From: "Ted White" <twhite8 at cox.net>
To: "WSFA members" <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Old School
Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2005 18:43:03 -0500
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Walsh" <MJW at press.jhu.edu>
To: <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
Sent: Wednesday, March 30, 2005 3:56 PM
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Old School

> > dalek_cag at yahoo.com 3/30/2005 3:16:36 PM >>>
[...]
> >
> >I'm a huge Bob Shaw fan, but he doesn't seem to be
> >very popular anymore in the US.=20
>
> He was also a fan who happen to be a writer.
>
> Here's a nice bio by Langford:
http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/cla=
> ssics_archive/shaw/shaw_bio.html=20
>
> He wrote three novels set in "a universe of audaciously daft physics
where =
> pi has an unfamiliar value, twin planets can share an atmosphere, =
> interplanetary balloon flight is feasible"
>
> He came up with the concept of "slow glass" which is really neat.See: =
> http://technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=3D692

I was Bob Shaw's agent in the '60s.   I became his agent when, while I was
visiting him, Jim White and the Willises in Northern Ireland in 1965, he
complained about the time it took to mail stories across the Atlantic, and
thus how long it took to sell a story to the US SF market.  I volunteered
to "remail" them for him, and he said, "Well, then, you'll be my agent."  I
sold every story he sent me, the majority of them to Campbell at ANALOG.
When he sent me "Light of Other Days," the first "slow glass" story, he
told me not to bother Campbell with it; he knew Campbell wouldn't like it.
But ANALOG paid the best, so I sent it to Campbell anyway -- and he bought
it.  I also sold his first three or four novels and helped him plot one of
them.

I recently came across my records on some of his sales.  "Light of Other
Days" was anthologized *four* times in 1967/68:  Ace Books paid $35 for its
use in WORLD'S BEST SF (edited by Carr & Wollheim).  Campbell's ANALOG
anthology paid only $19.  But Judy Merril paid $70 for her best of the year
volume and NEBULA AWARD STORIES TWO paid $130.   (In every case this was an
advance against a percentage of the royalties, but those advances were
never exceeded, or perhaps even earned out.)   A university press wanted to
use the story in a textbook of some sort -- but were aghast at the notion
of *paying money* for this use....

--Ted White