INTRODUCTION
The first thing a new reader who has just picked up Penric’s Travels needs to know is that the stories collected here will gave a complete read right now, batteries included, without having to circle back first to the chronologically earlier collection Penric’s Progress. (Though I hope folks will become curious enough about the younger Penric to do so eventually.) The Penric & Desdemona tales were originally designed to be a series of loosely linked stand-alones, e-published ala carte as the spirit moved me, open-ended. Among other things, I was thinking of the stories of favorite characters that would pop up randomly in the old pulp magazines, such as Poul Anderson’s Polesotechnic League or James H. Schmidt’s Telzy tales, to the delight of many readers including me. While each short work stood alone, readable in any order, taken together they tended to form larger biographies of the characters of interest. So it’s not altogether wrong to think of my e-novellas as magazine stories without the magazine.
While the ala carte scheme holds, the three stories collected here are more tightly linked than usual with each other, forming what I think of as “the Cedonia triptych”. I didn’t actually write them in that order, having circled back between “Penric’s Mission” and “Mira’s Last Dance” to write the earlier-set “Penric’s Fox”. This not only gave me a chance to work on something else while its ideas were hot, but also space for further developments in the later-set stories to brew up. An author looks over characters’ lives from a sort of eternal viewpoint, outside their chronological book-timelines. Characters whose stories play well with an episodic structure can take advantage of this fluidity.
For readers who want to know how all my story puzzles fit together, we’ve included a handy guide in the back of this volume.
Happy reading!
—Lois