How to run Congress and write sexy thrillers - get a coauthor

Insight on the News, May 8, 1995 by Sean Piccoli

Science-fiction novelist Bill Forstchen has published 17 books, including a few genre best-sellers, in a writing career that has made his Catholic mother, Dorothy, proud. But she worried about book No. 18 - a military thriller titled 1945 that her son cowrote with House Speaker Newt Gingrich - when the New York Times got hold of the galleys.

The paper, trumpeting Gingrich's novelistic debut, reprinted a scene in which a Nazi spy - a "shameless" Swedish blonde the authors describe as a slice of "delicious doom" - seduces the White House chief of staff. "I had to tell my mother,`No, Mom, I'm not writing dirty books,'" Forstchen recalled on a recent visit to Washington.

Dirty prose is not the only rumor Forstchen and Gingrich have tried to scuttle regarding their still-unreleased book. 1945, scheduled for publication in August by Baen Books, has received gobs of advance publicity, thanks to its politically famous coauthor. But it also has inspired a mixture of curiosity, controversy and occasional ridicule that seems to be preventing Forstchen - a friend and political ally of Gingrich - from savoring all the prepublication buzz.

"I'm really angry at some of the press," says the, New Jersey native, who teaches history at a college in North Carolina, where he lives with his wife and daughter. But Forstchen sounds resigned to what he calls "deliberate distortions" by critics who view 1945 as an opportunity to mock Gingrich.

"We knew while we were writing the book that every word was going to be hyperanalyzed," says Forstchen, who looks boyish enough, even at age 44, to cringe convincingly at his mother's disapproval. First came the steamy excerpt, which he felt was misleading enough. Then came a front-page story disclosing a cameo by one Lt. George Bush, a young naval aviator who is described in the narrative as "goofy." The authors swore that the apparent nudge at the former president was a stray comment penciled in by an editor and picked up in galleys.

Finally, there was a story suggesting that Gingrich, who dreamed up the plot and gets top billing on its jacket, was author only in name. Forstchen fumes at the notion: "He was a full participant in this book from beginning to end," The two split a $30,000 advance from the publisher.

The project got under way two years ago when Gingrich, then House minority whip, approach publisher Jim Baen with a World War II scenario in which the Nazis win Europe and head for the United States. Baen, in turn, approached Forstchen, known by science-fiction fans for the Star Voyager Academy and Lost Regiment series, the latter about a group of Civil War soldiers who get sucked into interplanetary adventures.

Forstchen caught up with Gingrich in Atlanta in February 1994. "I met with him between speeches," he recalls. "We would sit in the back of a Jeep and rush from one speech to another" talking about the book.

They wrote an outline, signed a contract, and traded chapters for editing. The two worked together easily, he says, because they shared an interest in science, technology and history The first draft was completed about two weeks before the November election.

With 1945 headed for print and the authors under contract to write two more books, Forstchen and Gingrich probably can only guess how the first will be received as they begin the second.

An American Reader

The past half-century has witnessed something of an Emerson boom, beginning slowly but growing to impressive proportions. Ralph L. Rusk's six-volume edition of Emerson's Letters in 1939 was followed by three volumes of Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, published between 1960 and 1982, four volumes of Complete Sermons, published between 1989 and 1992, and other works.

As teams of scholars transcribe and annotate what Emerson wrote during the course of his long career, Robert D. Richardson has published a new biography, Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Univ. of Calif. Press, 680 pp). Richardson seeks to make his subject's life and work comprehensible by excavating its sources. The author of a prize-winning 1986 biography of Henry Thoreau, he describes his approach to both writers as reading what they read "and then to relate their reading to their writing."

That sounds modest, but both men wrote a staggering amount and read a great deal more. Indeed, a recurrent feature of The Mind on Fire is its catalogs of the books Emerson read in particular periods - great cascading torrents of titles, some of them wildly arcane. What Emerson read in a month is more than most professors would try to tackle in a sabbatical year; and Emerson was anything but a man of leisure.