The sample of the Mahon looks much more like a fantasy version of Hornblower rather than a completion–Maria’s personality has changed completely. The Smith version seems much more faithful.
I refuse to read the Parkinson. I’ll never forgive him for his assertion, against all the evidence, that Hornblower killed Captain Sawyer. The copy I read back in 1980 was a library book; if it had been my own copy I’d have thrown it in a fire or a swamp.
For anyone still looking for the Hornblower story “The Hand of Destiny”, here’s a link
https://www.fadedpage.com/books/20190857/html.php
[quote=“Morgyn, post:77, topic:841830”]
[li]That Mercedes Lackey would write more books in the Hunter universe. In this case, the publisher didn’t want more, which just goes to show that some people are bloody idiots.[/LIST][/li][/QUOTE]
I’d like another Diana Tregarde book or few, but Lackey gave the same reason for not writing more of those.
Thanks for this, I love Steel Beach and the Golden Globe. Prompted by this post I found out that the Ophiuchi Hotline was the starting point, and that there is a newish sequel. Two more books for the queue!
-DF
I want one last Thomas Pynchon novel (he’s 83). Though I confess I didn’t care that much for his last one, 2013’s Bleeding Edge).
Or better yet, what if he’s sitting on a whole pile of finished manuscripts that he’s instructed his publishers to release posthumously so he doesn’t have to deal with the publicity?
(to be clear, this is complete baseless speculation)
Still wishing for The World Turned Upside Down and the conclusion of The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles by Robert Anton Wilson. (Author existence failure.) 
Yeah, I’d much rather see more Lovelock than more Alvin.
It’s nice to see a sign of progress. But I will admit to having doubts about participating in the patreon campaign. The book is approximately five hundred and seventy five months overdue. If that trend continues, this could be quite a financial commitment, even at the two dollar a month level.
I know some of the top J. R. R. Tolkien scholars. In fact, I live approximately halfway between two of them, Verlyn Flieger and Carl Hostetter, so I joke that my home is now the center of Tolkien scholarship. I’ve been told that a book will appear next year entitled The Nature of Middle-earth, edited by Carl Hostetter, which will be the last collection of the remaining unpublished works of Tolkien. It’s an annotated version of some unpublished Tolkien writings:
Well, manuscripts or outlines by dead authors are discovered fairly commonly.
I wrote to the man. He had three more stories but no publisher wanted them, so they are maybe still out there.
My friend had the distinction of writing the first story Harlan bought for The Last Dangerous Visions. He died this week, almost fifty years later.
I usually defend Harlan against the many broad accusations hurled at him. He was a huge presence with many outsized flaws and just as many outsized virtues. The private Harlan was almost always different from the public one.
I can’t forgive him for the fiasco that was TLDV. He fucked it up, down, sideways, and inside out. The blame can’t be passed along to publishers. The fault emerged from his ego. Along the way, the fact that the book never saw publication hurt dozens of writers, both personally and professionally. Harlan always found ways to make it worse, often by viciously attacking people who rightly were criticizing him for his failures.
Nothing Straczynski does can ameliorate the losses they suffered. Apparently, an unpublished story by Harlan “ties directly into the reason why The Last Dangerous Visions has taken so long to come to light.” Hard to believe that will be the true explanation, but I wish my friend could have lived to see it.
My guess as to the reason for the delay (and it is only a guess) is that Ellison got caught in a procrastination loop - if an ambitious project is late, the only way to make up for the lateness is to make the project even more ambitious- but this only makes the thing later (not that I’ve ever gotten into such a predicament- no sir, not me)
So, what exactly is the holdup on a multi-author anthology work? You take whatever stories do exist, you bundle them together, and you publish it. I mean, you still need to write a few paragraphs introducing each story, and the like, but any professional writer should be able to crank that out in an afternoon.
There’s no physical hold-up for the book. It could have been published anytime in the last forty years. I feel the reason is what Andy_L gave; Ellison just set expectations too high and worried he couldn’t meet them. So he kept delaying the publication while he tinkered away trying to make it perfect. But the longer he delayed, the higher the expectation rose so the publication date just kept receding into the future.
That could explain an author’s own work being delayed (like the endless revisions Tolkien was always doing). But surely Ellison wasn’t tinkering away on other authors’ work?
He could have been tinkering with the introductory material for each story (“How much of the author’s post-1978 career should I talk about for an introduction to a story written in 1978?” or “Crap, now X is dead, which probably means the intro to story Y needs an update”) , with the ordering of the stories, or their distribution into the book’s many volumes (“If I move this story to Volume II, does it make too many stories with theme X in one volume?”). Or even bigger decisions like “If the publisher insists that the book should have four volumes instead of three, I can add some stories from these three newcomers who have written up a storm in the 1980s, 1990s, or 2000s”)
He might have been dithering what stories to include?
That’s what I’ve heard. Ellison apparently got the rights to more material than he could actually publish.