Wednesday, July 01, 2009

Curse of the Sprawling Fantasy Epic

As you may have noticed, I haven't been able to report the completion of a book for the past several weeks. Partly, this has been because I have been working in advance of my target, and so decided to focus on other things instead. However, part of the problem has been to do with the content of "A Sword From Red Ice", the third but not final part of a trilogy from JV Jones.

The first two parts of this series were excellent novels. The setting was very well drawn, the characters were interesting, and things happened. It was good. When I finished the second book, the third was due to be published in hardcover in a month or two, and then paperback a year later. This was unfortunate, but I accepted the wait.

That was about five years ago.

The third book was published in hardback about eighteen months ago, and then paperback a few months ago. When it was published, there was also the news that this was now book three in a tetralogy. Uh-oh...

It seems that long waits of this sort are the kiss of death for fantasy epics. "The Wheel of Time" is the most obvious example, with "A Song of Ice and Fire" suffering the same fate recently. And now this series has the same issue. The problem is that the author has too many characters and too much story, and the whole thing becomes a sprawling mess. It becomes increasingly difficult to keep it under control and keep the story tight, which means deadlines get blown, the series bloats... and then because the series has bloated the author expands what they're writing some more, and you end up with book after book in which nothing happens.

I'm currently just over 100 pages into "A Sword From Red Ice", just under a sixth of the way through the novel. About half of the main characters have been reintroduced, and almost nothing has happened. A lot of people have talked... but they didn't really say much.

By contrast, "Lord of the Flies" was almost done by this point. Bond would be busy having the villain's evil scheme explained to him over cocktails.

And all those extra words don't make the novel better. Quite the contrary, they just take up space.

I've complained about this before, I know. But it really is a plague in recent novels, and especially in the fantasy genre. It seems authors have forgotten how to concisely draw characters and situations, and to stay on topic to tell their stories. Or perhaps they just need stronger editors.

Either way, there are very few stories that both require more text to tell than "Lord of the Rings" that are also truly worth the telling.

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