Linda Hoover wrote:
> At one time, Brad Ferguson wrote the novel "A Flag Full of
> Stars". I seem to remember there was an editorial problem
> with its publication... something like that is not what he wrote
> but that is what Pocket published under his name. Does
> anybody out there remember what that was all about?
I was going to just point you to Brad's own webpage in which
he tells the story and provides a pdf of his original version
of the book, but the site doesn't appear to be up anymore (at
least I couldn't connect to it and it's not cached by Google;
it might just be a temporary server problem, so point your
browser to
http://www.fred.net/thirteen/affos/affos.html and
see if you get anything). Fortunately the text therefrom has
been archived by Steve Roby at his comprehensive ST books
site; go to
http://www.well.com/~sjroby/lostbooks.html and
scroll about a third of the way down the page to the
"The War Virus and A Flag Full of Stars (1990-91)" section
and you can read Brad's detailed account in his own words.
Basically, it was the usual thing; author submits book,
publisher doesn't like certain things about it, gives it to
another author to tweak, publishes hybrid results under original
author's name, original author not happy. The same thing
happened with Margaret Bonnano's "Probe", although evidently
to a much greater extreme; for that whole story, go to
http://www.margaretwanderbonanno.com/files/Probed.doc (she
also references some of what happened to Brad's book). Not
an unusual circumstance, especially when dealing with media
tie-in fiction where there are often all kinds of additional
rules & restraints from outsiders to which original fiction
usually isn't subject.