Series:Chap Foey Rider

Early in 1974, while living in Tahiti, Hayford Peirce noticed that much of his incoming mail appeared to delivered faster the longer the distance around the globe it had travelled. Musing on this, he quickly wrote a two-page tongue-in-cheek story revolving around this curious observance and, as a joke, mailed it to Ben Bova, the editor of Analog. To make the joke even more elaborate, he attempted to create an anagram for the story's protagonist out of his own name. The only name he could come up with was Chap Foey Rider. Given this particular constraint, he was then obliged to create a character who could plausibly have such a name: hence the Anglo-Chinese factor, Chap Foey Rider, and his extended family. Bova loved the story, thought up the Galactic Postal Union as a science-fictional gimmick to add to it, had Peirce rewrite the ending while sitting in Bova's New York City office one August afternoon the day before Richard Nixon resigned, and encouraged him to continue Rider as a series character.