously toyed with the notion of making him a character in a future Gentle World book or story. Of which, alas! so far there have been none. One got partly written; but its central character was considering ending his own life and I must have been going through a rather bleak emotional time of it myself, because I couldn’t for the life of me think why he shouldn’t. It had the working title, “The Puzzle of the Poet’s House,” and I remember very little more about it. I had not known, when beginning it, that Ace had been hoping to inaugurate a line of fantasy romances, and thought my Torin novel would do to kick it off. That project apparently fizzled. Perhaps because in my own mind it had been written to the whodunit rather than the romance template?
I had not yet met the love of my own life, Clifton Alfred Hoyt. My dearest Clif. The years we spent together were worth even the pain of his fatal illness, sCJD.
* * * *
A few notes on pronunciation of names. Accent tends to be on the first syllable. The combination “th” is frequently voiced as in “there,” rather than voiceless as in “thorn”; the voiced sound can be signaled by a following “e,” as in “Alrathe”; but “Thala” is frequently begun with the sound of the voiced “th” as well. Long “a” (as in “make”) is very rare; most of the time “a” receives one of its softer sounds, e.g., “ah” or “aa.”
Chapter Two: A line on p. 21 of the original edition has Dilys thinking of enjoying “both her sons and her wait in solitude…” This may have puzzled some readers a moment before realizing that “sons” was a misprint for “song,” not a sudden introduction of two unexplained and inexplicable characters never mentioned again.
At Amberleaf Fair Page 18
