By the time he was working on The Fallon Pride , he had already said to me and you both that he wanted to write a great epic fantasy.
Yep. He wanted to write everything. I remember you called and you’d gotten the rights from Conan Properties to do a Conan novel, but you wanted it in time for the first Conan movie. Not that it would be connected to the movie, but obviously to get a ride on it.
Yeah.
Jim Baen was working with us at the time. I said: “Why don’t you ask Baen?” Jim said: “Baen doesn’t like muscular fantasy, that’s why.” I remembered the first thing of Jim/Robert Jordan’s that I ever saw, a manuscript called Warriors of the Altaii , which has still not been published. I think four or five contracts came out of that manuscript, including my own contract. A first novel is so dangerous because so many people start novels and never finish them, but I saw that he could indeed finish something. It was pretty muscular fantasy. I don’t remember anything about it except the hero is shackled to a stone wall in a prison cell. The stone floor rumbles open and great tentacles emerge from it at the end of the chapter.
So I asked him about the Conan novel, and he said no. Three weeks later Doherty hadn’t given up, and he called me and said: “I can’t think who else would do.” I went back to Jim and said please, and he finally said he’d do it. And then he liked it so much that he did six more.
He cut his teeth on those.
And then, after he stopped writing them, he edited a bunch of Conans. Once he had to take a plane somewhere and said: “Harriet, I forgot to write the sales copy for Conan the Whatever‑It‑Was “, so I ended up having to write it, about Conan up against the thieving little wazir. I read as few pages as possible, you know, to get the hang of that thing. The sell line ended up being “Sell that Conan down, boys. Turn that Conan round. Rack that Conan round.”
Those Conan books were fun, though. I never read his first novel [ Warriors of the Altaii ], but if it was like the Conan books, why didn’t we ever publish it?
Well, because I sent it to [Jim] Baen at Ace. Baen bought it for Ace, so it was sold. But then he left Ace, and Susan Allison came in, and she didn’t like it. Finally, after about a year he wrote her or called her and said: “Would you like me to do some stuff on it?” I don’t know what she said, but Jim said, it’s the women, and she said I’m so glad you understand. “Tell me what you want me to change and I’ll be glad to do it.”—another year goes by and nothing happens. I said: “Honey, I think you need to ask for the rights back.” He did, and she gave him the rights back.
So, that manuscript got him a contract with me. It got him a contract with Ace. Before we ever met, he’d originally sent it to Donald Wollheim at DAW, who sent him a long single‑spaced letter with no margins, obviously written at home. Jim had been taking a course in business law of some kind, because he knew he wanted to write, so he wrote back and said: “Thank you so much, Mr. Wollheim, but I wondered if I could have a little more? Five percent of the movie rights?” Or maybe it was the foreign rights. Wollheim wrote him a one‑line letter back: “In view of your contract attitude, I withdraw my offer.” So that’s three contracts this book has given him.
But we didn’t publish The Eye of the World until 1990, so why didn’t we ever do Warriors of the Altaii ? It would have seemed a natural fit while he was doing the Conans.
I don’t know. We never thought of it. We were busy. I guess I’m embarrassed to say I think it maybe was sort of like a John Norman novel . . . not something you’d really want to build a career on.
Warriors of the Altaii needed a lot of work. At one point he decided it needed a rewrite, and I said: “Just don’t.” But old Warriors glows with a strange green light. All those contracts came slurping out of that book. It’s the book that made me give him the historical contract. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. He could follow through. And he was a wild bird.
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