Read the Chronicles of Narnia in Publication Order (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Read the Chronicles of Narnia in Publication Order (2018)

tor.com

33 pointsapollinaire58 comments

I can't imagine how jarring the transition between _The Magician's Nephew_ and _The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe_ must be if you read them in that order for the first time. They're tonally very different -- Nephew feels more like Lewis' earlier science fiction novels, while Wardrobe has a fairy-tale quality. Nephew feels more "adult" (not necessarily in a good way).

Similarly, the transition between _The Silver Chair_ (a great book) and _The Last Battle_ (an awful book) might seem shocking without the two intervening books (one which is both good and awful, and the other of which is decent but uneven).

> I can't imagine how jarring the transition between _The Magician's Nephew_ and _The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe_

> Nephew feels more like Lewis' earlier science fiction novels, while Wardrobe has a fairy-tale quality

Will vouch for this. I started Narnia in my early teens. I knew Wardrobe to be a classic but the edition the bookstore carried had Nephew labeled as the first book. Honestly? I felt kinda short-changed at what I got. Nephew set-up this expectation of being a myth-heavy story, something in between Harry Potter and LOTR/Earthsea in terms of world-building. Jackson's LOTR was at peak popularity at the time too so I really lapped Nephew up.

Honestly though, I loved every book in the series. I can understand why people might have issues with Caspian---maybe the weakest book in the whole Chronicle IMO---and looking back now the Christian imagery might be heavy-handed at times. But as children's/early teens' fantasy series, the stories and the world are entertaining. Which, as a teenager, was all I really needed of the books. Maybe Lewis' only fault is that he peaked too early with Wardrobe, setting up expectations for the rest of the series.

I don't know why people dislike THE LAST BATTLE. Too Christian I guess.

Nah, Dawn Treader is extremely Christian and it's my second favorite. I just don't think it tells a very engaging story. It's a static narrative that spends most of its time in the same few places. A lot of the major events happen somewhere else and you learn about them secondhand. The Calormenes are just as embarrassing as they ever were. The main antagonist is an ape. It just doesn't hold a candle to the previous grand adventures. Frankly, if a lot more of the book was like the overtly Christian apocalyptic stuff near the end I'd prefer it.

I think Lewis was trying a little too hard in The Last Battle to produce the perfect allegory, and couldn't come up with a compelling story to wrap it with. He was working under much higher expectations than when he first started the series, and getting the "apocalyptic stuff" wrong would have been a surefire way to make a lot of Christians angry.

It certainly doesn't help that, by this point, the reader expects an epic battle of Tolkienesque proportions. Instead we are given a talk show adaptation of the Book of Revelations.

I don't know why publishers keep insisting on chronological ordering of fantasy/SF book sets. Don't they understand literature? A lot of novels are not chronologically ordered, even within one book.

Would you introduce someone to Tolkien and tell them to start with The Silmarillion? Absolutely not.

Fortunately, film and TV producers seem to know what works better. IIRC I've watched at least two Narnia movie franchises, and both started with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and proceeded in publication order. They usually don't go beyond The Silver Chair, though. Which was probably the right decision, because the remaining three books feel more like Hollywood milking the franchise with contrived prequels, sequels, and spinoffs than a proper part of the same canon.

The Horse and his Boy is unadaptable at this point. You'd have to change too much for it to be filmable.

For what it's worth, I liked Blackadder season one, it's a different character but it's still great, and in some ways I find it much more original, if less funny.

and it has Peter Cook in it - always a positive!

I'm sure the author is right about Narnia, but I stopped reading at this point. It shows a lack of taste.

Read everything in publication order. That is the only way it will make any sense; later books always assume that you've read the earlier ones, even if editors do their best to try to avoid this, but earlier books never assume you've read the later ones.

I can give you a concrete example of where this is not true because the author went to a lot of effort to give both books open questions which are answered by the other: Vernor Vinge’s “A Fire Upon the Deep” and “A Deepness in the Sky”.

He made sure that the second book answers the open question(s) left by the first, but also that it had open question(s) which are answered by the first book. It really doesn’t matter which one you read first, because the other one closes the loop, as it were.

In fairness, Verner Vinge is an amazing author and this is probably a skill unique to very few writers.

I've found his books to be repeatedly re-readable.

MAROONED IN REALTIME, A FIRE UPON THE DEEP and A DEEPNESS IN THE SKY are excellent. I could re-read them. THE PEACE WAR and RAINBOWS END are just average and I would only read them once. CHILDREN OF THE SKY is awful and I wish I hadn't bothered reading it at all.

Yea, even the best authors can’t consistently write excellent books. And “Children of the Sky” lacks many of the advantages that “A Fire Upon the Deep” and “A Deepness in the Sky” had, such as space travel. That alone makes it less memorable and contributes a lot to reader disappointment.

That just proves what should be obvious: there are always exceptions. In general, I still think production order tends to work best for most works.

Unless a series is explicitly conceived from the beginning as something to be experienced in any order and written concurrently, e.g. the episodes of the Netflix show Kaleidoscope, you should read in publication order if you intend to read the series completely.

It’s not just about making sense. A flashback will often make complete sense when viewed at its chronological time. But all sorts of dramatic weight and subtleties can be lost on a reader who does not have knowledge material that was published prior, and it can further alter your perception of events that happen later on that assume you don’t have that knowledge.

Each book was written with a unique frame of reference. It’s almost always a mistake to leave that frame of reference.

Not every story is written that way. Also, it's not necessary that everything make sense; sometimes there are higher priorities. Sometimes, it's just not worth the time to read it all.

It may not be exactly 100.000% true, but it's close enough that you can just stop thinking about it and read in publication order unless you're given a very strong reason. The author, editors, and publishers would have to screw up very hard for publication order to not be viable, and for something else to be optimal either requires extraordinary writing ability (it's hard to refer to books that aren't written yet, the arrow of time being how it is), or for the series not to have been very good to start. The major exception I can think of is something like Discworld where they're all pretty independent, i.e. barely a series at all in the sense we're talking about, but once you start talking about one of the sequential sub-series, you're back to publication order mattering.

I agree with you on this. Chronological, or chronological with omissions (perhaps with later backfill), is always a good choice. With Discworld I can see people choosing to read just subseries. (I read Discworld completely out of order and it was fine, but I'm not going to argue that it was _better_.)

There may be some odd exceptions. If someone came to me and said "I want to see if Star Trek is something I'm interested in" I wouldn't tell them to start at the beginning of the original series, nor would I recommend viewing any single series from the start. I could see a "tasting flight" approach to the franchise where you bounce back and forth between the series... but even then I feel like you'd want to keep some degree of production-order structure within the individual series.

People say these things with such confidence; where does that confidence come from? It's amazing, but not confidence-inspiring.

I've read/seen much art, in books and other mediums, that don't match your description. I find some things are much better if I skip the beginning and come back to it later, if I still think it's worthwhile.

> you can just stop thinking about it and read in publication order unless you're given a very strong reason

How can you advise - maybe even instruct - people so confidently, without at all knowning them, their purposes, and also what they are reading - which could be anything in the world! Must I read the collected works of Milton in order? The Bible? The Art of Computer Programming? History? Literary porn - can I skip to the good part or do I need to read it all in order?

When I see such certainty, I don't think 'who could know that much?' but 'who could think they know that much?'

You want to compare "the collected works of Milton", the Bible, and TAoCP to the Chronicles of Narnia? We're not talking about arbitrary collections of books, we're talking about fictional works with strong continuity between them in setting and events, among other criteria.

But if it's not that good, yeah, go ahead and skip some parts. I did account for that case, but whatever. This is entertainment, not deep moral truth.

> We're not talking about

You're not talking about it and assuming others are the same. That's the risk of giving advice, especially with certainty - you never know the other people, their priorities, needs, or what they are thinking about.

Mods, how much of this shit do I have to flag before you take action.

Just being a dumbass is not really flag-worthy. That's what downvotes are for.

Dismissing people as dumbass is flag-worthy - and actually dumbass. :)

Nobody is "dismissing" you as anything. You have self-identified.

>> later books always assume that you've read the earlier ones, even if editors do their best to try to avoid this, but earlier books never assume you've read the later ones.

> Not every story is written that way.

This is... clearly untrue?

Is it? I mean, are you willing to assert that literally every single multi-work story was written with successive works assuming the reader has read previous works?

Sure, I'd expect that to be the most common case, by far, but asserting that's the only case would seem to be impossible, unless you've read (or at least are familiar with) literally every multi-work story ever written in all of time. I don't think anyone can claim that.

Of course. That is the only possibility. What the author intended to do is not in question; the question is what actually happened.

I don't know about you, but there's much more to the world than what I know.

Sure, but even so I’m reasonably sure we can rely on the linear nature of time. Whether or not the publication of prequels was premeditated, it still rings true that the cultural artefact is always publication order.

But you are not at all required to follow some prior linear order in the linear order of your own time. If I want to smelt steel, I don't need to learn to smelt bronze first. What rings true is the eternal best advice: think for yourself.

I don't really buy that. An author may have planned out the entire story, but later decides to write and release later parts of the story first, and earlier parts later, as prequels, but not include an assumption in the prequels that the reader has already read the earlier-published works.

I don't know how common this is, but I don't think I'd be willing to assume this has never happened.

I wouldn’t be surprised if I learned that a majority of books in series have been written with the idea in mind that some readers are coming in fresh. That does not mean that a book is free from having followed the prior works. An author cannot change the frame of reference they were operating within when they authored a work. That’s the reason the “cultural artifact” is the publication order.

If we set aside books in a series that were written and edited to completion concurrently and published staggered, then i don’t see how an author could possibly publish a book while managing to entirely circumvent the reality that they have knowledge of the previous books they have written and do not have full knowledge of the ones they have not, no matter how hard they may try.

> An author may have planned out the entire story, but later decides to write and release later parts of the story first, and earlier parts later, as prequels, but not include an assumption in the prequels that the reader has already read the earlier-published works.

Still untrue. The author is going to include whatever information they possess in whatever work they create. If the prequels are written later, they will rely on information from the earlier works, whether the author wanted them to do that or not.

>I’m reasonably sure we can rely on the linear nature of time.

I'm not even sure about that, perhaps we can rely on our linear _experience_ of time, but we can't determine which is the correct version of two billiard balls colliding if we're shown the forwards and the backwards versions.

Assuming time is linear is convenient, but I don't think its provable or outright definite.

Firefly might be the classic counter example

The TV show? In that case the DVD set order is the canonical one and is plot/story order. That they were originally aired out of order back in 2003 was a one-off aberration due to studio leadership not understanding or being on board with what the show was about.

Let's call it "production order" then. Firefly was famously broadcast out of order.

I wouldn't call that a counterexample; if you watch Firefly in production order (not broadcast order; the broadcaster was moronic in reordering things), then you get the best experience.

I think it's more fair to call Firefly an edge case, instead.

> Granted, in either reading order, it takes awhile to reach the best book in the series, The Silver Chair

Well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man. Because The Horse and His Boy is clearly the best.

Like 75% of it is a great adventure story, but boy, that remaining 25% is rough sailing.

IIRC, the set I had as a kid presented the books in this order and didn't even include the Magician's Nephew (EDIT: it was the 1970 Collier-Macmillan set, which did include it, so either I'm mistaken or we lost it - both equally likely).

Star Wars is better in production order too, though I seem to recall fans coming up with alternative orderings that were neither production nor chronological.

"Machete Order": https://www.rodhilton.com/2011/11/11/the-star-wars-saga-sugg... The idea is to watch New Hope and Empire to get up to the big twist, watch the prequels to get the background, then finish on Return. I do want to try it sometime.

> Star Wars is better in production order too, though I seem to recall fans coming up with alternative orderings that were neither production nor chronological.

Machete order, as a sibling notes.

If you watch all six in chronological order, then the big reveals around Luke & Leia's parentage -- not to mention even the fact that they are siblings -- are ruined. (And you also get some super icky feelings in IV and V when Luke pines after Leia before knowing she's his sister.)

If you watch them in production order, it ends up unsatisfying because it's not a well-structured story from IV->V->VI->I->II->III. VI gives you the big payoff of resolving all the conflict, but then you go back to flashbacks: first you have Anakin's childhood in I, which doesn't really teach us anything all that interesting, and then you see II and III which do tell us how Anakin/Vader became the way he was. But then III ends on a big downer and you feel like you want to watch the original trilogy (or at least parts of it) again.

And frankly I just don't care about the final sequel trilogy. I grew up reading all the Star Wars expanded universe novels, and wiping away all that continuity for three so-so movies that feel so small story-wise is the most unsatisfying thing of all to me. Not to mention that trilogy is just super bleak: all the work of the original trilogy is undone, and the Skywalker family essentially ends, with its members more or less sad, broken, and unfulfilled.

Machete Order: https://www.slashfilm.com/1264147/what-is-star-wars-machete-...

Try the debates over the order for The Prisoner.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Prisoner_episodes

I watched it in KTEH order on Saturday (or Sunday?) Science Fiction night.

> After all, the story of Narnia—its very very earliest beginnings—technically starts with the sixth book on that The Magician’s Nephew, which tells the story of the creation of Narnia, in a scene C.S. Lewis pretty much ripped off straight from the then-unpublished work of his close friend, J.R.R. Tolkien.

What scene was ripped off?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magician's_Nephew#J._R._R....

> The creation of Narnia may also have been influenced by his close friend J. R. R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion, which also contains a creation scene driven by the effect of music.[37]

Assuming that's true, I very much doubt Tolkien was the first to do it.

Having read both, that's the closest link I can think of, and it's a very tenuous similarity on which to base the accusation of Lewis having "ripped off" Tolkien. That's only the biggest, most obvious unnecessary dig in the piece, coming from an author who doesn't even know how to spell "Tumnus". She's right about the headline, but you can stop reading there.

You are right. The Wikipedia source material is even more tenuous than the Wikipedia text, saying only:

> The creation of Narnia, of course, draws heavily on the book of Genesis. Perhaps it is also colored by Tolkien’s creation account in The Silmarillion, where the world is brought into being by a symphony of song.

https://archive.org/details/intowardrobecsle00down/page/58/m...

That speculative side-note doesn't seem appropriate for Wikipedia, and in the talk you see "Oh yeah, is it encyclopaedic to observe that similarities with Tolkien's creation myth will be because they both used the same source material for ideas?"

Also, maybe Tolkien ripped off Lewis. They shared many ideas with each other. Maybe they both heard it from a third person.

Per your other comment, I think common influence is by far the most likely, probably some myth or other.

They did read their works to each other in a pub.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inklings

I agree with this ordering.

Another series that I think benefits from a read in publication order is the Horatio Hornblower series. That means starting with the book Beat to Quarters.

I find it's often best to start with the book that made people like the series. When I recommend Stephen Erikson to people, I recommend starting with the second book, Deadhouse Gates, which is much more original, and you don't miss out on much. (Erikson never explains anything, so if you jump in, beleive me, the first book would not enlighten you.)

One exception is the Dresden Files series. It starts out with some weak book, but I can't recommend jumping to the first good book (the fourth) or the first sort-of-good book (the third). You have to slog through the whole thing or you'll miss out.

First mention of Hornblower I've ever come across on this forum! Read the whole series as a kiddo/tween in chronological order (still remember how freaking disappointing Hornblower during the crisis was as someone who had no idea it was unfinished..). First few books took a while to get through and I figured I was too young but maybe they just weren't that enthralling!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com