The next volume of Baen Books' reissue of the writings of Keith Laumer is entitled Earthblood & Other Stories. The centerpiece of the volume is one of Laumer's very few collaborations, the novel Earthblood, which he co-authored with Rosel George Brown.
Also included will be the three other stories Laumer wrote which featured the Niss aliens who appear in Earthblood. Or, I should say, the Niss. As a rule, Laumer was never very concerned with matters of continuity from one story to the next, and the Niss who appear in Earthblood are different in many respects from the ones who appear in the other stories. Nonetheless, those three stories are very good in their own right and deserve to be reissued. They are:
"The Long Remembered Thunder"
"The Other Sky"
"The Soul Buyer"
I'm also taking the opportunity—very dear to my heart—to reissue half a dozen of Rosel George Brown's stories. Hopefully, that will remind a science fiction audience that has almost completely forgotten her what a superb writer she was.
Brown is one of the tragedies of science fiction. She emerged as a writer in the late 1950s, and by 1962 was well on her way to becoming established as one of SF's leading female authors—of which there were precious few, at the time. Her stories were published in most of the premier SF magazines of the day: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Galaxy, If, Fantastic.
She then wrote Earthblood with Keith Laumer, which was serialized in If magazine and published as a novel in 1966. The long gap between her stories and the novel was due to her fight against cancer, which she'd contracted sometime early in the '60s. Her solo novel Sybil Sue Blue also came out in 1966. The sequel, The Waters of Centaurus, was published in 1970.
By then, she had been gone for three years. She died in 1967, finally succumbing to the cancer. She was forty-one years old. I can't prove it, of course, but I am quite certain that had she lived a normal lifespan she would be well-known today as one of science fiction's major women writers.
I specify her gender, because hers was a distinctly female voice, and a rather unusual one. She was a housewife, and her stories usually reflected that viewpoint—armed with a ferociously intelligent wit. There is no voice in science fiction quite like Rosel George Brown's. The best way I can describe it is as if Alice Kramden from the classic TV comedy The Honeymooners had devoted her spare time to writing science fiction, while her husband Ralph was off driving a bus.
From the more than twenty short stories she wrote, I selected what I thought were the half dozen best, and they are also included in the volume. For those (few, alas) already familiar with her work, they are:
"Fruiting Body"
"Save Your Confederate Money, Boys"
"Flower Arrangement"
"Visiting Professor"
"Car Pool"
"And a Tooth"
Finally, I need to take the opportunity here to thank two people who were very helpful in sorting out the Swedish details of Laumer's novels contained in this volume: Karl-Johan Noren and Ahrvid Engholm.
—Eric Flint
November 2004