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DERYNI RISING

An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author

Copyright © 1978, 2004 by Katherine Kurtz.

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Dedication

For Carl M. Selle,
late Professor of English and Humanities,
University of Miami,
who knew, all along, that it would
begin this way.

Introduction

INTRODUCTION

Putting the Deryni into Perspective

DERYNI Rising was written more than thirty years ago. At that time, the fantasy genre as we now know it did not exist, except in the epic template provided by The Lord of the Rings, the masterwork of Oxford professor J. R. R. Tolkien. Others had been writing fantastic literature earlier in the twentieth century and even before—Lord Dunsany, E. R. Eddings, G. K. Chesterton, and C. S. Lewis, to name but a few—but their work reflected the still-evolving literary forms of an earlier age and were becoming less and less accessible to readers in the mid-twentieth century, both because of the scarcity of copies of such works and because of changing tastes in literary style.

The Lord of the Rings was to prove a major milestone in the continuing evolution of the genre. Its commercial success would inspire Betty and Ian Ballantine to launch the immensely important Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, intended to put some of Tolkien’s predecessors back into print and, ultimately, to begin publishing new, original fantasy that hopefully would carry the fantasy tradition forward.