The Best Of All Possible Worlds by Spider Robinson (ed)

Author:Spider Robinson (ed) [Robinson, Spider]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sci-Fi Anthology
Publisher: Ace Books
Published: 1980-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

Introduction to “Duel Scene ” by William Goldman

Spider Robinson

It is possible that some of you sinus friction types may need to be told who William Goldman is. (A disturbing number of people read, nothing but sf; I know at least one man who reads only fanzines.) Surely no normal people* do: his work is probably known to more people than anyone else in this book.

*—poor bastards

For instance, he wrote an original screenplay once and sold it for a then-record figure. It was called Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, and it did some business. One called Harper did okay too.

There were a few novels that just might ring a bell with you, too. Boys And Girls Together, Soldier In The Rain, No Way To Treat A Lady (infinitely superior to the Rod Steiger vehicle that someone else made out of the movie version. Interestingly, Goldman originally published the book under the pseudonym “Harry Longbaugh”—which was the Sundance Kid's real name!), and more recently Marathon Man (both the book and the screenplay) and Magic (likewise). Each of these has made a Jew dollars.

Now, those last two in particular are among the best things Goldman has ever done, for my money—and Magic, for the same money, is at least as close to being sf as Theodore Sturgeon’s Some of Your Blood. But that’s not terribly close; taken together not a word of Goldman’s output really qualifies him for inclusion in this collection of fantasy and science fiction stories.

Except . . .

... for a novel which came out before Marathon Man, and sank without a trace.

It was called The Princess Bride, and it was the best damned heroic fantasy you’d ever want to read, funny and inventive and exciting as hell. It was brought out in hardcover by Harcourt, who hadn’t the least notion of how and where to market it (to be fair, at that time almost nobody knew how to market fantasy), and it just lay there. I stumbled across it on the Bookmobile in Phinney’s Cove, Nova Scotia, and started it out of idle curioisity (I’m not a big fantasy fan). I finished it late that same night, got up the next afternoon and read it through again. I began forcing friends to read it. I wrote a rave review of it in my very first Galaxy column. I narrated scenes from it to people at parties, strangers at conventions, colleagues at conferences. The book just lay there. After a few years Ballantine brought it out in paperback, tried to market it as a mainstream book, and it lay there. A year later Ballantine created Del Rey Books, and gave Bride to them. Lester and Judy-Lynn Del Rey do know how to market fantasy, but for reasons I can only guess at; they gave it what was, for them, a perfunctory promotion, and again it lay there. By now it is in grave danger of acquiring bedsores.

I think it might just be Goldman’s finest work to date. So when I was given the opportunity to edit this series I decided to use a chunk of it.

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