Introduction to the revised edition of PANGLOR

by Jeffrey A. Carver

Tor Books, July 1996
Copyright © 1995 Jeffrey A. Carver

This book is a modest revision of a novel that was first published in 1980. In certain ways, PANGLOR is the foundational novel of my Star Rigger Universe. It's not the first book that I wrote in that future history, but it's the one that sets the stage for all the others. This is the story of how it all came to happen: how starfarers first learned to navigate the streams of space among the stars--the Flux, that strange realm where intuition and imagination, meshed with the objective topographies of spacetime, create fantastic images through which pilots can navigate their ships. The adventures of pilot Panglor Balef provide the first glimpse of the Flux, without actually naming it.

PANGLOR has been out of print since shortly after its publication in 1980. It was first published by Dell Books, just prior to Dell's closing down its science fiction line. It appeared without promotion, with a dreadful cover, and sank like a stone. I am delighted to see it return to print. And to celebrate the occasion, I have done some of the editing on the prose that I might have done in 1979, if I'd had the skill then. My editor Jim Frenkel, the book's original editor and its present editor as well, has assisted me with the job.

It's a curious experience, looking back on work first done sixteen years earlier. These days, it's not that uncommon for a writer to dust off an early work, and to revise and expand, and generally recraft a new novel out of old cloth. I have not done that. I _liked_ the story I'd told, and had little further to add to it; but it was clear that it could be made a better book with a little help from a more experienced hand.

I suppose any author mutters quietly to him or herself, looking back on work done a goodly time before--especially work done in the formative years, when his or her craft and narrative voice were just emerging. In my case, the muttering is often but not always critical; sometimes it's astonishment at a line or paragraph that seems to sparkle with unexpected originality. Once, when perusing a book of mine after a long absence, I was particularly startled by one scene--_a scene I had no memory of having written._ Suddenly, paranoiacally suspicious that a fast one had been pulled on me, I dug into my files and found the original manuscript, and checked to see if someone else had snuck in those sentences. No one had but myself; such is the ephemerality of memory.

In rereading PANGLOR, I found an energy and exuberance that I didn't want to lose. I also found some pretty clunky prose and painfully awkward bits of characterization. And so, vorpal red pencil in hand (no word processor for this one), I set out to snip back the thickets of purple prose here, to straighten the garbled sentences there, to stamp out the redundancies everywhere--and in general, to provide a better read without needlessly altering the book that a promising younger writer had created.

I did the same thing with my earlier novel, STAR RIGGER'S WAY, when it was reprinted in a Tor edition a couple of years ago, and found the process--and the results--satisfying.

I had a good time rereading the book while I was at it. I hope you enjoy it, too.

Jeffrey A. Carver
November 1995