BilmBlog500

Military sf has been part of my existence as a literary agent for most of my career. My first author in the genre was Bill Baldwin. Bill was a very, very successful author for Warner at a time when it didn't have a particularly successful sf program. There was Warner, then there was Questar, then there was Aspect, then there wasn't much, and eventually when the French publishing conglomerate Hachette came along and purchased Warner Books, they imported Tim Holman, who had done a great job building the Orbit UK list, moved the sf program from Warner to Little Brown/Grand Central, and have since had much better results. Not so back then, the Warner program wasn't much, and Bill and his Helmsman books were rare projects that would be displayed at the front of the bookstores. The Helmsman series was classic in its appeal, the lead character Wilf Brim a man's man of a space captain with a life full of women and adventure. Working with Bill was one of the experiences that...

Publishers Marketplace reports that long-time NAL publisher Elaine Koster passed away earlier this week at the age of 69. Elaine was kind of the go-to person during the early years of my career when I was selling Simon Green and Rick Shelley to the NAL list, the person editors like John Silbersack and Chris Schelling and later on Laura Anne Gilman would need to go to for the thumbs-up on an acquisition. I'm told by many of these people that she could be hell to work for, but was at the same time one of those people that a lot of good people would all learn a lot from working with. After she left NAL, she became an agent. John and Chris did eventually as well, actually. But we'll forgive her for that. And remember her support of the genre.