A note on the existence of this echapbook. . .
Those who have been following the Liaden Universe® and/or the career of Sharon Lee and Steve Miller for a time will know that we'd gotten into the habit of producing chapbooks – 8.5x5.5 inch saddle-stitched pamphlets of 40-60 pages. The very first Lee-and-Miller chapbook was The Naming of Kinzel, collecting three fantasy stories featuring a well-meaning young wizard named Kinzel, which we published (it says here) in a limited run of 300, on June 20, 1987.
Later, SRM Publisher was formed, for the purpose of publishing chapbooks containing Lee-and-Miller, Miller, Lee, and, later still, other authors, work. This was in the age of paper; there were no ereaders, and computer screens were pretty rugged, still. For seventeen years, starting in1995, SRM Publisher produced at least one chapbook a year, at Yule, containing one or two Liaden stories.
SRM was closed in 2011, and we quickly realized that we weren't going to be able to break ourselves of writing short stories, so we established Splinter Universe (http://www.splinteruniverse.com), where we would occasionally publish "splinters," i.e. pieces of stories or books that never came to completion, and also any new stories we happened to write.
Ever since SRM closed its doors, there had been a call from the readers who had been with the universe and the authors through all the changes, for the return of chapbooks. By now, technology had caught up with itself, so the authors began to produce echapbooks, on the model of the first paper chapbooks – and also republished all of SRMs backlist in ebook format.
At that point, the traditional publisher of our novels, Baen Books, suggested that they collect our stories into what was at first to be one volume. We agreed, realized that one volume wasn't going to be enough – so eventually A Liaden Universe® Constellation Volumes 1 and 2 were published from Baen.
And that, should have been that.
Except – no, we still couldn't break ourselves of the short story habit, and the Constellations had done well for Baen. As soon as we had published enough short stories to warrant a book, Baen offered a contract for A Liaden Universe® Constellation Volume 3, which took several stories straight off of Splinter Universe. Those stories were never collected into chapbooks.
We recently realized that this was the case, and, in the interests of completeness, we have produced two echapbooks, collecting the four stories that were missed.
This is the second of those two "catch up" echapbooks, containing two novelettes: "Roving Gambler" and "Code of Honor."
This is what we said about each of those stories, in Constellation 3:
Roving Gambler
At times we, as coauthors, talk about and know so much about what's going on in the universe that we forget that we haven't written it down. "Roving Gambler" came from that abundance of information – dealing with story stuff that we knew but hadn't quite managed to get into a novel or another short story yet. We have a lot of characters, and they are all involved – even if we haven't had time to write them in. So here's a story featuring Quin – we knew that Quin was isolated, we knew that the arrival of Korval on Liad was not going to be easy on the clan and on Pat Rin. Something, of course, was going to have to happen. "Roving Gambler" helps get Quin happening.
Code of Honor
This story exists because we were plotting a completely different story, and needed a character to. . .do something. . .for the main character. That secondary character came with an utterly fascinating back-story. So fascinating, in fact, that he got his own story, set in the aftermath of I Dare. And yes, we are still planning to write the story that spawned this one, so. . .watch the skies!
If this is your first time reading these stories, we do hope you enjoy them. And, for those of you re-reading, we hope you enjoy spending additional time with old friends found again.
Sharon Lee and Steve Miller
Cat Farm and Confusion Factory
November 2017