When it comes to fantasy novels I am now old, jaded and cynical, like the Ron Perlman character in Enemy at the Gates. I like it to be brief and to the point. Unless Gene Wolfe, Jack Vance or JRR Tolkien has written it, 300 pages is too long; I also have a heuristic approach to what I read, which dictates that I will not buy anything written since the year 2000 unless it is by an author I already know and respect.
Ricardo Pinto's The Masters slipped through the net on a technicality; it is less than 300 pages long, and although it was published in 2020 it is a reformulation of a book that came out in 1999. So I gave it a try, and I was very impressed - I recommend it wholeheartedly as the most original fantasy setting I have come across since arriving late, a few years ago, in Urth. It is also genuinely chilling in places - if you thought the 40K universe was grimdark, wait until you've arrived in The Three Lands.
The Masters is, then, sequel-worthy: I think I will read the rest of the series, which is a very unusual decision for me. For the last ten years or more, I have tended to only read the first volume in a series, even if I have rather liked it, because there is always so much else to read, and continuing with a series can therefore often feel like something of a wasted opportunity to encounter something different. It doesn't help of course that a single volume in the typical fantasy series is so interminably long; in this regard Stone Dance of the Chameleon, of which The Masters is the first volume, may be almost unique - and I applaud Pinto's risky decision to produce seven short volumes rather than three big long ones (even though there is undoubtedly a financial rationale at work in that decision, too).
What are the other sequel-worthy beginnings to a fantasy series? The Fellowship of the Ring, yes, clearly; The Shadow of the Torturer, The Knight and Soldier of the Mist; Nine Princes in Amber for sure, Lyonesse/Suldrun's Garden and I think most of Vance's series if we are counting the SF ones (though probably not the Durdane books, which I read out of a sense of completeness, really); Out of the Silent Planet, and, let's face it, A Game of Thrones too. I have a hard time thinking of other examples of first volumes of series that have really grabbed me and refused to let go. What are yours?
NK Jimesen "The Fifth Season"
ReplyDeleteThat's an excellent title.
DeleteJoe Abercrombie's First Law series. He wrote a great character in Logen Ninefingers, a complex anti-hero with massive success in killing and a lifetime of regret.
ReplyDeleteI really loved the Blacktongue Thief, I am eagerly awaiting the next installment. Although I am far less jaded with the genre than you seem to be. I also couldn’t let go of Malazan Book of the Fallen after Gardens of the Moon, that series really grew in quality and maturity the further it went along.
ReplyDeleteBlacktongue Thief was great - I can't recommend highly enough. I was compelled to finish Malazan too but was so exhausted by experience I have not picked up any of the other series in that world.
DeleteMalazan Book of the Fallen somehow didn't work for me. I liked the idea of it but I tried several volumes and couldn't quite finish any.
DeleteWithout exception, every single one of my favorite fantasy tales is either A) a short story or novella or B) a novel of 300 pages or less. The longest on my list is The Hobbit (which, in my facsimile reprint of the 1st edition, is exactly 300 pages).
ReplyDeleteAgree with your premise; all of these padded out trilogies and 5 or 7 book series don’t deserve it. It’s filler. A couple older examples where sequels were justified: Ursula LeGuin with Tombs of Atuan following upon a Wizard of Earthsea. Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord Trilogy (arguably not fantasy).
ReplyDeleteI love Cornwell.
DeleteCornwell seems like a magician if you are reading history of the same period in parallel. Terrific.
DeleteGlen Cook's The Black Company, anything by Adrian Tchaikovsky, Harry Turtledove's The Misplaced Legion, John Twelve Hawks' The Traveller, David Brin's Sundiver and/or Brightness Reef, Koji Suzuki's Ring, Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation, and Philip G Williamson's Dinbig of Khimmur all currently leap off the shelves at me as examples of first books whose subsequent many sequels I demolished (along with Vance, Wolfe, etc).
ReplyDeleteDinbig of Khimmur sounds fun!
DeleteIt's really good, sort of Vance meets an actual RPG campaign. The second book in the sequence, The Legend of Shadd's Torment, features one of the best fantasy dungeon sequences since Moria (i.e. an actual dungeon with a sort of ecology and reason for existing). Sadly, the main sequence of three books was never completed (and in a worrying sign, each subsequent book was smaller than the last), but he did 3 spinoffs and a completed trilogy on a similar tangent. Would love to see the series completed but it appears he writes no more. :-(
DeleteI can appreciate the logic behind your gatekeeping (my god, as I stare at my shelves of unread books, and contemplate my 55th birthday next year, I can appreciate it) but, my gosh, that's harsh.
ReplyDeleteI take it you haven't read Brian Catling's Vorrh trilogy then?
I did try that before I developed the heuristic but really didn't like it, I'm afraid. I gave up. It kind of felt overwrought. Please don't hate me, Dan!
DeleteHa, no, that's OK. I had a niggling feeling that you might not like it. I, obviously, loved it.
DeleteBTW sightly tangential, but have you ever read any Peter Vansittart? I recently started reading his Parsifal, am finding it very very slow going (takes me about ten minutes to digest each page) but equally... wow. I can't really describe it, as I don't know what to compare it to, but it's up there with the best things I have ever read.
DeleteNo but it sounds good!
DeleteI've just recently reread The Black Company, The Sword in the Stone, and A Wizard of Earthsea, and can confirm that they made me neither cringe nor yawn. I'm reading my children The Lord of the Rings at bedtime (we're at the Ents right now) and might follow it up with LeGuin.
ReplyDeleteYeah, crap, I should have put The Sword in the Stone. That's one of my all-time favourite series actually (and the sequels are if anything better - The Ill-Made Knight is brilliant).
DeleteI just finished Tamsyn Muir's Gideon the Ninth and really appreciate being set up for a sequel from a completely different perspective than the first book.
ReplyDeleteYeah, my friend was reading that and recommended it to me. I have to say that reading about it, and hearing her comments, *really* put me off, but you never know...
DeletePersonally I really liked it right up until the end, at which point I had to resist the temptation to throw it at the wall.
DeleteLewis isn't even worthy of reading a first tome - his writing is just bad.
ReplyDeleteAnd more general, I prefer to not read a first tome of a cycle if I'm not going to see its sequels. There's just no point. If the author can't tell what he/she wants to tell in 1 tome, there's probably no sense to be made in further ones. %) And there are TONS of such authors nowadays. %(
For actual recommendations - I'd add Moorcock and other New Wave authors to the list of worthy to look for sequels. Farmer, to the degree, even if his language is often uninspired. Cherryh & Hambly, though they were usually better at shorter works. Not Turtledove - who is _definitely_ better at shorter works, though I like the Videssos cycle well enough in my youth. Glen Cook, as mentioned above.
Mike
Anyone who says Lewis's writing is 'just bad' either doesn't know anything about writing or is posturing. It's perfectly acceptable to say you don't like his writing, that it's not to your taste, or that you don't like his views or themes, but the idea he is a 'bad writer' is a sheer canard. Go and read Perelandra and then explain why the writing in it is bad.
DeletePerelandra is beautifully written. Speaking of which, here are my favorite fantasy novels (along with the page counts of my copies):
DeleteGeorge MacDonald's Phantastes (185 pages)
George MacDonald's Lilith (252 pages)
The real "Space Trilogy":
1. David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus (277 pages)
2. C. S. Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet (154 pages)
3. C. S. Lewis's Perelandra (214 pages)
J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (300 pages)
A. Merritt's The Moon Pool (242 pages)
A. Merritt's The Face in the Abyss (278 pages)
A. Merritt's Dwellers in the Mirage (213 pages)
R. E. Howard's The Hour of the Dragon (172 pages)
Everything else I love along these lines is either a novella or a short story.
Perelandra is a work of great poetic beauty. The only reason for anybody describing it as 'bad writing' is an objection to Lewis's project. (Something similar goes on with Ayn Rand. It's recieved wisdom she was a 'bad writer' too, because people don't like her politics. I don't massively like her politics either, but she was a very direct, clear, powerful prose writer.)
DeleteA Wizard Of Earthsea by Ursula K LeGuin (not terribly controversial, its world is utterly compelling)
ReplyDeleteDuncton Wood by William Horwood (martial arts mole epic)
Legend by David Gemmel (I expect a tv/film effort any time now of the Drenai Saga)
Love Duncton Wood. I might never have written about it on the blog but that is a wild (no pun intended) series. Mole martial arts! Mole-on-mole erotica! Mole magic!
DeleteIt is quite mad when you think about it..
DeleteOthers have mentioned The Black Company, and I quite concur. I would also say that The Lies of Locke Lamora cried out for sequels, though not the ones it actually got (which are not bad books, they just don't develop things as much as I hoped). The various Vlad Taltos books (I forget which one is first) also did.
ReplyDeleteLocke Lamora never seems to have stepped out of Fantasy Venice-mode. Which is irritating, given the actual developments of the plot involved leaving Fantasy Venice far behind. The long awaited fourth book might have accomplished this - a new cultural context, a war going on - but it looks unlikely that we'll ever know.
DeleteDefinitely Le Guin's "Wizard of Earthsea," also quite enjoyed her Annals of the Western Shore trilogy (first one is "Gifts"). Samuel Delany's "Tales of Neveryona" is also a great start to the 4 books of the Neveryon series (which always seem completely overlooked to me). Wolfe's "Soldier of the Mist" (though I find the third one in the series the least successful).
ReplyDeleteYes, the last one in the series strays too far into just being incomprehensible - I defy anybody to explain to me what happens in the final act, although presumably that was Wolfe's point.
DeleteMartha Wells books have been genuinely interesting and just plain fun. The Murderbot books are great fun, and the Raksura books are interesting world building and had me trying to figure out how to run a game in that world.
ReplyDeleteThe books of Babel by Josiah Bancroft have Borges/Wolfe DNA all through them, and even they could be accused of trying too hard, still worth the read.
Nice! I like the sound of them.
DeleteThe Raksura books were really good. I wish she had done a sequel to City of Bones (also a fun world I wanted more of) but it looks like her Murderbot success helped greenlight a reprint!
DeleteA couple of people recommended City of Bones to me; I found it really, *really* tedious.
DeleteI don't recall the first of the Chronicles of Prydain crying out for sequels, exactly, but the fourth book--Taran Wanderer--certainly calls out for the preceding books of high adventure to contrast with Taran's attempts in the fourth book to reconcile himself to a more common way of life, and his growth in maturity that follows. Not to say that the earlier books aren't fun reads, but rather that the effect of reading about Taran coming to grips with his sense of his own lesser station in a world of fantasy was really sobering as a young reader, in a good way.
ReplyDeleteThat's an interesting twist: books that justify their own prequels.
DeleteTitus Groan.
ReplyDeleteI have to this day never got beyond Titus Groan to the rest. I liked it, but it felt to me like eating molasses. I would need to set aside time to read the others.
DeleteI find the humour lightens the oppressive atmosphere, in the same way that humour in Kafka does. But you have to be receptive to it.
DeleteBrand new cherry flavor and Stainless by Todd Grimshaw, both eminently sequel worthy and both shall never have the sequel. Lord of Light by Zelazny, also forever sequel-less.
ReplyDeleteI don't know I ever wanted a sequel to Lord of Light, but I did want to see Zelazny's 'variations on a theme' - to see what he did with a similar set of ideas. And everything I found that was sort of like that was not terribly arresting.
DeleteI like Lord of Light a lot but for me it works so well as a compact standalone.
DeleteStainless and Brand New Cherry Flavor are two books that yearn for sequels that they'll never get. Lord of Light by Zelazny, the same, though it shall never come.
ReplyDelete