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Interview #1017: Talking With Tom: A Conversation Between Tom Doherty and Brandon Sanderson, Entry #3
Brandon Sanderson
That’s the first time I knew that Tor was a thing. I was like, “Hey, who’s this publisher?” You have the best logo in publishing. I don’t know if you feel that, but the little mountain…
Tom Doherty
That was all about visibility. I started out as a salesman, and we used to check stock. I wanted something you could see from a distance. If you have ten letters, they have to be small to fit on the spine of a paperback. If you have three letters with a handsome image, it fits in and you can do it big enough so it’s visible. That was the idea behind Tor: mountain peak, small, nice looking, and just three letters.
Brandon Sanderson
That mountain peak, as a fantasy reader, actually meant “fantasy” to me. I’d see a lot of the logos, like—well, I’m fine with Bantam, but it’s a chicken, right? Isn’t that Bantam? I didn’t see chicken and think, “Oooh, fantasy novel.” With the Tor mountain peak, we’ve got the Dragonmount, we’ve got the Mines of Moria with the mounds… It’s just so evocative of the genre. I’d see it and think, “Oh, fantasy novel.” So that was very smart.
Tom Doherty
It was kind of lucky, because I didn’t mean it especially for fantasy. I wanted it to be something handsome and visible and symbolic of the kind of things that we wanted to do. In the beginning we were planning to do history: past, present, and future. You know, starting with the prehistoric, which to me is science fiction, because it’s an extrapolation from anthropology, rather than from physics going forward into the future. The far past leads you toward the present, and it leads you to a time when European civilization, which was industrial and much more advanced, met Stone Age North American. The same editors who are comfortable with “human meeting alien” are comfortable with the clash of such different civilizations.
Brandon Sanderson
I never heard it described that way. That’s pretty cool.
Then, from the other end, we did near‑future science fiction. Other people began doing it and calling it techno‑thriller.
Brandon Sanderson
Right. The Michael Crichton sort of thing.
Tom Doherty
Yes. Michael Crichton was the beginning, really, and it sold better as a thriller.
Brandon Sanderson
If you look back at it, James Bond has always been slightly science fiction‑y, near future‑y science fiction. People who would think, “Oh, science fiction, I don’t do that” would pick up a James Bond novel and read it.
Tom Doherty
That’s how we created [Tor sister imprint] Forge. We were doing these near-future science fiction novels that weren’t getting reviewed, because the people who’d review them were the thriller reviewers.
We had a book by Paul Erdman, not really a techno-thriller, more a financial thriller. The San Francisco Chronicle had always been very good to him, but they totally ignored this book. We contacted them and said, “Look, far be it from us to suggest who to review, but we were just kind of surprised that you would skip Paul Erdman, when you’ve always reviewed him so well in the past.” And they said, “Oh, we would never skip Paul Erdman. Let us look into that.” When they came back to us, they said, “Oh, we got the book from Tor and sent it to our science fiction reviewer. He put it aside as not for him.” So that’s why we made Forge.
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