Teflon Billy said:Now that's a damn shame
Chalker was the first author I read in my teens who was very clearly not "Normal Old Sci-Fi"
He had an amusing anecdote about his original book deal with DelRey I think. The trick as he explained it was that you needed that first book deal to get your foot in the door, but once you had the first deal gave them the right to your next few books at a very low fee. So what you wanted to do was write a book that they would refuse to buy, thus getting you out of your contract.
Now there had been one line from his first book (the first Well World Book, IIRC) that I think Mrs. DelRey had insisted had to be changed. It was when Nathan Brazil was spying on the sponge merchant (addictive drug, destroys your mind if you don't get regular doses), who was tormenting and basically forcing one of his sponge slaves to have sex with him. The line in the book was something like "Another man, might have been revolted or disgusted by what he was witnessing, but Nathan Brazil was indifferent." This was changed from "Another man, might have been revolted or disgusted by what he was witnessing, but Nathan Brazil was aroused."
So he knew that the thing that was guarenteed to get a book rejected was kinky sex. So he wrote "The Identity Matrix" which involved body swaping and as a result lots of kinky sex. Sure enough it was rejected and he was free to go on and sell his books for substantially more money.
