She didn't want anyone to know it, but she was a character out of a science fiction novel - the young genius who overcomes tremendous adversity and achieves great things through courage and perseverance. The classic hero also has luck on her side, but Jenna's luck ran out on March 4, 2001, and it breaks my heart.

She came to work at Tor when she was 15, part of our high-school intern program. She was a scholarship student at Hunter College High School, and I remember her as an intense little girl with wild hair and big glasses, who would stare at me and ask searching questions - then flinch as if she expected to be dismissed instead of answered. At first she was always surprised when I answered her at length - but they were such good questions.

Gradually we learned that she was an orphan, her mother recently dead of AIDS, her father long gone. She had a baby sister, and an aged grandmother, who seemed more in need of Jenna's care than able to take care of the girls. Jenna was determined to make a good life for herself, and she had learned not to expect much help in life.

Two years later we offered her a full-time job, and I was very happy to take this ambitioius, clever, funny young thing as my editorial assistant, sharing her time with Patrick.

She learned really fast, and the shyness disappeared as her confidence grew. She understood bureaucracies, and she knew how to make friends with the people who run them. She could make writers feel loved, and knew how to distinguish between things that were really important and merely urgent. She knew how to get things done, and she knew how to keep me on deadline, no small feat at times! We became close friends. She had a wonderful taste in fiction that encompassed both commercial fantasy and the edgiest sf of the late 90s. And she didn't just know what she liked, she knew why she liked it. She edited books for us, she and Rob Killheffer published the wonderful Century, she worked for a time for the New York Review of Science Fiction. She was burning brighter and brighter every year.

And like all great assistants, she was too good to keep.

It was only a few years before it became clear that she must be promoted. Full editor at 21, the youngest ever in the business. I missed our three-times-a-day phone calls, but we stayed in close touch and I had the great pleasure of continuing to help her and watching her grow in her profession. She was terrific. She was just beginning to establish a list of her own, just beginning to show us what she could do. Her death is a tragedy for the future of our genre.

And all that is just a professional biography. My memories of Jenna are a kaleidoscope of images. The little girl over the breakfast table in a hotel, so nervous, wanting the job so bad that she was shaking. Jenna bringing me up to date on all the gossip late at night at a convention. Struggling over a P&L to make sure Jenna could answer any possible question Tom or Linda might ask her. My heart in my throat as she flung herself off the bungee-jumping tower next to the Queen Mary. Listening in amazement as she talked football with The Guys - Jenna was a jock. Shooting pool. Laughing over cow-print computer cozies. Talking strategy for a deal or an auction. Showing me pictures of her cats, demanding pictures of my horses. Her expression when she told me she had to go bail her boyfriend out of jail in Providence. Coming out of a sweat-lodge into the Arizona night, ecstatic with the experience. Wheedling me into coming along for Friday night drinks with the 20-year-olds of Tor. Watching the Tempel Lipizzans in morning schooling during an escape from a convention in Chicago. Yelling at her for not taking her medication.

I knew her for ten years. I thought I'd know her forever. I'll miss her more than I can say.


Beth Meacham