The Lure of the Basilisk

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  I’d always wanted to be a writer, ever since my second-grade teacher complimented a story I wrote, and I had sixteen months, so I decided to attempt the same feat. I’d spend my time until my readmission writing and trying to sell what I wrote. If I didn’t sell anything by the time I went back to Princeton (assuming I did go back), I’d give up the idea of a writing career and concentrate on other things; if I did start selling, I could go on while in school and get serious about it after graduation.

  So the next obvious question was, What should I write?

  There I was in my picturesque garret, with an electric typewriter and plenty of time and motivation, trying to write to sell. What to write?

  Well, what did I want to write? What did I like to read?

  Sword and sorcery, that’s what. I’d discovered Robert E. Howard’s Conan not long before, and Moorcock’s Elric, and Lin Carter’s “Flashing Swords!” anthologies. I decided to take all the stuff I liked and put it together in my own series of sword and sorcery adventures.

  Oh, I wrote other stuff, too, but my major project was to be a series of swashbuckling fantasy adventures.

  For that, I needed a hero. I liked Moorcock’s use of a not-quite-human hero, but thought his Melniboneans were too effete, so I invented overmen — which were, incidentally, based more on having read Desmond Morris’ The Naked Ape than on Nietzsche. I took my hero’s name and noselessness from Simon Garth, the title character in Marvel Comics’ black-and-white Tales of the Zombie.

  So I had a protagonist, but then I needed something for him to do. I decided that I wanted a series of errands, not unlike the labors of Hercules, but that meant he had to have someone telling him what to do. So I added a mysterious mentor figure, swiping the King in Yellow from Robert W. Chambers for the job.

  Then I needed an errand for my first story. Dragon-slaying is the traditional one, but I thought dragons were passé; I wanted some sort of monster that hadn’t been over-used. I considered manticores and gryphons and the like, but settled pretty quickly on the basilisk, which just impressed the hell out of me with its lethality. Petrifying gaze, toxic breath . . . perfect! A basilisk was a little-used monster with the potential to be genuinely creepy and a real threat to my characters.

  But even so, killing it was too easy, so I decided I’d have Garth capture it alive!

  And there I was with the premise for a story. I sat down and started writing, without any clear idea where I was going — certainly without any real outline.

  The result was a 10,000-word novelet entitled “The Master of Mormoreth,” which had largely the same plot as the first nine chapters of The Lure of the Basilisk, but rushed through it headlong.

  I sent that out to Fantastic, the only sensible market at the time for short sword and sorcery, and went on working on other stuff, including several more stories about Garth.

  “Master of Mormoreth” didn’t sell — I got a note from the first reader saying he liked it and had sent it on to his editor (that first reader was Moshe Feder, who I later dedicated the novel to, by the way), but I never heard back, and when I finally contacted the editor he swore he’d never seen the story. I suspect he just lost it.

  Anyway, I didn’t worry about it too much; I was writing a lot of stories, not putting all my eggs in one basket. I wrote four complete Garth stories and several fragmentary ones, and a couple of dozen assorted other stories.

  Out of that, I sold one short story in that time I’d allotted myself — a short-short entitled “Paranoid Fantasy #1” sold in October ’74, and was published in August ’75. That was enough to justify further attempts later on, but not enough to launch a career.

  My application for readmission to Princeton, which was accepted, was accompanied by seventy-one rejection slips, to demonstrate that I was serious about writing and not just playing the artiste.

  When I went back to Princeton in September of ’75 I didn’t think much about writing for awhile, but then, in 1976, I began to look seriously at the business end of it, and concluded that (a) all the money was in novels, and (b) short sword and sorcery was dead, dead, dead, but fantasy novels were doing okay.

  And in May 1977 I dropped out of college to get married. This time I left for good — or actually, I theoretically took an indefinite leave of absence that’s still going.

  And again, rather than get a real job, I set out to be a writer — after all, I had that short story sale and a few articles to my credit, and my new wife had enough faith in me to support me for awhile. I’d written a complete novel during the summer of ’76 (which turned out to be a first draft for The Cyborg and the Sorcerers), and that was out making the rounds, but I wanted to write another novel, and I looked through my stack of ideas and unsold stories.

  “Master of Mormoreth” still looked pretty good, and it occurred to me that I could rework the Garth series of short stories into a series of books . . .

  So I did. I finished The Overman and the Basilisk (as it was then known) in April 1978, but didn’t get up the nerve to submit it anywhere until August, when I mailed it to Del Rey Books, which was then clearly the top fantasy market in North America.

  I submitted that early version of The Cyborg and the Sorcerers at the same time; it came back, rejected, right around Christmas. Basilisk didn’t come back, but after a couple more months I decided it must’ve gotten lost, and I was never going to make it as a writer and I’d better find another way to make a living. So I gave up writing and set myself up in the mail-order comic book business.

  And on May 10, 1979, I got the acceptance letter from Lester del Rey, offering to buy The Overman and the Basilisk if I’d make a few minor changes, including a new title. I happily made the changes.

  And by the way, Lester wanted to know, was I planning a sequel?

  The Lure of the Basilisk was first published March 1980 by Del Rey Books, ISBN 0-345-28624-3. The original cover art was by Darrell K. Sweet. The Del Rey edition went through at least eight printings — second printing was dated March 1984, fourth November 1985, fifth (labeled third, but it’s the fifth) March 1987, seventh June 1988, eighth February 1990. All Del Rey printings had cover art by Darrell K. Sweet, but there are two different paintings — Del Rey decided the first was too dark, so from the second printing on it’s the second, largely yellow one. The book finally went out of print in 1994, and I reclaimed the rights, and in 2001 I signed a contract with Wildside Press to publish this new edition.

  In preparing the Wildside Press edition I’ve gone back to the original 1978 manuscript and gone through it carefully, reviewing editorial changes made in the Del Rey edition. Some I have kept, but I have always believed that some of the changes Lester made were mistakes. In this edition I have removed the editing I disagree with, and returned to something closer to the original text. These differences between the two editions are all minor, but if dedicated readers spot small discrepancies, no, it’s probably not your imagination, nor a typesetting error.

  The most obvious difference is probably the new map. The map in the Del Rey edition, although based on my own original map, was drawn by Chris Barbieri, and Wildside was unable to obtain the rights to it. I have therefore redrawn the map — the original was lost twenty years ago — and Alan Rodgers at Wildside has adapted it into publishable form. This new map includes areas that Chris Barbieri had trimmed away in order to better fit the page, and is slightly more accurate in other ways, as well. I’m afraid it’s a little uglier, but one can’t have everything.

  And of course, I’ve included these appendices. I think that a new edition should include new material, and if there’s enough interest in an old book to justify reprinting it, then there should be some interest in that book’s origins and history.

  I’ve been very happy with The Lure of the Basilisk. It was quite successful commercially. In addition to the American and British editions, it’s been translated into German, Polish, S
panish, Italian, Hungarian, and Japanese — details of the foreign editions are on my webpage. It was a good solid start for my writing career, and I think it was a decent adventure novel. Looking back at it now, I see flaws — I think I could write the story much better now — but all in all, it turned out well. It spawned three sequels, which Wildside will also be reprinting, and I’ll have more to say about those, and about any future work in the series, later.

  — Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Gaithersburg, MD

  October 2001

  Appendix B: The Histories of Garth of Ordunin, Written and Unwritten:

  The original 1974 plan for the Garth series was for twelve stories, ranging from 3,300 words (“The Dragon of Orgûl”) to novel length (The Lady in the Jewel). In chronological order, they were to have been:

  1. “The Master of Mormoreth”

  2. “City of the Seven Temples”

  3. The Lady in the Jewel

  4. “The Scepter of Dor”

  5. “The Eyes of Kewerro”

  6. “The Dragon of Orgûl”

  7. “The Decision of the Council”

  8. “The Fall of Fortress Lagur”

  9. “Skelleth”

  10. “Return to Dûsarra”

  11. “The Jungle by Night”

  12. “The Last Quest”

  “The Master of Mormoreth” was to start with a prologue explaining the series premise, and “The Last Quest” would end with an epilogue wrapping the whole thing up. The theory was that these could eventually be gathered into two volumes — a collection and a novel. Or possibly, if they ran longer than expected, two collections and a novel.

  All the stories except “Skelleth” and “Return to Dûsarra” were begun; four of the first six were completed, but never published.

  In 1975 or early ’76 the plan was modified slightly — “The Decision of the Council,” “The Fall of Fortress Lagur,” and “Skelleth” were to be combined into a novel called The Decision of the Council.

  In 1976 I decided that I should focus on novels, and the list was revised again, becoming primarily a series of novels. The first, The Overman and the Basilisk, incorporated “The Master of Mormoreth,” but expanded and extended the story, and was completed in 1978. The other novels were left unwritten until the first sold.

  In 1979 The Overman and the Basilisk sold and was retitled The Lure of the Basilisk, and the series was continued, now planned as five volumes:

  1. The Lure of the Basilisk

  2. The City of Seven Temples

  3. The Eyes of Kewerro & Other Stories (short story collection)

  4. The Decision of the Council

  5. The Last Quest

  The Lady in the Jewel was dropped from the series as no longer really fitting in properly; the possibility of inserting it somewhere later was kept open.

  The proposed novel version of The Last Quest would combine “Return to Dûsarra” and “The Last Quest.”

  The second novel, The City of Seven Temples, was written, expanding the 12,000-word novelet “City of the Seven Temples.” Lester del Rey was not satisfied with it, and felt that it was too slow in getting to any sort of action or magic, so it was extensively revised, incorporating a piece of “The Eyes of Kewerro” into an early portion of the novel, resulting in The Seven Altars of Dûsarra.

  That also resulted in rethinking some of the series structure, since there were loose ends in The Seven Altars of Dûsarra that were to be tied up in The Decision of the Council, and waiting an entire volume to address them seemed to be a mistake. Besides, the intended title story of the collection had been cannibalized and was therefore no longer available.

  The revised plan was this:

  1. The Lure of the Basilisk

  2. The Seven Altars of Dûsarra

  3. The Decision of the Council

  4. The Dragon of Orgûl & Other Stories

  (short story collection)

  5. The Last Quest

  The Decision of the Council was written in 1981, and retitled The Sword of Bheleu. Its resemblance to the original fragment from 1975 was very faint, and although much of the intended plot of “Skelleth” did wind up incorporated into it, virtually no trace of “The Fall of Fortress Lagur” remained. In fact, by that point I think I’d forgotten “Fall” had ever existed, though one or two minor elements survived.

  And after that was done, I looked at what I had left to work with, looked at the short fantasy markets, thought about how the series had developed, and decided that the only short story I still cared about at all was “The Dragon of Orgûl,” which could hardly be a fourth volume all by itself.

  So it was expanded into the first four and a half chapters of The Last Quest, which was retitled The Book of Silence, and the series was completed in four volumes, rather than five.

  The astute observer will have noticed that this means the following stories were not included anywhere in the final version: The Lady in the Jewel, “The Scepter of Dor,” “The Fall of Fortress Lagur,” “The Jungle by Night,” and a fraction of “The Eyes of Kewerro.”

  “The Fall of Fortress Lagur” and “Eyes of Kewerro” could still have fit into the series reasonably well; the other three just didn’t belong in Garth’s adventures as they eventually developed. I may yet re-use some of the premises, though.

  Here are quick summaries:

  The Lady in the Jewel: The Forgotten King wants a sorceress named Sharatha, who rules the city of Ilnan, removed from the world. Garth initially assumes that this means she must be killed, but learns that in fact she is from another universe, a world inside a magical gem, and was exiled to Garth’s world by her enemies. He agrees to escort her home, but finds himself entangled in the same web of feuds and power struggles that caused her exile in the first place.

  The link to the main story arc of the series was to be that the Forgotten King could not carry out his plans for Garth’s world as long as beings from other worlds lived in it; thus, he demanded that Sharatha be removed.

  “The Scepter of Dor”: The Forgotten King wants a magical scepter that’s in the possession of Dor, Lord of Therin. Dor has no intention of giving it up while alive, and Garth discovers that Dor is very hard to kill — he has multiple bodies sharing his consciousness.

  “The Fall of Fortress Lagur”: The heavily-fortified port city of Lagur, Ordunin’s major trading partner, is one of the magical keystones holding Garth’s world safe; the Forgotten King wants it destroyed, so Garth raises an army of overmen to attack it. Frankly, I think I abandoned this one because it was such a boring premise. Another fantasy siege — big deal.

  “The Jungle by Night”: Garth is passing through the jungles of Yesh, far to the south of Eramma, on an errand for the Forgotten King, and trespasses on the tribal lands of the Kikoru, who decide that an overman’s hide would make a good trophy. The Kikoru are fierce, and the tribe’s shaman is a formidable wizard, so the result is an impressively bloody sword-and-sorcery battle. This one had some nice cultural details for the Kikoru, but was very short on actual plot.

  “The Eyes of Kewerro”: Kewerro is the Arkhein god of the wind. In order to locate certain items the Forgotten King wants the Eyes of Kewerro, magical gems that allow their owner to see anything, anywhere in the world, that’s touched by the wind. These gems are sealed in a tomb on the uninhabited polar continent, and Garth fights his way through various menaces in order to rob the tomb. About half of these menaces wound up guarding the village of Weideth in chapters 4 and 5 of The Seven Altars of Dûsarra.

  And that was the whole thing as originally planned back in 1974.

  Later on, as the series developed, a couple of other possibilities emerged — novels I might yet write someday, though I’m not planning to any time soon.

  First, there’s A Handful of Gold. Early in The Lure of the Basilisk Garth, ignorant
of how highly humans value gold, grossly overpays a stable-boy. Later on it’s mentioned that the stable-boy used that gold to buy a share in a caravan headed south. At one point I desperately wanted to tell the tale of that boy’s adventures as he makes his way to Kholis, seeking his fortune, while Garth’s actions are altering the familiar world around him. I never found the time for it, and eventually the enthusiasm faded.

  And second, I have never ruled out the possibility of sequels, describing Garth’s adventures (and Frima’s — she’s a character introduced in The Seven Altars of Dûsarra) after the end of The Book of Silence. I plotted two of these, but then got busy with other projects and never wrote them, or seriously proposed them to a publisher. One would have been called Skelleth, and would have concerned control of that increasingly-important town; it would not be the same as the never-written ninth story in the original series outline.

  The other sequel’s title is a spoiler for the ending of The Book of Silence, so I won’t mention it here, and it would have been about certain people seeking vengeance on Garth for events in the first four books. I could have written these two sequels in either order, since the outlines were still vague.

  Every so often readers ask me if I’m planning to write any more about Garth or his world, and the answer is no, I’m not planning it, but it might happen someday.

  And that’s all there is to the series.

  — Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Appendix C: Ancient Fragments

  While the original Garth stories from 1974 are sufficiently amateurish that I would prefer not to see them published — after all, I was only nineteen or twenty when I wrote them — I thought readers might be interested in a couple of samples:

  Series Introduction, intended to accompany each story if it appeared out of context:

  It is a strange bargain that was made in the King’s Inn of Skelleth, made by two strange beings for their own reasons.