THE ORIGIN OF THE

BIRTHRIGHT UNIVERSE

It happened in the 1970s. Carol and I were watching a truly awful movie at a local theater, and about halfway through it I muttered, "Why am I wasting my time here when I could be doing something really interesting, like, say, writing the entire history of the human race from now until its extinction?" And she whispered back, "So why don’t you?" We got up immediately, walked out of the theater, and that night I outlined a novel called Birthright: The Book of Man, which would tell the story of the human race from its attainment of faster-than-light flight until its death eighteen thousand years from now.

It was a long book to write. I divided the future into five political eras—Republic, Democracy, Oligarchy, Monarchy, and Anarchy—and wrote twenty-six connected stories ("demonstrations," Analog called them, and rightly so), displaying every facet of the human race, both admirable and not so admirable. Since each is set a few centuries from the last, there are no continuing characters (unless you consider Man, with a capital M, the main character, in which case you could make an argument—or at least, I could—that it’s really a character study).

I sold it to Signet, along with another novel, titled The Soul Eater. My editor there, Sheila Gilbert, loved the Birthright Universe and asked me if I would be willing to make a few changes to The Soul Eater so that it was set in that future. I agreed, and the changes actually took less than a day. She made the same request—in advance, this time—for the four-book Tales of the Galactic Midway series, the four-book Tales of the Velvet Comet series, and Walpurgis III. Looking back, I see that only two of the thirteen novels I wrote for Signet were not set there.

When I moved to Tor Books, my editor there, Beth Meacham, had a fondness for the Birthright Universe, and most of my books for her— not all, but most—were set in it: Santiago, Ivory, Paradise, Purgatory, Inferno, A Miracle of Rare Design, A Hunger in the Soul, The Outpost, and The Return of Santiago.

"When Ace agreed to buy Soothsayer, Oracle, and Prophet from me, my editor, Ginjer Buchanan, assumed that of course they’d be set in the Birthright Universe—and of course they were, because as I learned a little more about my eighteen-thousand-year, two-million-world future, I felt a lot more comfortable writing about it.

In fact, I started setting short stories in the Birthright Universe. Two of my Hugo winners—"Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge" and "The 43 Antarean Dynasties"—are set there, and so are perhaps fifteen others.

When Bantam agreed to take the Widowmaker trilogy from me, it was a foregone conclusion that Janna Silverstein, who purchased the books but had moved to another company before they came out, would want them to take place in the Birthright Universe. She did indeed request it, and I did indeed agree.

I recently handed in a book to Meisha Merlin, set—where else?— in the Birthright Universe.

And when it came time to suggest a series of books to Lou Anders for the new Pyr line of science fiction, I don’t think I ever considered any ideas or stories that weren’t set in the Birthright Universe.

I’ve gotten so much of my career from the Birthright Universe that I wish I could remember the name of that turkey we walked out of a! I those years ago so I could write the producers and thank them.