Black Gate

It’s a tough thing to have to change publishers in the middle of a trilogy. That’s exactly what happened with Midori Snyder’s The Queens’ Quarter, which began with her second novel, New Moon, published in 1989. The last two novels followed over the next four years.

New Moon (1989)
Sadar’s Keep (1990)
Beldan’s Fire (1993)

Snyder’s first novel was Soulstring (1987), a standalone fairytale based on the Scottish legend of Tam Lin (which we covered here). Two years later, she decided to turn her attention to a secondary world fantasy. The first novel, New Moon, appeared in paperback from Ace in February 1989 with a fine cover by Jody Lee (above left; click for bigger version).

If subsequent books in the series had also had covers by Jody Lee, or even kept the same cover design, they would have been easy to spot as part of the same series. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, Snyder was forced to switch publishers in midstream. As a result the second book, Sadar’s Keep, arrived in paperback in the US March 1991 from Tor Books, with a fine but strikingly different cover by Dennis Nolan (above middle).

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Jinian Star-Eye was the last volume of Sheri S. Tepper’s monumental nine-volume fantasy opus, The True Game. On course, in keeping with 1980s-era fantasy marketing, no mention was made of this anywhere on the book. However, if you were an attentive buyer, you might have noticed the poem on the back, a sure tip that this was part of the series. Poetry as a marketing device, to the best of my knowledge, was an idea that was born and died with this series.

We’ve covered several of the previous installments over the years, but not the entire series. It began with King’s Blood Four in 1983, Tepper’s first novel. Subsequent volumes were divided into a trio of trilogies, starting with the True Game trilogy:

King’s Blood Four (1983)
Necromancer Nine (1983)
Wizard’s Eleven (1984)

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