One Who Disappeared about to Appear

One Who Disappeared, the final book in my trio of Czech novels (called The Obstinates), will be published in August or September by PS Publishing. (Hooray). My editor Jim Goddard and I have handed over the project to Robert Wexler, book designer extraordinare. I'd like to thank Nick Gevers, who shepherded the entire series through PS; Pete and Nicky Crowther for publishing it; Vlad Verano for his lovely covers, and Robert for the incredible designs for all three books. Finally, kudos to Jim, who brought a wealth of energy, critical acumen and good humor to the project. Watching Jim run his fine-tooth comb over every historical reference, weed out every excessive punctuation mark, and quash any-and-all Americanisms that might have intruded on the Mittel-European setting, has been a huge pleasure.

As to the rest of Jim’s career, here’s a bio I found:

In the early 1970s James Goddard edited and published the critical journal Cypher, which attracted contributions from many well-known writers including Brian Aldiss, Kingsley Amis, J. G. Ballard, Bob Shaw, John Brunner, Edmund Cooper and James Blish. Cypher was the first, and is still the only, journal of its kind to have received an element of Arts Council funding, via Southern Arts.

In 1971 he published the first J. G. Ballard bibliography. In the mid 1970s he collaborated with Interzone editor David Pringle in editing the Ballard festschrift J. G. Ballard: the First 20 Years (Brans Head Books, 1976).

In the mid 1980s he was one of the principals of, and editor for, Britain's first SF small press, Kerosina Publications, which published books by Brian Aldiss, Philip K. Dick, Gene Wolfe, Richard Cowper, Keith Roberts, D. G. Compton, Michael Bishop, John Brunner and others.

Storeys from the Old Hotel has always been one of my most favorite Wolfe books, so kudos to Jim!

Praise for The Obsinates and David Herter

“I hope you get the full trilogy into American print.”
-- John Simon, critic for The New York Times Book Review, Esquire, Opera News

"David Herter is a writer of formidable intelligence and talent." -- Paul Witcover, The New York Review of Science Fiction

“Just as there are touches of D.M. Thomas’s The White Hotel in Herter’s depiction through his beloved Janácek of the warp and weave of a civilization under stress, so there are suggestions of Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows” in the way he spells his great composer into tranced rapport with whatever breathes there and does not wish to be taken into music.”
-- John Clute on On the Overgrown Path

“The Luminous Depths has a richness of prose and a density of allusion and ideas reminiscent of authors like Aldiss and Wolfe -- and, incidentally, it is a page-turning cracker of a horror story. Outside his homeland, Karel Capek may be remembered primarily through his legacy of the term “Robot”. It is Herter’s achievement in this novella to lead us through the narrow window of that single chthonic word to a rich evocation of a fragile, doomed period of Central European history”
-- Stephen Baxter

“David Herter’s trilogy, to which One Who Disappeared provides a spectacular and moving conclusion, does not fall; on the contrary, it remains perfectly suspended, sturdy and elegant — and by virtue of its topography, it does not, like more myopic literary projects, taper off into soothing closure, but opens wide to an even vaster and more glorious universe of possibility.”
-- Brian Stableford on One Who Disappeared

“Distinctive and imaginative, Herter's tale moves to its own disconcerting logic: a debut of immense promise."
-- Kirkus Reviews