Bill Fawcett (writer)
American writer and game designer (born 1947) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
William B. Fawcett (born May 13, 1947)[1] is an American editor, anthologist, game designer, book packager, fiction writer, and historian.
Life
Fawcett and fellow science fiction writer Jody Lynn Nye were married in 1987. They first met at a science fiction convention in 1985. At that time, Fawcett owned a gaming company in Niles, Illinois, and Nye began to work as a freelance writer for the company.[2]
Career
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Perspective
Bill Fawcett was one of the players in early Dungeons & Dragons games being played in the Chicago and Milwaukee areas, using photocopied prototypes of the rules handed out by Gary Gygax.[3]: 166 Darwin Bromley brought Fawcett on as a partner in Mayfair Games soon after the company was formed in 1980, and they worked together to design the game Empire Builder (1980).[3]: 166 As a veteran role-playing gamer, Fawcett got Mayfair involved in the RPG field, and the company kicked off its Role Aids line with Beastmaker Mountain (1982).[3]: 166 Fawcett was friends with Robert Asprin and Lynn Abbey, and FASA was able to leverage their connection with Mayfair to obtain a license to publish Thieves' World role-playing game adventures from 1982–1984.[3]: 120, 167 Fawcett and Jordan Weisman designed the robot arena fighting game Combots (1983) for FASA.[3]: 121
Fawcett produced the Crossroads books (1987–1988), a series of licensed gamebooks published by Tor.[3]: 168 He also authored the short-lived SwordQuest gamebooks series.[4] He edited the book The War Years 1: The Far Stars War (1990).[5] With David Drake, he co-edited The Fleet series (1988-1991), as well as its sequels, Battlestation, Book One (1992), and Battlestation, Book Two: Vanguard (1993).[6] As a book packager, Fawcett was able to arrange a publishing deal between Wizards of the Coast and HarperCollins for novels set in the Magic: The Gathering multiverse of Dominia; the first novel in this series was Arena (1994).[3]: 278
His 2008 book, Oval Office Oddities, was described as "Chock-full of information—trivia, anecdotes, charts, illustrations, etc." focusing on the lives of American presidents and their wives.[7]
Works
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Fawcett and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro write mystery novels together under the pen name Quinn Fawcett.[8] Fawcett was also a field historian for the Navy SEAL museum in Fort Pierce, Florida, and has co-authored work on the US Navy Seals in Vietnam.[8]
As writer
- Cold Cash Warrior: Combat Command in the World of Robert Asprin's Cold Cash War (with Robert Asprin) (1989)[9]
Mistakes in History series
- Trust Me, I Know What I'm Doing
- 100 Mistakes That Changed History
- Men At War
- It Seemed Like A Good Idea
- How To Lose A War At Sea
- Doomed To Repeat
- How To Lose WWII
- How To Lose The Civil War
- Hunters And Shooters
- How To Lose A War
- It Looked Good On Paper
- Oval Office Oddities: An Irreverent Collection of Presidential Facts, Follies and Foibles[7]
- You Said What?[10]
- How To Lose A Battle
- You Did What? Mad Plans and Great Historical Disasters (with Brian Thomsen) (2004)[11]
SwordQuest series
- SwordQuest: Quest for the Unicorn's Horn (1985)
- SwordQuest: Quest for the Dragon's Eye (1985)
- SwordQuest: Quest for the Demon Gate (1986)
- SwordQuest: Quest for the Elf King (1987)
Short-stories
- "Lincoln's Charge" (1992) (collected in Mike Resnick's anthology Alternate Presidents)
- "Zealot" (1993) (collected in Resnick's anthology Alternate Warriors)
- "Through the Dragon's Eye" (1994) (collected in Christopher Stasheff's anthology Dragon's Eye)
- "The Last Crusader" (1998) (collected in Harry Turtledove's anthology Alternate Generals)
As editor
- Crafter I (with Christopher Stasheff) (1991)[12]
- Gods of War (1992)[12]
- The Fleet anthology series (with David Drake)[6][13]
- The Fleet: The Fleet (1987) aka The Fleet, Book 1[13]
- The Fleet: Counter Attack (1988) aka The Fleet, Book 2[13]
- The Fleet: Breakthrough (1989) aka The Fleet, Book 3[13]
- The Fleet: Sworn Allies (1990) aka The Fleet, Book 4[13]
- The Fleet: Total war (1990) aka The Fleet, Book 5[13]
- The Fleet: Crisis (1991) aka The Fleet, Book 6[13]
- Battlestations anthology series — sequel to The Fleet anthology series[6]
- Battlestation (with David Drake) (1992); aka Battlestation I[14]
- Battlestation II (with Christopher Stasheff) (1993); aka Battlestation: Vanguard[12]
- Battlestations (2011); omnibus edition of Battlestation I and Battlestation II
- The Teams: An Oral History of the U.S. Navy SEALs with Kevin Dockery (1998)[15]
- Making Contact: A Serious Handbook for Locating and Communicating With Extraterrestrials (1998)[16][17]
- The Warmasters (2002)[18]
- Masters of Fantasy (with Brian Thomsen) (2004)[11]
- We Three Dragons: A Trio of Dragon Tales for the Holiday Season (2005)[19]
- The Battle for Azeroth: Adventure, Alliance and Addiction in the 'World of Warcraft' (2006)[20]
- Liftport: Opening Space to Everyone (2006)[21]
- Nebula Awards Showcase 2010 (2010)[citation needed]
- Mooney, J. E. & Bill Fawcett (eds.). Shadows of the New Sun : stories in honor of Gene Wolfe. Tor.
References
External links
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