Note from the Authors
We hope you’ll forgive our expectation that if you’re reading this you probably have a passing or even more than passing acquaintance with the the Liaden Universe®, a universe that we—Sharon Lee and Steve Miller—have been writing in since the 1980s. One set of our business cards says: The Liaden Universe®, where honor, wit, and true love are potent weapons against deceit and treachery. Well, given that, it probably comes as no surprise that a lot of our stories focus on people of honor and wit who love truly. Many of our readers applaud this—and expect it. Still, the yin yang of life, the dialectic of story, necessity, in fact, requires that somewhere in the Liaden experience there must be opponents of honor, wit, and true love, or at least people with surprising takes on what those means. You probably know that.
If you’re a regular reader of our work, you probably know more than what we write; you know something of our methods and how we stay in touch with our readers and fans. So if you’re a regular reader, you may be surprised by this chapbook appearing at all, much less now.
But see, Bad Actors came as a surprise to us, too. A surprise even though we’re the proprietors of Pinbeam Books and nothing happens at Pinbeam without us. We usually plan when the next chapbook will come out, with Sharon making careful notes on our calendar—sometimes even the two-year calendar! – and with an eye to making sure as many of our readers have access to our stories as possible.
Given that some of our readers only want to purchase from particular vendors, or don’t want to purchase from particular vendors, or want things only electronically, or only in paper, making stories available in Pinbeam chapbooks gives us a way reach our readers where they want to be reached. Since some of our chapbooks contain originals, you the reader are used to our work appearing just as soon as it can. Sigh . . . not this time, friends.
In this case, though, Bad Actors snuck up on us, a result of anthology publishing schedules, reprints in other venues, and contracts requiring exclusivity for varying terms. In some cases, we cannot reprint before a hardcover edition has a soft-cover counterpart, in others we’re required to wait for a full six months, or a full year, or a full eighteen months after a story first appears. Given that sometimes stories are held for anthologies for months or years, it can make it hard to recall which story appeared where and when, and which are due to pass through the Pinbeam Books chapbook process.
So timing came into play, as did authorial forgetfulness. In the midst of the pandemic we were so focused on moving forward that we let go of the fact that several stories had yet to reach the chapbook stage, though they’d been seen elsewhere.
In a way we were lucky that the three Liaden Universe® stories in Bad Actors blend themselves into a theme as they do, that the editorial commissioning of stories meant that the stories lent themselves to the cover art so convincingly. We won’t study too hard on the coincidence of so many editors looking for hard-edged stories where the story centered around bad actors and hard decisions . . . but they did.
Here then are three stories for your delectation.
"Excerpts From Two Lives," first appeared in passing as a song—"The Ballad of the RosaRing"—in our Liaden novel Carpe Diem, published in 1989. "Excerpts . . . " first appeared in the Baen anthology Star Destroyers in March of 2018.
"Dark Secrets," was commissioned for the Titan Books anthology Infinite Stars: Dark Frontiers which came out in November of 2019.
"Revolutionists" which was first published in June of 2018 in The Razor’s Edge anthology from Zombies Need Brains LLC.
We hope you’ll enjoy them if this is your first reading and enjoy re-reading if you’ve seen them before.
Even Bad Actors need to be seen sometimes!
Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, Cat Farm and Confusion Factory, June 2021