Remember Richard Wilson? Some of you might, but alas, most probably don’t. Wilson won the Nebula Award for Best Novelette in 1968 for “Mother to the World” (which got him a Hugo nomination, too), and I published his “The Nineteenth Century Spaceship” in Last Wave back in 1984. He died in 1987, and is now mostly forgotten except to the cognoscenti.

John Pelan of Ramble House is publishing a series of books collecting his short stories—the first volume of which is now on sale, and he got in touch with me to see whether I still had copies of the magazine he could use to help in reprinting that latter story.

But I’d hung on to more than just that. I also had our correspondence regarding that and other submissions. So I sent John scans of a batch of letters, including the one below, which teases with information about a collection editor Terry Carr was considering, one that never came to pass. (Carr also died in 1987.)

Ah, the land of Might-Have-Been! That letter is filled with many things which never came to pass.

For more Wilson, keep up with what Ramble House‘s publishing plans.