Without further ado, let us commence the Great Monsters & Manuals Group Research Project 2026.
The 'prologue' as such is a concept that goes back at least to ancient Greece. But a fairly recent innovation in fantasy fiction has come in the form of the action-packed prologue chapter, often taking place in media res, which gets the reader hooked from the outset and tees up the narrative proper. I am not talking here about a framing device like the introductory sequence to The Worm Ouroboros, or a preliminary infodump like in The Fellowship of the Ring. I am talking about a teaser taking place 'before the opening credits', as it were, often filled with violence and derring-do and causing the pages to turn from the very outset.
The most famous and notable example nowadays may be the A Song of Ice and Fire books, which each begin in this way. Off the top of my head, others would include The Eye of the World, The Name of the Wind (which I confess I have not fully read), Gardens of the Moon, The Dragonbone Chair... if you have read a great deal of high fantasy fiction, you know the drill.
I have done some Googling, and even consulted Satan himself (in the form of Claude.AI for higher education, for which I have super-duper access through my day job) and have not been able to find a definitive starting point for this practice. I think it has to have become fashionable sometime between the publication of The Lord of the Rings and The Eye of the World. But when?
A datapoint: Pawn of Prophecy, the first volume in David Eddings's The Belgariad, includes a preliminary infodump prologue about the creation of the world. It was published in 1982, and it is safe to say that since Eddings was self-consciously trying to ape epic fantasy fiction, he can be used as a bellweather. This would indicate the action-packed prologue chapter was not in vogue at that time. The Eye of the World, which on the other hand definitively has what you would call an action-packed prologue chapter of the type I am describing, came out in 1990. This would narrow the search down to some point between 1982-1990. But I might be wrong.
Does anybody have any ideas? Fly, my pretties!
Maybe The Black Company? Not an action scene from page one but it drops you into a world with no preamble. It came out in 1984.
ReplyDeleteThat’s slightly different to what I am talking about. I mean an actual self-stated prologue which is almost a mini short-story in its own right which then sets up the main narrative.
DeleteI dunno man, RE Howard’s “The Devil in Iron” (1934) definitely has an in media res prologue with an anonymous fisherman stumbling over ancient ruins and meeting a gruesome end before we begin the main story of our hero Conan. This was a pretty standard device in the pulps.
ReplyDeleteInteresting! Thanks for that. I hadn’t really thought about the earlier pull stuff.
DeleteYeah, a number of Sword & Sorcery short stories start with a kind of "cold open" (to use the television term) to build interest. Howard does this a few times that I recall: "People of the Black Circle", "Black Colossus", and "A Witch Shall Be Born" in addition to "Devil in Iron." Karl Edward Wagner in the '70s does this in some of his Kane stories too, like "Undertow" and "Reflections on the Winter of My Soul" and "Sing A Last Song of Valdese."
DeleteI bet was occurring in fits and starts long before it went mainstream, since this off-with-a-bang routine was common currency in movies long before 1982 (e.g., the Bond franchise, many horror movies).
ReplyDeleteYeah, good point about Bond and also horror. It is also a staple of SF TV series.
DeleteLike Anonymous above, I immediately thought of the Bond movies when I read the title of the post before I even clicked on it. I'm not sure where it begins, as honestly, I haven't read a lot of 80s fantasy fiction. I just checked Lawrence Watt-Evans' The Misenchanted Sword (1985). It starts with the protagonist alone, separated from his unit, and being hunted by enemy soldiers...but it's not a super action-packed first chapter. What he thinks may be the enemy turns out to be the old wizard who misenchants his sword. So not really an action packed start, but it is in media res.
ReplyDeleteThe Bond makers must also have got it from somewhere, I suppose….
DeleteI think I know it more from movies than books. Star Wars is the obvious one that jumps to mind. But I think they were trying to recreate the feel of TV serials that stopped mid-action each week.
ReplyDeleteYes, maybe it began in TV and fiction writers copied the practice from there.
DeleteYou mentioned SF TV series above -- I noticed that some time in the 90s-00s, during the shift to "prestige TV", there was a vogue for starting a pilot in media res and then backtracking to play out a series of flashbacks to explain how we got here, perhaps over many episodes. LOST is probably the prime example, but it was everywhere for a while (might still be, I'm not sure). Sort of a related structure, but also kind of the opposite structure.
DeleteIt occurs to me that crime and detective stories very often start with an in media res prologue of sorts, in which you see the victim get murdered, and then the main story shifts to the detective protagonists and the investigation begins. This also shows up in TV sci-fi stuff like Star Trek (perhaps this is what you had in mind): freaky phenomenon claims the life of some redshirt or otherwise disrupts the ship's routine, then credits, then cut to the bridge or to sick bay as the doctor tells us he's never seen neural activity like this yadda yadda.
Yes, Star Trek: TNG was exactly what I was thinking of actually.
DeleteYep, I was going to cite cinema, specifically the James Bond films of the 1960s. Not sure if that lines up with the Flemming books (which I happen to own, but haven't yet read...they being in possession of my son at the moment).
ReplyDeleteFrom memory, I don't think they do.
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