The Sword of Aldones Read Free Page A

companion publication of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.) It was then sold to a publisher in Europe and appeared in a German translation. Still later, after Bradley had established herself with Wollheim at Ace Books, Ace asked to see the novel. In the interim, Bradley’s carbon copy of the manuscript had been lost, and she had to reconstruct the novel by retranslating the German version to English. The book appeared, eventually, under the title in English The Door through Space.
    Another novel, Seven from the Stars, had appeared in Amazing Stories in 1960.
    This was Bradley’s first Ace book and her first book published in the English language.
    Despite the bibliographic citation of Bird of Prey/The Door through Space as Bradley’s first published book, and of Seven from the Stars as her first English-language book publication, she herself regards The Sword of Aldones as her first book— “absolutely first” in her own words.
    She conceived the book, she states, at the age of 15. This would place the event in 1945 or early 1946, seven or eight years before the Vortex sales and eleven or twelve years before any form of Bird of Prey was published. The Sword of Aldones gestated for over three years before the author actually began writing it. She was then age 19. The first complete draft was finished in 1949—this was the version seen by Dorothy Quinn.
    In 1956 Bradley “sold” The Sword of Aldones to Raymond A. Palmer. Palmer had been a pulp science fiction author (and fan) as early as 1930. He had been tapped to become the editor of Amazing Stories when that magazine was taken over by the Ziff-Davis Publishing Company in 1938 and remained with Ziff-Davis until 1949, when he left to found his own publication, Other Worlds Science Stories.
    Operating on a budget that would make even Vortex look generous, Palmer often failed to pay his authors even token rates. Palmer also had the regrettable habit of holding stories in inventory for very lengthy periods, thus affording the authors not only no payment, but not even the publicity value of publication. Palmer held The Sword of Aldones for fully five years.
    By 1961, Bradley’s earliest novels had been well received as “halves” of Ace Doubles. Consequently, when Bradley sold Ace The Planet Savers, editor Wollheim asked her if she had another novel with which he might make up an Ace Double, rather than pairing Bradley with another author. She retrieved The Sword of Aldones from Palmer, revised it for Wollheim, and the double volume of The Planet Savers and The Sword of Aldones was issued in 1962.
    The revisions of 1961 were mainly general polishing, but a major new element was introduced as well: the loss of one hand by the protagonist Lew Alton. In the preceding versions of the novel, Alton’s face had been scarred, but Bradley had used the device of facial scarring in other works by 1961, and to provide a newer (and obviously far more powerful) element, she introduced the further injury.
    Although The Sword of Aldones was published as the “back half” of The Planet Savers, it proved the more popular work almost from the outset. It was a finalist in the Hugo nominations the following year. The other nominees were A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke, Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper, The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick, and Sylva by “Vercors” (Jean Bruller).
    Bradley did not expect to win the award, and in fact campaigned for another candidate by asking fans to cast their votes for Little Fuzzy. However, neither Piper’s book nor Bradley’s gained the award, which was won by The Man in the High Castle.
    Bradley does not consider The Sword of Aldones a particularly good book. In 1972
    she wrote a critical article in which she stated some of her own objectives in the writing of the book and attempted to gain an understanding of its great popularity (despite her own feeling that it “was not a very good book”): I explored one theme, rare