Fantasy must shake off the tyranny of the mega-novel | Hacker News Reader

Fantasy must shake off the tyranny of the mega-novel

theguardian.com

55 pointsdnetesn69 comments

I think the response is more accurate - that big ideas and epic world-building require a lot of space. http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/may/20/fanta...

And I would cite Brandon Sanderson as a good example (and good counter-example to the original article) - smaller ideas get novellas (Legion, Emperor's Soul), medium-sized ideas get novels (Elantris, Rithmatist, Warbreaker), epic ideas get large novels in series(Mistborn, Way of Kings).

All excellent, by the way...

One huge point in Sanderson's favor is that he writes fast and consistent enough that his epic series might be finished in a reasonable amount of time. I also get the impression that he plans a lot more in advance than many other fantasy writers, so I doubt he'll add a few more novels to his series at the end.

Brandon Sanderson is a truly unique author though, his output at the moment is phenomenal.

I'm not entirely sure what the point of the original article was though, mega-novels, otherwise known as series to normal people, are a common thing in sci-fi and fantasy and always have been.

There's no way that page counts are a reflection of the size of the ideas in the book. You can huge ideas and absolutely marvellous worlds in under 200 pages. Maybe the book doesn't have 1000+ named characters. but why would that be an important metric?

> that big ideas and epic world-building require a lot of space.

That's not the same as requiring a mega-novel. You can have a series of stories set in one universe. Just look at Discworld. Or superhero comics, for that matter.

That's not true. A truly skilled fantasy or sci-fi author can hint at a huge and complex world with just a single, casually-delivered line of dialogue.

I grew up just reading whatever I could pull off the shelf from my local library—finding the SFF short story scene in my late teens was a huge and welcome discovery. Not sure why, and it could just be confirmation bias, but in my experience the quality of writing in short stories tends to be a lot higher than the writing in a novel, or series. Short form has some of my favorite works now, and I tend to read that first since it's much easier to make time for. It's really worth looking into it if you've only been exposed to published novels before. Tor.com is free and has a great collection. Clarkesworld and Asimov's both charge subscription fees but are completely worth the price.

I've completely given up on reading multi-volume epics. Either stick to a defined 3 or 4 novel series (ie. call it a trilogy from the start), or go with a series of interconnected, but standalone, novels like Iain M Banks Culture books.

The major problem I find is that I just can't be bothered to re-read the previous books. Yet inevitably, I will have forgotten a lot of characters and plot (particularly with character dense fantasy), and must re-read or be completely lost when reading the new book.

This isn't really a problem with trilogies, usually I don't need to re-read at all for the final book, or even if I do it's relatively quick. But the moment you start writing huge, 5-6+ novel series I get very annoyed with authors.

Take George RR Martin for example. I still haven't read the latest book, simply because there was a 5 year gap, then a 6 year gap between publications of the last two. During that time, I've nearly completely forgotten what went on in the books. I re-read after the first gap, but I'll be damned if I'm doing it again...

There are successful authors who manage to write large, interesting worlds/stories without needing to descend down into the muck that is the mega-novel series. Like Iain M Banks with his standalone Culture novels that form a coherent world over time. Or Terry Pratchett, with the Discworld.

After this happened to me too many times, now I simply wait until the series is completely finished before starting it.

Which is tough on the authors I'm sure. But unless you can put out a new book at least yearly, I'm going to continue to wait. And probably even then.

It doesn't always work though, I finished the Mistborn series after he was done - and now I hear he's got some new books planned for it. Ooops :)

The major problem I find is that I just can't be bothered to re-read the previous books.

Agreed. I've found this happen a few times. For example, in one series, I read about 6 books and then didn't have time or for some other reason didn't continue. I thought about going back and finishing the series maybe a year and a half later, but didn't feel like rereading the previous 6 books but felt too lost without doing so. This happens to me with TV programs too.

The sad thing is that this very real phenomenon "punishes" those who start series early, the very people that validate the business model or writing sequels at all. I don't expect I'll bother with book 6 of GoT for the very same reason you state. And the TV series will be in syndication by then most likely!

Yeah, the TV series has put me off reading them too. I'd rather just experience the one version of the story. I've been waiting for it to catch up to where I remember in the books.

Having said that, I have bought the latest book and will probably buy the rest, I'm just not sure if I'll get round to reading them until the series is finished. Which given the overall slowness so far, could be another 10-15 years! That's why even though I highly enjoy a good epic, I really can't stand reading them anymore. It's a love/hate thing now.

I haven't read the books but it's my understanding that the show has caught up with the books & that you may be confused if you try to jump straight from the middle of the books to the middle of the show, since they've changed many of the characters' storylines.

> I haven't read the books but it's my understanding that the show has caught up with the books & that you may be confused if you try to jump straight from the middle of the books to the middle of the show, since they've changed many of the characters' storylines.

It likely will have caught up to or passed the books by the end of this season (assuming that, given the divergence in storylines, the comparison is even meaningful anymore; but there are some signs that at least some of the divergence is just keeping the number of independent threads down and may converge back somewhat), but all of the existing storylines in the show that can reasonably be compared to the book remain behind the parallel storylines in the book.

I love myself some big epic fantasy, The Malazan Book of the Fallen series was a huge favourite of mine, followed closely by A Song of Ice and Fire, but this is a pretty real logistical problem even for me. I have gone and read the Ian Esslemont books in the Malazan universe though, precisely because they are disconnected from the main plot. Maybe I'll go back and re-read these series after they're complete.

Yeah, waiting til the series is complete and then reading them all in one go is the approach I've taken towards things. I'm making an exception for the new Brandon Sanderson series, but I think I'll regret that eventually!

In terms of format, I appreciate something like Raymond E. Feist's Riftwar Cycle, where you have a series of connected trilogies. You carry over the universe and some of the characters, but the story is tied up at the end of each trilogy.

Or Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser short stories, which were the individual adventures of those two characters.

There's something obviously appealing about a universe (a "franchise" or "IP", if you must) which goes on and on, but that doesn't mean spending decades on a single story.

Fafhrd and the Mouser are an interesting case: There are seven (pretty short) volumes of stories, written over nearly forty years, with the major anthologies halfway through.

Lots of those stories are just short vignettes, not more than a page or two long, that were nonetheless published individually. In the books, they seem like brief interludes, but they were originally written/published sometimes years apart from the longer stories. http://panglott.blogspot.com/2010/08/for-re-reading-of-nehwo...

Most fantasy readers tend to dismiss Feist's work, it's good to find someone else who appreciates it.

A lot of the shorter fantasy goes into the Young Adult category now. Especially since the younger age categories read more books a month. Fish around a bit for your own taste and you will find shorter novels and novellas there http://www.goodreads.com/choiceawards/best-young-adult-fanta...

I find the whole "Young Adult" category strange. In film, most people don't automatically look down on movies just because they're not rated R or NC-17. Any book without blatantly adult-only content (which includes the majority of books) could reasonably be read by "Young Adults".

I think the problem is that "Young Adult" encompasses a wide level of maturity, and authors may tailor their works towards vastly different levels of maturity, that the quality can vary quite a bit. Some works are targeted for young readers, but are rather mature in their execution (well explained, well reasoned character motivations and plot, etc), while others bank on the possibly lower expectations of the young and inexperienced reader. I've picked up some horrendous young adult fiction before and read it (I'm looking at you, James Patterson!). That doesn't keep me from reading it, but it does make me wary...

I've found word of mouth and reviews to help out with that. But its not 100% proof alright.

Categories are about marketing. "Young Adult" categorization is part of a decision to market primarily to the YA demographic, not a content-based description that the book can "reasonably by read by" young adults in a way that doesn't apply to most other books in a bookstore.

It certainly makes sense from a marketing point of view, though even there it's possible to market a book to YA without making it a classification. I just don't think the distinction makes sense as a top-level classification.

The two purpose top-level classifications serve is (1) identifying where to look for retail customers, and (2) discussing distinct business market segments.

I think it makes pretty good sense from both of those perspectives.

It probably doesn't from the point of view that classifications should fit some neat content-description role, but that's never been the function that they actually serve except insofar as content descriptions have utility to the other purposes mentioned.

(2) could be solved by marketing the same book differently. I agree that (1) has value, and (2) has some value when classifying customers.

However, this thread started because many adult sci-fi and fantasy readers look down on YA books. That's the purpose for which I'd suggest that the distinction doesn't make much sense.

There's some really good YA genre fiction out there, but I think one of the defining aspects of the genre is it's written about teenage protagonists with a number of very teenage problems, which I find increasingly tedious the further I get into my twenties.

That said, Marissa Meyer's Lunar Chronicles (to pick a somewhat less known example) are pretty excellent sci-fi, if you can get past the annoying teenage romances of the protagonists.

Fair enough. I do very quickly skip stories that seem like a sitcom with fantasy elements thrown in. Then again, there are a lot of non-YA fantasy novels about broken people (teenage or adult) with highly non-fantastic problems; that seems to be a defining element of bad fiction for all ages, that it can't manage to escape the mundane. I have zero interest in reading about the everyday problems and situations of twentysomethings or thirtysomethings either.

Another good example of YA fantasy I've enjoyed that manages to dodge the trope: Diane Duane's Wizards series ("So you want to be a Wizard", "Deep Wizardry", "High Wizardry"), which seems to mostly stay away from typical teenager problems. The premise is not that novel, but in this case I found the execution quite satisfying, particularly in the second and third books. Without providing spoilers, I would note that the second book manages to avert one of the single most common tropes of YA fantasy novels (and of other series that avert it, most do so far later in a series). I'm also a big fan of "sufficiently descriptive language as magic" and "sufficiently analyzed magic", both of which these have quite a lot of.

(Note that I have not read the "updated" editions of these books that attempt to make some of the technology references less dated.)

I tend to see a disdain for YA books in the SFF community. Which is sad, since many in the community still remember the (not-so-distant) past, when all of SFF was looked down upon by those who only read "real" literature. Romance, too, seems to get this attitude.

Personally my disdain for them is that currently they are mostly telling the same basic story with different window dressing.

Worth checking out Cory Doctorow's YA novels... they tend to be more varied than the typical fare - a good example of what you can do with the genre.

Yes, there's a "coming of age", "figuring out what you want to do with your life" common element to them - but then one might argue that many alleged adults in today's world have not actually come of age yet. Maybe we need more of this stuff in our literature.

Yes, if you can stand Doctorow's breast beating over EFF type themes of autonomy, government, security, etc... Which might be just your thing ;)

He's not breast-beating, just making a clear, compelling, well argued and well illustrated case...

Or, you're right, it might well be my thing :-P

Fair enough, lol. The only reason I call it breast beating is because it's such a clear departure from his very early work.

There are bad YA novels, and bad non-YA novels, in all genres, including fantasy. I've seen plenty of cookie-cutter fantasy stories in the standard fantasy section as well.

And on the flip side, there are a lot of excellent fantasy novels squirreled away in the YA section where many people will overlook them.

What's the basic story? (bonus point if you link to tvtropes.)

People have been saying this about the fantasy and sci-fi genres for decades.

Yeah, that attitude is odd. My strategy is to be intentionally clueless as to why anyone would have a problem with 28-year-old-me reading The Hunger Games.

This is getting to be less and less true with the success of series like Harry Potter, Twilight, Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, Divergent etc. Many of the books listed on that Goodreads link are parts of larger series themselves.

It's interesting that they mainly start around more recent series, mentions older ones "Les Mis", but don't say how this is and always has been a thing. I remember reading most of the Xanth series (first book published in 1977!) when I was in high school (1999)- and there were already 20+ books in the series.

I like long stories about characters I care about. When I stop caring about the characters (or if the plots get too out there), then I stop reading the books.

I think it's fine if people want to read singular episode books as well. As @teirce says, this is why I also like Neil Gaiman (currently my favorite author). His stuff is self-contained and quite enjoyable.

It's up to the author to decide what they want to do with their characters, and I'll be game for it either way.

As I remember them, the Xanth stories had an order but mostly stood on their own, like the detective novels TFA mentions.

In contrast, there's hardly anything in Game of Thrones that isn't tied tightly to everything that precedes or follows it. The division between books is largely arbitrary and you could have divided them up in a million different ways that would be no better or worse than the way they are now. Not that this is qualitatively better than the older series or serial style, but I do agree with the article that it's "different".

This is needed if only so I don't have to get sucked into a great first book like Wizard's First Rule to then have to deal with 100 page lectures on Objectivism if I want to find out what happens to the characters later in the series.

Very much yes! That series was a disaster. It's not even internally consistent from the first book to the last.

The author completely changed his characters to make them fit into his new lectures.

The reason fantasy (and also much scifi these days) needs the length is partly because once you've gone to all that effort of establishing a world, you'll want to stick that world.

A short novel with a completely unique setting would turn a fantasy story into something closer to a fairy tale or fable, or be entirely about the setting (as is often the case with scifi; Lem's "Solaris" is a great example).

Of course, you can still tell completely separate stories set within a single world. Which authors do: Banks with the Culture books, for example, and I rather prefer that form of non-serial storytelling. G. R. R. Martin himself has written spinoffs set in the Westeros world. Gene Wolfe's novels are often set in the same universe.

The second aspect of serial, "long-form" storytelling that everyone enjoys is the continuity; you may have lots of small stories told over the course of several seasons of a TV series, but it's the same, familiar world, and you don't need to be introduced to a completely new setting every time. As someone who greatly enjoys books (though not so much fantasy) but has a huge problem getting past the opening chapter or even the opening page, I completely understand the attraction.

(That said, there's no excuse for bloat. G. R. R. Martin seems to have entered into a kind of narrative tailspin as a result of having plotted himself into several corners. Rather than chopping away at the narrative and making some shortcuts to get the characters in the position he had planned for them to be in, he apparently decided the solution was... more plot. The end product was the long and tedious boat journey that was "A Dance With Dragons".)

I have to admit I'm kind of puzzled by this article and its countering article "Fantasy cannot build its imaginary worlds in short fiction." Look. There is great fantasy fiction being written in every length. And that's a wonderful situation! Why spend your time complaining because some works aren't the length you would prefer?

Sprawling multi-book series work kind of the way fast food does. It's a known quantity in a world of unknown quantities.

It's also the most reliable path to income for writers.

If anyone is interested in a great single volume fantasy book, I recommend Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay. It's a very good book.

Thanks I'll check it out. I'll add my own recommendation: anything by China Mieville. Although he does have a few books that are set in the same fantasy world they are each stand alone storylines although they may loosely reference each other (kind of like the Discworld series does). He also has quite a few single volume books, each with its own rich and fascinating world.

Better are books that can be read on their own...and are part of an expansive series

* Foundation * Dune * Discworld * Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy * Hyperion

Even worse are 5 book sets (Belgarion and Eddings novels)

This is one reason why I really like Neil Gaiman. His works tend to be on the shorter side and self-contained, yet still managed to be quite entertaining.

It is somewhat surprising result in the world of short attention span. I stopped watching Game of Thrones after 3.5 seasons, stopped reading Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth after 4.5 books and Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber after 2.5 books (notice the pattern of dropping the things halfway through the installment). For me it sort of goes downhill from production value and/or captivating action to a pointless nonsense _with no end in sight_.

I've noticed that my brain has developed an actual revulsion to fiction that never ends attains closure on anything. It is starting to feel very similar to the dream most of us have had of the quicksand we can't get out of because however high we go it's always higher. I don't mean that as a metaphor, I mean, I really do get a very similar feeling out of both.

So many of these things seem to start out tight, then just drag out forever. I have more experience in the TV-series side.

I am happy to not have all the answers, I'm happy to watch something overarching that goes on for a while, I'm even happy to watch something that ends ambiguously. But I've got little and ever less tolerance for those authors who think the way to make their universe last longer is to never resolve anything. No... you resolve things, and then there are more things. Preferably consequences, anticipated and otherwise. Just like, you know, real life. Don't simply stretch your story out... and out... and out... and out...

Stargate SG-1 attained the nearly-perfectly-correct balance for me. And it made some of the developments in that series legitimately surprising to me, when they actually upended their universe a bit in several of the season finales, because I so casually expected "nothing to ever change" in a series like that. (Now it's more normal, but at the time especially I was surprised by their boldness. They never did quite take the step of making the program public knowledge, though...)

(Special callout for Alias, by the way, who also scraped against my brain in such a way that I'm also extremely irritated by "but wait, there's a conspiracy behind that"... by the fourth or fifth time it's like the dream hallway that never ends. And my suspension of disbelief really breaks down too... how, exactly, does one become the guy in change of the conspiracy under the conspiracy under the conspiracy under the conspiracy under the conspiracy under the conspiracy? Is there a college track I should be focusing on for that? Does the n+1th conspiracy conduct secret interviews? Is a member of conspiracy-4 really supposed to be surprised to discover conspiracy-5?)

After watching "Babylon 5", the first American TV series I knew that had a fixed length and didn't try to go as long as possible, I decided that if you don't have an end, you don't have a story. So unless I know there's an end, I don't bother. It's worked out pretty well; Robert Jordan's series kept getting longer (= doesn't know how to finish) until it got so long he died. GRRM seems be having similar problems--taking 5 and 6 years to write the latest two suggests to me he is getting bogged down (= doesn't know how to finish).

I had similar problems with "Alias." You can't just upend who is good and who is bad every month. It isn't believable, and it feels like you're playing with your audience. It also indicates you have no idea what you are doing (= no end point). I watched season 3, and quit early on in season 4 after I realized...

I have a similar revulsion to what I call our "pre-order culture". Everything is "coming soon, preorder today!" It used to be just video games (and I guess some books) but it seems like EVERYTHING is available for pre-order. Kickstarter and its ilk certainly didn't help that.

Once I type my credit card in it flips the "when is it going to get here" switch in my brain and the obsession sucks. I preordered an Apple Watch and spent so much time checking shipping status and hanging out on /r/applewatch that by the time it actually showed up the thrill was gone.

There's a bunch of psychic overhead involved in preordering something -- or watching/reading a story that doesn't end -- and the anticipation completely outweighs the payoff.

I feel similarly about book series -- I __devour__ them, and then at some point feel just drained and tired, and can't read book 9 or 12 or something. In contrast, there are webcomics that I read every week that have been going for ten years or more, and I still do not get tired of them. It might be the regular drip-feed of content that does that, though.

You didn't mention Wheel of Time - the poster-child of an author's inability to end a series. I'm proud of having lasted through just 3 books, and amazed by people who have slogged through all of them.

I'm surprised that the Amber series hasn't been developed into a film (someone surely has the rights). Swords, sorcery, inter-world travel, dysfunctional royal family. It's got it all.

It wasn't inability. If you look closely, the first Wheel of Time book stands alone and actually concludes the story by beating the main bad guy at the end of book 1. However, after the first book's success, Jordan obviously realized he could make it a trilogy, which he did and once again has Rand fight a triumphant battle that defeats all the forces of evil at the end of book 3. And then...Jordan finally just decided to pretend like he hadn't ended it twice already and settled in to write non-stop in that universe forever...which he did.

I personally quit reading the series somewhere around book 6 or 7, but it wasn't inability that kept him going...it was sales.

GRR Martin, on the other hand, I firmly believe lost track of his story. I don't think he would ever have made any more headway on it had it not been for the HBO miniseries and all the help and fan-made reference pages that cropped up as a result. I predicted for years that the story had stalled and would never see anymore progress during the mid 2000's.

Not just mega-novels, it seems like the long novel of 400-600 pages are more common too. Seems like back in the day you could get a good story in 150-200 pages. But now reading books is a bigger commitment. I think I'm going to start on the "novella" category of the Hugo winners =/

I agree! My book is 175 pages because I tried to keep in the good parts and trust the reader to figure out why character A got to point B without explaining the entire journey. Skip to the interesting parts and let a couple lines of some dialogue explain the in between.

it feels like it's starting to get shaken out. the whole mega-popular digital book thing is enabling wider distribution of formats like novellas.

heck, even sanderson is getting in on the gig with all of his recent success with the shorter novels like "the emperor's soul" or "legion" -- which are both fantastic, btw.

Oh Lord, yes. Signed. Upvoted. Just give us good stories with a scope the author can deal with in a human lifetime.

Oh God yes.

I look back my days of reading D&D novels (Krynn and TFR mostly) with some fondness. Yes they were part of much larger series, but the books were usually fully contained novels with strong story-lines and conclusions.

Sci-fi is in a similar situation (if you did not consider sci-fi to be fantasy in the first place). Remember reading (possibly your parents collection of) Isaac Asimoc novels? Or possibly novelettes by today's standards. Amazing stories and imaginations in what would be the prologue of a 1500 page monster today. And without the constant graphic violence that has become a hallmark of modern sci-fi.

I've read great short fiction, but nearly every time I read something Really Awesome or Interesting, I end up wanting to read more exploring interesting things in that world. Parallel events, precursors, Lore, etc. I dislike when there's a constant "To be Continued...." (Wheel of Time, Game of Thrones), but love when there's a series of related books that each can stand alone, but also enrich a shared lore. I absolutely devoured nearly everything in the Dragonlance novels and Star Wars extended universe books, for example.

Whenever I read the first book of a book like Dune, or Foundation, or Earthsea, or Anne Leckie's Ancillary Justice, or the Diamond Age (or Snow Crash) I end up wishing for more from that same universe of Lore. Sometimes this ends up being something amazing, like the Foundation series, other times the sequel fails to hold me, or goes off the deep end like some fantasy serieses seem to.

I think I end up gravitating towards trilogies. I know there's more to the story arc than just one book, and but enough written that I (in theory) won't be left in the lurch. :-)

Then again, I also read all [at the time] of the Honor Harrington series, because I loved the characters and political story arc(s), but ended up getting burned out and never reading the more recent novels. I don't even know or recall if it was a feeling that it jumped the shark, I just didn't feel I had the energy to devote to it.

Huge Krynn fan here too.

My annoyance with the mega-novels are the sheer number of characters and threads which are happening simultaneously. In the Wheel of Time there are three main characters - which is a reasonable number of threads - but in one of the books, one of them was hardly included at all. It's weird coming back to a character after 300, 400, or even 600 pages. They start to feel like afterthoughts.

And GOT is even worse. There are dozens of threads and some of the characters names are similar enough to be annoying.

Sapkowski has a hilarious article on why fantasy authors tend to produce multi-volume monsters.

"There is no gold in the Grey mountains", struggling to find it online.

Is it in English?

I guess there should be a translation somewhere, he's a major writer after all.

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