Personal Trivia - Star Warriors

I meant to explain this cover, after showing it in a recent post to demonstrate the, um, less well-written fiction ...

The artwork, by Ken Smith, is for the story "Star Warriors," a blatant steal from ... well, you can probably guess what that was. My working title was "Rip-Off Warriors ..."

In the late 1970's, I met the writer Hank Stine (now Jean Stine, and that's another very weird story. Some years earlier, Hank had written a classic sci-fi porno novel for, I think, Grove Press, called Season of the Witch, about a woman trapped in a man's body. Apparently it was not as fictional as one might have thought -- he eventually had the surgery and changed gender.)

I digress. Bad habit. But it's so interesting ...

Anyway, I had just started writing and trying to sell stuff, when Hank, who had moved to my home town with his new wife, gave a talk at the local library. I had never met a published SF writer, and since I was probably the only other guy in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, even trying to write the stuff, we had something in common. We started hanging out.

Hank introduced me to science fiction conventions, my first one being the SunCon in Miami, in, I think, 1977. I met Robert Heinlein there. Sorta. He walked under my arm as I was leaning against the wall. He was not a tall man, Bob Heinlein ...

Um. Anyway, shortly after that, Hank moved away, and got the job as editor of Galaxy Magazine. At another convention in Phoenix, in 1978, he and I and Harlan Ellison were walking to Harlan's GoH speech when Hank offered me a gig. He needed, he said, a thirty-thousand word novella, a Star Wars pastiche -- that recent movie -- to be published in two parts. He needed the first half in a week, all he could pay was a penny a word, and could I do it?

No problem, I said. I was a two-story pro at that point -- nothing was beyond me, I was fearless. (I got another assignment at that con for a short story, and I wrote the first part of it on a napkin whilst sitting in the bar. A very productive convention, I doubled my entire published output as a result of attending, plus I met J.F. "Jesse" Bone, who wrote The Lani People ...

No, no, I won't veer into digression-land again. Back to the tale:

After the con, I went home, cranked out the piece, and shipped it. It was published in two parts, under my pseudonym, "Jesse Peel." Hank had told me to get it done, not to worry about how rough it was, he'd fix it. I was afflicted with both exclamation point poisoning and said-bookisms at the time, and Hank, bless his hairy little head, didn't touch the sucker, so every goof I made stayed on the page. Had a guy hiss the word "damn." Try that some time. Can't do it. Nooo sibilants ...

It was not the acme of western literature, though it did get a couple of nice reviews, despite the fact it was almost totally derivative. Almost.

Kenneth Smith, the artist, who published a magazine called Phantasmagoria, went on to bigger and better things. Not long ago, I tracked him down. Did he still have the cover he had done for that old Galaxy? I'd be interested in buying it, since I'd always liked it, and couldn't afford artwork at the time I wrote the novella.

What was not to like? A half-naked couple on a giant pile of skulls and bones blasting away at the bad guys, the demi-whelf Linchini snarling next to them, the giant Trogian robot in the background. (See, I had a short furry sidekick and a giant robot, instead of a giant furry guy and a short robot, so it wasn't totally derivative. And in case you missed it, Linchini is not far from Lon Chaney, and swapping a couple letters in "Trog" gives you Gort ...)

Klaatu barrada ... uh ... uh ... oh, crap!

Smith said, Why, yes, even after all these years, he did still have that cover. It was in an art gallery in San Francisco, and for sale. I could have it for a mere $20,000.

Twenty thousand dollars?

Right. I got three hundred bucks to write thirty thousand words, only half of which I ever managed to collect.. Of course, that was in 1978 dollars, so that hundred and fifty would be maybe ... three hundred dollars today ...

Twenty grand. Maybe I shoulda been an illustrator instead of a writer ...