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Kevin’s collaborations with Doug Beason, like The Trinity Paradox and Ill Wind, and the ongoing, highly successful Dune series with Brian Herbert .
    In writing to Kevin in response to reading one of those, The Butlerian Jihad, I talked about the subtle skill of his craft:
    More and more I notice how truly masterful writing, yours and others’, leaves the reader with an overall impression of making it all seem easy —regardless of how much work has gone into the craft, the background, the research, and the intellectual underpinnings (or maybe because of all that), it just breathes off the page in a smooth flow of seemingly-inevitable revelations.
    I know I’ve made similar comments about drummers before: some of them try to make simple things look difficult and impressive, but the true masters make the impossible seem easy.
    It doesn’t seem fair to the creator of that carefully-wrought illusion, undermining all the effort and experience necessary to operate at that rarefied level, but it’s the ultimate nature of mastery, I guess. (It may be lonely at the top, but it must feel better than being at the bottom!)
    In late 2002, toward the end of a long American tour that had me drained and feeling sorry for myself, I wrote to Kevin:
    One bright spot I can report along the way is that during some idle hours in the tuning room, on the bus, and in hotel rooms, I had the great pleasure of reading Hidden Empire.
    First of all, I have to tell you that if you or anyone else had any doubt, I think you have achieved a true Masterpiece with this book—meaning that term in the sense which you clarified for me years ago. It is definitely a piece of work to lay alongside those of the Masters, to be accepted by them and by the great abstraction of “the Audience” as one of the pantheon of masters yourself.
    Congratulations. I really think it is a great book. I was so impressed by it at the time, and also after the fact—a true test of quality, I’m sure you’ll agree.
    The craftsmanship alone is sheer perfection. The architecture of the storytelling moves forward with grace and economy, combining girders and panels of deft characterizations, wondrous settings, admirable “imagineering,” and all the superstructure of pure thought that has preceded all that.
    (The reader will have observed by now that when Kevin asked me to write this essay, it was easy to say yes—I knew the important stuff had already been written, either by me or by him. I would only have to look it up!)
    Here are some of Kevin’s thoughts on “style,” from a recent exchange of e-mails on the subject:
    I think in a letter to you many years ago, I talked about creating believable worlds and scenes; one of the vital tricks I mentioned was to nail down a few small but very precise and mundane details (the color of a piece of lint, the brand of a gum wrapper wadded up in a gutter), and the reader will buy into the rest of what you’re describing. It seems easy, seems transparent. It’s simple to show off, to be flashy and flamboyant, to prance around and point at marvelous overblown metaphors. It’s more difficult to be subtle.
    To which I replied, in part:
    Another note about writing style that occurred to me in connection with what I wrote the other day: I just finished Gabriel García Márquez’s memoir, Living to Tell the Tale, and he described his early decision as a writer to avoid all adverbs of the “ly” sort (mento in Spanish, I think), and how it became almost pathological with him, just as Hemingway tried to cut every unnecessary adjective.
    In your case, with the necessary “mission” of describing an entirely imaginary universe for the reader, it would seem especially difficult to avoid extraneous adjectives and adverbs—and yet you do, making the descriptions of planets, cities, palaces, customs, and technology fall more-or-less naturally into the ongoing narrative. And . . . you make it look so easy.
    As we have discussed, that is