Grimes of the Federation Survey Service—on the Road to the Rim

Lorn, Faraway, Ultimo and El Dorado. The planetary names say it all. The frontier. The Rim. Here everything is ill-explored, isolated, weird, wild—and ripe with adventure! And if you've made it out this far, you are usually a bit on the wild and weird side yourself.

Here John Grimes plies the spaceways between planets, going from ensign to commander in the Federation Survey Service, all preparation for his career on the Rim. Lost colonies, strange worlds, and alien artifacts are his stock in trade. And, if lurking pirates don't get him, a faulty Manschenn Drive (the FTL device that moves a ship ahead in space while traveling astern in time) might easily throw Grimes into one of various alternate realities where he either doesn't exist or has been demoted three ranks and is the third mate on a garbage scow. Fortunately, Grimes's trusty pipe and tobacco seem to exist in all possible worlds—as does his pluck and ability to bounce back and prevail!

If you're thinking "Hortatio Hornblower in space," you would be close. This is the good stuff from a writer who got his start with John W. Campbell, with whom he remained life-long friends.

"Chandler writes his stories in the middle of a hurricane," Campbell famously said, "with his typewriter lashed to his desk."

He wasn't being metaphorical. In addition to being a Golden Age legend, A. Bertram Chandler was a professional sailor, rising from deckhand to mate to master over the course of his long career as a merchantman officer and Australian naval reservist. He was a younger member of the Campbellian circle, and did his best writing—the writing we're about to offer you—in the late 1960s and early 1970s while at sea.

If there were ever an author who could understand the emptiness of space—along with its magnetic allure—that author is A. Bertram Chandler. If there were ever a writer who could imagine the remote, the dangerous, the amazing—and get it right—that has to be Chandler, too. He'd been there. He'd done that.

You're going to love these books.

Here they are, all of the Commander John Grimes—Federation Survey Service saga, all collected in one e-volume and available from Baen Books' Webscriptions (www.webscriptions.net). This amazing collection includes:

• The Road to the Rim
• To Prime the Pump
• The Hard Way Up which contains the famous short stories:
  • "With Good Intentions"
  • "The Subtracter"
  • "The Tin Messiah"
  • "The Sleeping Beauty"
  • "The Wandering Buoy"
  • "The Mountain Movers"
  • "What You Know"
• The Broken Cycle
• Spartan Planet
• The Inheritors
• The Big Black Mark

The megavolume will be released June 15^th, 2007, and will be available in the reader-friendly, unencrypted formats Webscriptions is known for. No need to track down the crumbling remains of dead tree—this is the alternate reality where Grimes goes digital! For the next three months, the complete works will go for $20. As always, we'll let the math do the selling. Okay, we will add one rather salient detail: NO SHIPPING FEES! Then, AFTER the three months is up, the e-volume "dissolves" and we'll offer the individual Grimes ebook titles for $4 each. (Still a great deal, of course!)