Geoff Duncan

Publisher Byron Preiss died July 9th in an automobile accident. Preiss was a longtime author, publisher, and packager of material for books, comics, games, and electronic media on a variety of subjects and in many genres. Preiss titles were among the first to use the terms graphic novel or visual novel and his projects stretched across a surprising number of ventures. Jim Steranko has written a memorial piece for Komikwerks which is worth a read; nearly all the writers and artists I've encountered who've worked on Preiss projects had good things to say about the man and his belief in what he was doing, even if the business side of things could get touchy.

I was barely acquainted with the man, but was saddened to hear of his death.

Back in 1993 I was working at the Evil Empire. We were making CD-ROMs just as the market for CD-based "titles" for computers was heating up—one reflection of that market taking off was that our division name was changed from Multimedia Publishing to Consumer right around this time, which should have—and, in my case, did—set off loud warning klaxons. But I digress.

The fundamental problem of publishing CD-ROMs at that time was Rundgren's Maxim: It's the content, stupid. Everybody wanted to make (and sell!) CD-ROMs, but finding enough material to fill a then-enormous 650 MB was more than of a challenge than it might seem. And you had to wrap some sort of software around it to organize and present the content, and that software had to install and run on machines which had less processing power and memory than typical cell phones today.

As such, the Evil Empire sought out content partners—folks who had decent content but didn't have the interest (or the in-house technical moxy) to publish the content on CD. In some cases the content partners did want to publish a CD, but working with the Evil Empire offered certain advantages on the technical, marketing, and distribution sides.

Byron Press was one of those content partners. The then-fledging Byron Preiss Multimedia was pitching a series of titles to the Evil Empire: some were in development, some were deep into production, and one was "ready to go:" the Macintosh version of Isaac Asimov's The Ultimate Robot. (You can read a 1995 review and description of the later PC version; the features and content were largely identical.)

As the resident lonely Mac person in the multimedia group, I was called out of the blue into a meeting to look at the product and assess how much effort would be required to test and ship the product under the Evil Empire's aegis: in that meeting I first met Byron, who struck me as somehow too young and enthusiastic to be running a New York publishing house. I allowed—truthfully—that the product fell right into my lap. I knew the material and I knew the development platform: Apple's HyperCard.

Outwardly I was thrilled to have an opportunity to work on a potentially cool HyperCard product; inwardly, I was groaning, because my first glances at Ultimate Robot told me getting to the quality level I demanded was going to be…a long haul. And if the product stank, that might be the end of the Evil Empire's efforts to ship Mac CD-ROMs, of which they'd shipped precisely one, although there were a couple from the fine folks at CogApp in the works. So I asked if I could take a more detailed look at the existing build and give a more detailed evaluation at a meeting the next day.

Byron enthusiastically agreed, as did his lead developer, a somewhat frumpy professor-looking man whose name, I'm embarrassed to say, now completely eludes me. (I ought to search through my old email for it.)

The next day only Byron, his lead developer, and I showed up for the meeting on time. There were a few minutes of awkward silence, perfunctory greetings, and idle comments as we waited. I was just planning on keeping my mouth shut—I mean, I was a 24-year old kid with hair down to my ass about to deliver a fairly detailed assessment of their title's various technical shortcomings. No point in antagonizing these guys any earlier than I had to, right? Time passed, and I'm not sure how this happened, but when the head of our business unit finally showed up, Byron and I were deep into a discussion of Harlan Ellison's never-produced I, Robot screenplay based on Asimov's robot stories, which had been serialized in Asimov's Science Fiction a few years before. I'd totally spaced I was talking Harlan not only with the head of a New York publishing outfit but also a man who knew Ellison personally. Probably for as many years as I'd been breathing. I should have been quaking in my unworthy boots; instead, we were talking about the process of adapting stories for different mediums, and, again, Byron was nothing but enthusiasm. This was stuff he cared about.

I don't think I met Byron again after that day; during the meeting I did my best to leave him with the inescapable certainty that, if I was put in charge of testing his product, it would either ship far, far later than anyone wanted, or meet an unheralded, undignified end. Suffice to say we put Ultimate Robot through 30-someodd additional test releases—and trying to meet release schedules put me through a few 100-hour weeks—before I even considered signing off. We made it as strong as we could, although the implementation, content, and design were, naturally, out of my hands. Preiss's developers were graciously shipped out from New York for a week to iron out the final bugs: I think I kept them around over two months. It is not the fondest memory of my software development days.

Over the years I occasionally heard from Byron via email. Minor stuff: maybe an author event or other going-on in the Seattle area he thought I might be interested in, or he'd seen my name go by on some unrelated project. I asked him if he knew a screenwriter who had name-dropped Byron (he did); a few years ago, one of Byron's companies optioned some short music clips from me for an unspecified online project.

What I now know to be my final message from Byron came in November, 2004, noting that his company ibooks had just printed an edition of Ellison's I, Robot screenplay for Simon & Schuster to be packaged with an edition of the DVD release of 2004's I, Robot movie (which is, emphatically, not filmed from that screenplay!), including color prints from artist Mark Zug. I hadn't realized Byron had commissioned the color illustrations for the screenplay, let alone back in 1992, shortly before I met him: I was just impressed that, over a decade later, he remembered the only real face-to-face conversation we'd ever had.

Some lives are too short.