From The Future Is Female! More Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women
Eleanor Arnason has been publishing science fiction and fantasy for more than half a century. Her first two stories were published in the early 1970s in Michael Moorcock’s influential New Worlds paperback series in the early 1970s, and then she sold three stories to Damon Knight’s Orbit anthology series. Along the way, she co-authored (with Ruth Berman) “The Face on the Barroom Floor,” a story included in the authorized paperback Star Trek: The New Voyages, which went through at least twenty printings and vastly increased her exposure to science fiction readers.
Her experience with publishing her first novel, however, might have permanently discouraged many lesser authors. In a 2020 interview with Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine blog, Arnason explained:
My first novel, The Sword Smith, came out in 1978 from a small publishing house that turned out to be a tax-avoidance scheme. In order for the scheme to look plausible, the publisher had to actually publish some books, and he didn’t much care what they were. An acquaintance of mine was working for the company, not realizing that it was fake, and bought my book. It did not do well, as you might imagine. It has recently been republished in ebook version by Aqueduct Press. It’s really pretty good, a fantasy about a sword smith on a non-epic quest, aided by a small female prepubescent dragon. The important part of all this is: the IRS nailed the publisher for tax avoidance. . . .
The publisher was Condor Books and its owner was Robert Lowell Moore Jr., known to the world as Robin Moore, the author of such best sellers as The French Connection and The Green Beret—which is why so many editors and authors believed the operation was legitimate. Moore worked with two lawyers to “sell” paperback royalty rights at ludicrously inflated prices and then led others to invest in these fake tax shelters and falsely claim tax deductions and credits—to the tune of more than thirty-seven million dollars. Moore ended up pleading guilty and in 1986 received a suspended prison sentence of five years. Condor Books folded, of course, taking the inventory of its publications with it.
In the mid-1980s, Arnason threw off this disappointment and in the decades since she has published five additional novels and more than fifty stories, many of which have been gathered into six collections. One of her earliest stories, “The Warlord of Saturn’s Moons,” was included in Library of America’s second Future Is Female anthology and was featured last year on our Story of the Week site.
