Babel Clash

Brandon Sanderson was one of our first two Babel Clash guests.  In honor of his help getting Babel Clash started, I wanted to veer from our usual routine for one post to discuss the next book in a series that you may recognize, the Wheel of Time.

The Gathering Storm

Can you believe that it has been 19 years since Robert Jordan’s first Wheel of Time novel?  Robert Jordan was my favorite writer.  He wrote dramatic scenes with charismatic and dangerous characters, in a setting vivid and rich with mythology.  The series clicked along like a finely tuned machine.  This was high fantasy its most epic, grandiose and spellbinding.

Then the series lost some momentum.  The plot’s pace slowed under the weight of its many characters.  Fans were anxious for progress and resolution.  They were waiting for a book that was something special.

The Gathering Storm is that book.

The plot doesn’t just progress.  It cruises by at a breakneck speed, with frightening hairpin turns and shocking jolts.  It is the darkest book in the series.  Beloved characters make frightening choices, and prophecies unfold.  Storm concludes with two of the most memorable moments in the entire series.

Brandon Sanderson completed the book after Jordan’s passing.  Jordan left behind many notes and some portion of the text.  Brandon weaves his style and Jordan’s together seamlessly.  Expect Brandon’s own work to get extra attention based on his success here.

It’s not the end.  Two more books, Towers of Midnight and A Memory of Light, will follow.  I, for one, am very grateful it’s not over yet.

Congratulations to Brandon this accomplishment!  It’s a great book.

Thank you again to Brandon Sanderson.  It’s been a great two weeks of conversation.

Our next guest is China Mieville.   China, whose work is often described as “weird fiction,”  is the writer of Perdido Street Station and YA novel Un Lun Dun.

His new novel, The City and the City, is a hard-boiled detective story featuring Inspector Tyador Borlu.  It is set in the strange, mysterious and magical cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma.   The mystery is fascinating, and China’s unique approach to these cities and their cultures will intrigue science fiction and fantasy fans.  There’s something here for everyone, and this is a great starting point if you’ve never read China’s work before.

Check in tomorrow to learn the topic of our next debate.

This is the part where I pitch my book, apparently. Only, I’ll admit, I’ve never been that great at this part of the whole process. I once heard a wise man (Robert Jordan) say something along the lines of “Well, I wrote the series as long as I did because that was how long it took me to tell the story. If I could tell the story in a one-page summary, that’s what I’d have written in the first place.” I always had trouble writing a query letter or synopsis for one of my books. (Note how I cleverly worded that sentence in such a way as to keep from having to figure out how to spell the plural of synopsis.)

But if you’d like a summary, here’s a page where I posted some things my editor wrote about the novel:

Blog Post: It’s Out!

That page also includes a nice long list of reviews from top tier media sources, including some glowing words from:
Publisher’s Weekly (They call the book Powerful, extraordinary, and highly entertaining.)
The Library Journal (They call the book “essential reading for fantasy fans.”)
Booklist (They call the book superior.)
And Michael Moorcock, who says: “Anyone looking for a different and refreshing fantasy novel will be delighted by this exceptional tale of magic, mystery and the politics of divinity.”

Are the words of those nice people why you should read my book? Well, I guess it depends. What and what are your personal tastes? Warbreaker is a stand-alone epic fantasy, self-contained in one book with an original magic system. The story focuses on reversals and witty dialogue, along with some (hopefully) deep and interesting characters. Is that why you should read the book? Perhaps.

If you’ve liked what I’ve had to say on the blog, if you enjoy epic fantasy that tries to take a few steps away from the cliché, if you like to support people who post their books on-line for free alongside the store product, or if you’re simply curious who this guy is that is finishing the Wheel of Time, maybe that is why you should read the book.

But it’s hard for me to explain to people what they ’should’ do. You make that call yourselves. It’s been a pleasure visiting with you all for these two weeks, and I hope to do it again some time. If you’re curious about my work, check out the link above. If not, then you’re fine by me. Not every book is going to appeal to every reader, and we can like different things and still get along.

Thanks for listening to my random rants!

Brandon

Brandon, thank you for sharing your time and thoughts with us here at Babel Clash.  Would you like to take your last post or two and share with us why Warbreaker is an essential summer read and a perfect addition to any book lover’s collection?

All, attached is a YouTube interview with Brandon.  Please check it out, and then, if you haven’t done so already, track down your copy of Warbreaker:  YouTube Video

Warbreaker @ Borders.com

Because of the excellent discussion we had here about the whole series vs. standalones idea, I thought it would be interesting to delve into the types of series out there and talk a little about how I envision each one.  This is kind of off the cuff; I’ve never really looked at this before.  But perhaps it will be interesting.  If not, at the very least the post might make some fertile grounds for mockery.

Now, I’m not talking genres here—I’m talking about the actual format of the series.  As I see it, there are several different types, and each have their advantages and disadvantages.  And, because I’m like that, I figure I’ll try to name each one (mostly just for the purpose of discussion here).

Type One:  The Saga

I’m borrowing this title from Lee Modesitt, who talks about his main series (the Saga of Recluse) in these terms.  A saga by this definition is a series where the books are connected only in that they deal with the same world.  A saga jumps around in time quite a bit, and rarely follows the same viewpoint characters for more than a few books.  The author is really telling the story of the world and its history, rather than talking about a specific set of characters.  The most famous example in sf/f would probably be the Pern books.  You rarely have the same main protagonist from one book to another, and the books were not released in chronological order.  Recluse, mentioned above, is another excellent example of this kind of series.  Discworld would fit here too, though those do have a larger number of consistent viewpoint characters than some of the others.

I tend to like sagas because of the way they mix a standalone with a series.  You can pick up any Pern or Discworld book anywhere in the series, and generally you’ll be all right if you’ve skipped a few.  Continuity between books is less important than the story of the contained novel.  If you do read them straight through, you gain a little bit more understanding, and can enjoy the ’series’ aspect of it that way.  Of course, you always have the trouble of deciding whether to read the books chronologically as written, or as they happen in-world.  (Personally, I vote for as written.  Dragonflight isn’t the same if you’ve read the books about the arrival of mankind on the planet.  Though, thinking of Pratchett, perhaps it would be interesting to start with the first one chronologically.  What would that be?  Small Gods?)

Type Two: Serialized Epic

These are the series where the next book in the series picks up right where the previous one left off.  In essence, the author is writing one enormous book, releasing it in installments.  Obviously, The Wheel of Time would fit here.  Lord of the Rings is another great example.  I’d probably cheat and slip Mistborn in here, though there are year gaps between the books.  One essential feature of this type of book would be distinct, continuing characters and a continuing story that arcs over the course of several books.

The Serialized Epic is great because of the way it lets us invest in a series and characters over the long haul.  The biggest problems are probably learning curve (you can’t just pick up the middle book in a series without being terribly confused) and cliffhangers.  It’s extremely difficult to walk the line between giving each story its own arc and giving the entire series a larger arc, which leads to a lot of frustration as the books take time to wind down.  However, despite its flaws, when this is done right it’s my favorite kind of series.

Type Three:  The Continuing Adventures

This is the series where you get one central protagonist who has a complete story in each book.  Then, when another book comes out, that character can go on another adventure.  It differs from the saga in the fact that it goes chronologically and focuses on a single, central viewpoint character.  The Dresden Files and the Miles Vorkosigan books are great examples of this type of series.  Any given book could be the end, if it had to be, but we keep coming back to read more about the central character.  Sometimes, there are longer arcs across books—but those are always secondary to the mystery or objective in each given volume.

These kinds of series can be very successful.  (In fact, outside SF/F, I’d say this was the standard way of doing a series.)  You gain even more flexibility for drawing in new readers with each book, as it doesn’t really matter where you start in the series.  Sagas can get confusing because of their odd chronology, but the Continuing Adventures books are much more streamlined.  However, they do usually trade some measure of scope and urgency to gain this format.  I’ve found that I’m not as quick to run out and buy the next book in a Continuing Adventures book because the question of “What happens next” isn’t as strong as in the Serialized Epic.  At the same time, I don’t get as frustrated with these series for not getting a volume out on time.  They aren’t as confusing as the Saga, but at the same time, you don’t get to see the sheer scope of the world in the same way as you do with a series that jumps around through time and shows a lot of different viewpoints.

Well, I think that’s gone long enough.  There are other types of series we could define.  The Sequel Series (where an author follows one series with another) could be one.  What kinds did I miss?  Are there series that don’t fit any of these?  What do you think of the categories?  Did this even need to be defined?  (Probably not, but I like thinking about and writing about these kinds of things.)  What are your favorite types of series, and why? I’ll be eying the comments to see what I missed.  Maybe we can come up with a good framework that covers all the series out there.

Sometimes I’m jealous of the novels sold into YA.  I want them in the Fantasy & SF section.  Sure, I understand the publisher’s decision, but the books are so good and the appeal so broad that it seems a shame not to show them off all over the store.  One example that comes to mind is D. M. Cornish’s Monster Blood Tattoo series.  Those are some gorgeous books.

Speaking of Monster Blood Tattoo, there are illustrations!  Would you like to see more illustrated novels?  There are a couple of interesting adult illustrated novels forthcoming:  Peter & Max, a Fables novel & the Child Thief by Brom.  Is this a trend that you’d like to see catch on?

When I was in high school, I spent some time doing service at a local library.  For the most part, this meant re-shelving books or looking through the stacks to make certain everything was in order.  I remember being asked to shelve a copy of Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey.  I couldn’t find the place in the computer where it was supposed to go, so asked the librarian.  She told me I’d been looking in the wrong place—Dragonflight was shelved in Children’s, not adult.

That’s right.  This award winning story, one of the best spec-fic books of all time, was shelved in Children’s.  That bothered me for reasons I couldn’t quite define.  It made me feel childish and annoyed at myself for feeling childish.  What I was experiencing was something that a lot of literacy professionals have talked about recently—that teens HATE the idea of being thought of as children.  (Who knew?)

There’s nothing wrong with the children’s section, and there’s nothing wrong with shelving McCaffrey there.  If her books are of interest to teens, then putting them where teens will find them is a good thing.  (As a culture, though, I think we still have a tendency to look down on teen/middle grade/children’s authors and books.  To shelf something in children’s still strikes many of us as something of an insult.  I wonder why that is.)

Anyway, as the 90’s passed, more and more ‘teen’ or ‘YA’ sections started appearing in bookstores and libraries in order to provide a place for teens to go find books without having to enter the dreaded children’s section.  About the same time, interestingly, fantasy fiction was invaded by a plethora of fantastic YA and middle grade fantasy novels.  His Dark Materials has been brought up, so has Harry Potter.  I’m partial to Garth Nix’s work as well, and they’re just the tip of a mound of very good, excellently worldbuilt fantasy novels that appeared in the late 90’s and early 2000’s.

As someone working in this genre, all of this leaves me to wonder and speculate.  Did the increasing prominence of YA sections add to this explosion?  Was it all the Harry Potter bubble?  Or were people jumping ship from traditional epic to YA because epic was beginning to feel stale?  Perhaps it was all of this.

I think it made the genre better.  I think we’ve had to look at our sluggish beginnings in epic, and realize that two hundred pages of wandering around a castle before conflict appears may not be the best way to begin a story.  We’ve had to become more creative in our worldbuilding, partially (I think) to compete with the elegance of YA competition.  Probably, most epic authors don’t even think about this, though I bet many of them have read Potter and the others.  You can’t help but react to, incorporate, and learn from what you read.

What do you all think?  What are your favorite YA fantasy novels, and how do they compare to your favorite epic fantasy novels?  Am I just searching for correlation where there is none, or is my speculation on to something?

Talking about people taking chances with fantasy and pushing the genre in interesting places has me thinking about one of my favorite spec-fic subgenres: Steampunk.

I’ve been fascinated by the Steampunk (and its younger cousin gearpunk/springpunk/whatever you want to call it) since my early days enjoying the anime movies my brother would dig up here and there.  (If you’re lost as to what these are, might I point you to Wikipedia?  They’ll do a better job of explaining it there than I have time for here.)

There are a lot of interesting things going on in the sub-genre.  Scott Westerfield’s LEVIATHAN looks very well done, and the sub-genre as a whole seems to be enjoying a renaissance of books, stories, and visuals.  (A lot of fantasy art lately has had a decidedly steampunk edge.)  I actually wrote a very fun gearpunk story two years back—a full novel, actually, that I haven’t had time to revise or do anything with.  (The Wheel of Time has proven somewhat distracting to me lately….)  It’s called Scribbler.  Maybe I’ll get around to doing something with it eventually.

I have a lot of curiosities about this genre.  What is it that draws us to it?  Why do we love this classical use of technology, turned in to science fiction?  Perhaps it captures that sense of exploration and wonder that used to exist to a larger extent in scientific discovery.  Science is still exciting, but it’s become something much more…technical these days.  Back in the late 1800’s early 1900’s, there was a feel that science could not only solve all problems, but that it was something every day people could explore and understand.  A lot of branches of science were relatively new, at least in the modern form, and there was a general excitement and enthusiasm to the process.

Now, science is something we study in school and take tests on.  In general, even the common person has a grasp of basic scientific principles.  What is happening is amazing, but at the same time, there’s a density to it.  Trying to figure out quantum physics or other areas where breakthroughs are happening can twist the brain in knots.  Some of the wonder is gone.  And so, we find ourselves looking back at times when science WAS magic to us, and we create stories that explore these eras.
Or maybe that’s all just me waxing overly philosophical.  What are your thoughts?  Do you like Steampunk?  Is it played out and over-done, or is it here to stay?  Why haven’t we had a really good steampunk live-action movie?  (Note that I said a GOOD one.  LXG and Wild Wild West do NOT count.  Hellboy gets points for having some gearpunk elements, though.)  Why does this subgenre fascinate us so?

I like the Arthur C. Clarke quote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

The more advanced the technology in a fantasy setting, the less wondrous magic appears.  Technology gives us the power to fly and the capability to communicate across thousands of miles.  Not so long ago, both acts would have seemed magical to the average person.  The science featured in some of the far-future sf novels appears as strange, wondrous and weird as many magic systems.

This is a big reason why so much fantasy is grounded in the past.  I’d love to see more books that approach fantasy and science fiction as one genre, instead of genres in opposition.  Is it possible to integrate the two in some way and make it work well?  Where are our futuristic fantasies?  Can anyone think of great examples?

I can still remember the first fantasy novel I read that used gunpowder.  It was one of the Robin McKinley books, the Blue Sword or The Hero and the Crown.  I’ve mentioned before in one of these posts just how wrong that felt to me.  And then, the fact that I felt it was wrong ALSO felt wrong to me.  Shouldn’t a fantasy author be allowed to play with any kind of technology and magic mix that they want?  Shouldn’t any time period be valid for creating the fantastic?  And still, it felt wrong.

Interestingly, many fantasy characters are anachronistic themselves.  At least as much so as guns.  One standard aspect of fantasy fiction is the idea of the ’socially progressive yet technologically slowed’ society.  Some fantasy authors tiptoe around it.  I don’t.  I admit it straight out–I’m writing about societies where people, for one reason or another, are more like people in our world socially, even if much of their technology hasn’t caught up to ours yet.  Perhaps I can get away with this a tad more than most as I have yet to write a fantasy that takes place in what I envision as a medieval society.  Elantris and Warbreaker are Renaissance, Mistborn is 19th century.  Only in all three cases, there is no gunpowder.

Perhaps this is my old bias influencing me.  In the Mistborn novels, it’s a world element and there’s a very good reason why there’s no gunpowder.  In the other two, no explanation is given.  I think it’s reasonable to say that just because technology grew in a certain way in our world, it doesn’t mean each and every world is going to follow the same path.  And yet, at the same time, I doubt that adding gunpowder to either Elantris or Warbreaker would have changed the books in any great measure.

What are your thoughts on these topics?  Does gunpowder ruin a fantasy immediately, or is it just another element of technology and world an author can play with?  Does it bother you that fantasy characters sometimes talk and act like more modern people, or do you prefer it?  (I happen to like this last one both ways.  I enjoy reading a book—like Doomsday Book—where the author tries to accurately portray the way people thought in previous eras.  But I have trouble relating to those characters, and that inhibits my ability to get into the characters’ heads.  And so I generally gravitate toward books where the characters are much easier to relate to, and feel more like people from our era.)