As pointed out on rasfw

[james_davis_nicoll]

The perils and pleasures of long-running fantasy series

Also as pointed out on rasfw: Poor Gerrold; his grand unfinished series has pretty fallen off people's radar.

Comments

[lilfluff]

Ah yes, I do here rumors that Gerrold will have a new Chtorr book out... sometime. Maybe.

The scary thing is I can picture the book being finished, maybe even finishing off the series, and the publisher saying, "Mmmm. No. It's been how long since the previous book? Sorry, there won't be enough audience left."

But, Gerrold is no more our B**** than Martin. And as a reader I'd rather picture what could be than see something that seriously sub-par pushed out the door simply to shut up nagging 'fans' (for certain stalkerish definitions of the word fan).

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Some gems in the comments:

Once upon a time, when I was but a wee Princess--settle in, this is a long 'un--I kept hearing Piers Anthony praised to the skies among my nerdier friends, particularly online--they called it some of the funniest fantasy stuff they'd ever read. Daunted by the sheer number of books he'd written, I held off on indulging my curiosity...until I spent a quarter on a well-used library copy of a Xanth novel called "The Color of her Panties".

Well-used. I hope she used rubber gloves.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

There aren't enough ten-foot poles in the Great Bamboo Grove of Hi-Brasil.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

What a looooong screed of fannish entitlement. "The longer a series runs, the more stacked the expectations and pressures become, and the more intimate it feels, a sort of long-distance love affair of avowed commitment and mutual assumption." Assumption would be the word that comes most to mind, yes. "Mutual"? "Commitment"?

"The only solution for readers is to appreciate what we get when we get it, but that’s just as impossible as Martin somehow satisfying all his fans without writing a book specifically tailored to each one of them. "

Huh. I seem to manage it. The entire epic saga essay never manages to acknowledge that writers are people, that people's lives are never as they plan them, and that, frankly, shit happens. Instead, it's all about HOW UNFAIR IT ALL IS TO THE READER.

If I think about the series that I follow avidly, Bujold's Barrayar stuff and tagmeth's Godstalk, the writers took breaks -- Bujold to write other books, Hodgell to pursue a successful academic career. (Obvs. Bujold isn't the committed WORLD-SPANNING EPIC, and you can't argue that the books are incomplete as they stand.) Although I want to find out what happens next, very badly, I don't think that I have a solemn compact with either writer. I just caught on to Martin, but if the next book doesn't come out for 13 years, he won't have broken a promise; he will just be another human being whose work didn't turn out quite as he expected it.

Neil said it best.

[scifantasy.livejournal.com]

Interestingly, Martin's issue about the delays to A Dance with Dragons was, at least in my opinion, due entirely to the fact that he did break a promise--the one he made in the afterword to A Feast for Crows.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

It's not as if he said "HAHAHA YOU FOOLS", though. He was quite open, in the years that followed, about why he was having problems and why the book had turned out -- as much to his own surprise as to the fans' -- to be much more difficult to write than he expected.

People, and that essayist in particular, are acting as if the writers deliberately choose to break some imaginary compact.

[scifantasy.livejournal.com]

Maybe; I for one didn't really hear for a long time that, or why, he was having problems. Big difference between what's in interviews or the author's blog, and then what's on the page.

I don't think it was a deliberate choice, but I do think that there was a broken promise. Minor, forgivable, but a lot of the commentary from the other side has been to the tune of "he doesn't owe you anything," to which my answer remains "he did make us a promise..."

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

I haven't read the afterword to A Feast Of Crows. Is it really a broken promise, or more of a mistaken estimate?

I've gotten to the point that even standalone novels over 400 pages mostly irritate me. I read books in series, but multi-volume plots are just not for me these days. So the entitlement on display in the AV Club comments especially, where people feel justified in resentfully speculating on another person's death, is a long way from something I can sympathize with. If you embark on a long series, you just naturally run the risk of not finishing for any number of reasons, whether you're writing it or reading it. It stands to reason to be aware of that going in.

[scifantasy.livejournal.com]

*shrug* It certainly felt like a broken promise, especially since it was an apologia for how Feast was half a book. He does say "I devoutly hope," but...

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Even short series: Robert Stallman suffered author existance failure five months after his first novel was published, Orphan, was published. Despite his death, all three volumes of the Book of the Beast did see print. Similarly, Richard C. Meredith died before the publication of the final Timeliners book (although it too saw print).

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

If Stallman is an existence failure, does that make A Dance With Dragons an existence proof?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

He was an example of *author* existance failure and as his next two books proved, the author can be dead for some time before new books stop appearing. Heck, Mark Twain still manages to get new material out from time to time.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

The rumors of his death really were....?

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

At one point, Louisa May Alcott and I had the same agent, and let me tell you who got faster service...

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

::applause::

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

[List of characters] will be along next year (I devoutly hope) in A Dance With Dragons, which will focus on events along the Wall and across the sea, just as the present book focused on King's Landing.
George R. R. Martin
June 2005

Sounds like a mistaken estimate to me. Don't get me wrong, a six-year gap when you were expecting one year is frustrating as Hell. But I don't perceive "I devoutly hope" as in the same league as "To love and to cherish, until death do us part."

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

Yeah, that sounds like a mistaken estimate to me too. In fact, it sounds like "I am totally intending to almost certainly finish by a nearly determined date at some point, God willing," which is a mental state that artists working to their own deadlines probably recognize.

Granted, I've never been five years off an estimate, but my projects are usually a lot smaller than Martin's.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I will start moaning about Game of Thrones delays the week after I get The Universal Pantograph in my in-box (considers my James is a dumbass Panshin story but then saves it for another occasion.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

Damn, I wish I could read that book. It's very high up on my list, together with the third Naga Teot (Bloodstorm) book.

[agharta75.livejournal.com]

I'm too busy with "The Last Dangerous Visions" to get to either of them.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

Haven't most of those stories leaked out by now? I think the Cordwainer Smith one has. Or am I conflating two things?

[le-trombone.livejournal.com]

"Most" is an over-estimate, but a significant number of them have seen print.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

Damn. There are a lot of fine authors still buried there.

[le-trombone.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Without naming names, one of the people involved in the TLDV Bibliography list happened to meet one of the authors over a decade ago, and asked her (I'm willing to mention gender) if she had plans for her story outside of TLDV.

Reading between the diplomatic lines, he believes that she will start submitting the story the week after H.E.'s obituary runs. I don't know if he's still as famously litigious as his reputation has it, but I do wonder if some of the no-shows are because the authors just don't want to bother when they can just write a different short story.

[connactic.livejournal.com]

I saw a GRRM interview. One of the questions was basically "have you ever wrote anything you later regretted?" I don't know what the questioner was interested in, but GRRM's answer was giving a time estimate on ADWD :)

[nelc.livejournal.com]

I remember picking up AGOT, way back when it first appeared, fully intending to buy it — until I realised it was to be the first in a series. After Gerrold's slow release of Cthorr, and Delaney's lack of sequel to Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, and maybe just comparison between reading other series as they were published in real time vs picking them up later and reading through at my own pace, I just felt unwilling to invest in a new series until it had shown some pedigree.

Would it be bad form to express some happiness that I decided thus?

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

Well, even though I may make loud pronouncements, I am not actually the fannish Arbiter Elegantiarum.

That said, I think "Glad I didn't start that incomplete series" is very different from "The author of this incomplete series has implicitly vowed a contract with me that comes very close to marriage on the astral plane."

[bastets-place.livejournal.com]

I keep having a discussion with myself on this sort of subject; a different author, who writes the kind of thing that I really enjoy, seems to insist on taking longer to write a book than it takes for me to read them.

Frustrating, that. Then I laugh at myself, and hope that she will come out with another one eventually, while I seek out other books and authors to read.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

...But Chtorr is SF.

I probably had more to say, but I figure I'll just sit around quibbling, instead.

[kgbooklog.livejournal.com]

Huh, the first page of comments there are almost entirely about the new comment system. Has anyone read all the comments to see if there's any mention of Steven Erikson? Or Hugh Cook? Surely someone has mentioned Rothfuss, right?

[tanac.livejournal.com]

Pfft. I'm still mad about the Gerrold series failing to continue. I waited patiently for *years*, not knowing he'd gone and adopted a problem child and turned his life upside down and stopped writing it. :/

[agharta75.livejournal.com]

The Chtorr won. The narrator never got to write book 5. End of story.

[badger.livejournal.com]

If another Chtorr novel ever comes out I'll probably buy it. I'm not looking for it but I figure if it ever happens I'll see the news somewhere. In the meantime (as in probably the rest of our lifespan overlap) I have plenty of things to do.

[murasaki-1966.livejournal.com]

I'm still waiting for Scott Lynch to bring out the next book in the Gentleman Bastard series. Given the shit he's had to deal with health-wise, I am content to wait.

[asyouknow-bob.livejournal.com]

As Seth Ellis said upstream: I've gotten to the point that even standalone novels over 400 pages mostly irritate me.

Chtorr pretty much broke me of EVER reading ANY series, certainly not before it's finished.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

As long as Martin doesn't pull an Architect of Sleep, I'm fine with waiting.

I followed Katharine Kerr's Deverry series from 1986 to 2010, and ASOIAF is projected to be quite a bit shorter.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

This is why Bernard Cornwell is a genius; the thing is to write the beginning and the end and then fill in bits in the middle as they occur to you.