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I’d like to thank a coterie of early readers for giving such useful comments. Mistakes that remain are mine. The readers include David Groff, Betty Levin, Andy Newman, and William Reiss of John Hawkins and Associates; and at William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins, Cassie Jones and Johnathan Wilber.
Douglas Smith’s devotion to the exercise of illustrating the Wicked Years is an inspiration to me to continue writing the books just to see what he’ll come up with.
FOUR YEARS AGO, to prepare for writing Son of a Witch, I reread Wicked for the first time in quite a while. I was startled to see something I’d never noticed before: a little plot device I had worked up to explain the mysterious presence in Elphaba’s life of the dwarf (in A Lion Among Men called Mr. Boss). I saw that his employment and employer bore similarity to aspects of Susan Cooper’s novel for children called The Dark Is Rising, which I’d read some fifteen years before writing Wicked. While I have had fun in the Wicked Years slipping sidelong references to books by L. Frank Baum and other inspiring fantasists, and to the famous MGM film of 1939, I didn’t intend my homages to descend into appropriation.
At once I wrote to Susan Cooper—a long-standing friend and colleague—and I apologized for the accidental theft. She answe
red with her usual clarity and courtesy, citing a remark by J. R. R. Tolkien (who had once been her teacher at Oxford) that reminds us of the differences, in ancient storytelling, between invention, diffusion, and inheritance: “Speaking of the history of stories and especially of fairy-stories we may say that the Pot of Soup, the Cauldron of Story, has always been boiling and to it have continually been added new bits, dainty and undainty.” Had she been possessed by a litigious mood, she might have gone on to quote: “There are many things in the Cauldron, but the Cooks do not dip in the ladle quite blindly. Their selection is important.”
