Peter: It just kind of snuck up on everyone, year by year and over several generations. I’m constantly meeting people who were raised on the film, people who tell me that they watched it so much as children that they actually memorized it.

Connor: After that, the next big twist in the history of The Last Unicorn took another 20 years to happen. In a lot of ways they weren’t great years for you. You got divorced, remarried, and divorced again. You moved from California to Washington, then back to California. The book version of The Last Unicorn sold steadily, and made you a trickle of money. The film version sold steadily but made you nothing at all, thanks to some fraudulent movie industry accounting. And you wrote everything under the sun, but none of it got a lot of attention‌—‌more treatments and screenplays, mostly for forgettable animation, a number of nonfiction books, now and then an introduction or an article, plus a handful of novels that garnered minimal sales and little notice outside the SF/fantasy field. Through the whole period you were in a mostly downward financial spiral, with only occasional upticks, like when you wrote the “Sarek” episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s safe to say that your career was in a slump.

Peter: In the ‘90s I was writing some of the best fiction I think I’d ever done‌—‌I’m very fond of my books Tamsin and The Magician of Karakosk, and The Innkeeper’s Song is my personal favorite among my novels. But I was with a publisher who publicized no one, and I didn’t have any strong, productive editorial relationships. Writers complain about editors all the time, but that’s only because there are so few great ones out there. I got spoiled early on by working with some of the best.

Connor: Now you’re stuck with me.

Peter: Well, you do have this disconcerting habit of invariably putting your finger on the stuff that was always bothering me, that I was hoping nobody would notice. You also nag effectively and are pretty good with titles, which, as I said, I’m usually not. [laughs] You have my permission to stick around. Things have been going in the right direction since you showed up.

Connor: It’s been an interesting ride, working together. A little bit like the writing process you described‌—‌one part planning, five parts figuring it out as we go along. The first project we did related to The Last Unicorn was producing an unabridged audiobook version.

Peter: Back in 1990 I recorded a severely truncated reading on cassette for Penguin Highbridge Audio, but that edition was so utterly chopped up‌—‌more than half the book was gone‌—‌that I found myself trying to sneak in lines from memory while I was in the recording studio.

Connor: I tried listening to that. I tell people it’s like hearing a wonderful reading of the Kng Jms Bble.

Peter: I’ve never been able to bring myself to listen to it at all. The one we did together was much more fun, despite the fact that I was struggling with throat problems that made production go very slowly. Part of the pleasure was having Jim Lively as the recording engineer‌—‌he’s got astonishing ears, and since he knows the book so well he was able to help direct me as I read, not just make sure I didn’t swallow a word or cough when I shouldn’t have. Another part of the fun was having original music written for the project by your friend Jeff Slingluff. Jeff is a fine guitarist, and the main instrument he used for his compositions was a classical guitar that had been owned by a dear, dear friend of mine, Joe Mazo, which I inherited after Joe’s death. I like the feeling that Joe was involved in this, too.