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."
DeleteRobert Jordan wrote a bunch of Conan pastiche novels before The Eye of the World so he'd definitely be familiar with the Howard work and style.
DeleteThanks both. Fascinating - I had no idea Robert Jordan had written Conan pastiches.
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.
DeleteBond kind of is an SF film series, only expertly masked.
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.
DeleteColumbo is probably the epitome of this in the detective genre, isn't it? The opening invariably shows not only the murder but the culprit as well.
DeleteYes, and now that you mention it, it happens a lot in detective TV series.
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.
DeleteI think the specifics of the Wheel of Time prologue is pretty unique: starting thing en media res is an old technique l, but I can't think of any examples earlier than Robert Jordan that do all of the things that the WoT prologue does:
ReplyDelete-Start en media res.
-Have a viewpoint character who is completely separate from the protagonist of the rest of the book.
-Have the prologue function as a complete short story.
Wheel of Time was very influential in the 90's and then have Martin do the same sort of thing in each of his also very influential fantasy books really cemented this as a common way to start a fantasy book. I really think Jordan started this as a trend since I can't think of a single fantasy book that uses this technique before The Eye of the World, maybe I'm missing an example but I doubt it has the influence of Jordan.
Yes, I was going to post more or less exactly this, with the addition that I think Jordan may have gotten it out of the pulps mentioned by Picador above; I don't know whether he was an outright fan or not, but Jordan had a quantity of Conan pastiches to his name before starting in on the Wheel of Time, so he must have at least been familiar with Howard's style of writing.
DeleteThanks - this is the type of knowledgeable and thorough answer I desired. From Howard to Jordan sounds plausible to me.
DeleteAh, Bosh here again. It being an old pulp trope that Jordan picked up makes sense. I just don't know pulp well enough (have just read the standard trio of Howard, Lovecraft, and Smith and then the first issue of Weird Tales, which is a FASCINATING read with a lot of interesting tropes and WILDLY uneven quality with a few interesting stories that showed interesting roads less travelled for weird fiction and some that read a lot like Lovecraft with early 20th century spiritualism instead of weird shit) to pick out that kind of pulp literally device.
DeletePulp --> Jordan --> Martin, with Martin being huge enough to spread it among a lot of writers who don't know their Jordan well make sense. I can't recall seeing much of that trope in my sci-fi/fantasy reading of the era between Howard and Jordan so there seems to be a gap there. But maybe I just haven't read enough.
The action-packed prologue is a promise to the reader that what comes after is nothing he hasn't seen before.
ReplyDeleteNever change man.
DeleteIt is definitely an attention span and reader-grabbing thing because they figured nobody would want a slow prologue or story intro anymore because we're all brain dead.
ReplyDeleteI think you should have started this post: I slid to a stop under a desk, laptop in one hand and my last frag grenade in the other. I just hoped a stray bullet didn't take out the wireless access point in the ceiling before I could hit "publish." There was no time to spell check or go over the grammar one more time, but my readers were smart enough to get started on the research project while I got out of Dodge. I hit enter, slammed the screen down, and pulled the battery.
ReplyDeleteHa! Nice.
DeletePretty sure this is an ancient technique; Romeo and Juliet starts with a fight between the two houses, both to get the audience's attention and to set the stage. I'm confident that it is common amongst Shakespeare's works, but I don't remember any others offhand.
ReplyDeleteThat's an interesting shout. Although is it strictly a prologue? I want to distinguish the separate prologue from just an in media res opening.
DeleteA prologue?
DeleteA prologue? O be some other name!
What's in a name?
That which we call in media res by any other name would move as quick. So prologue could, were it not prologue called, retain that dear impetus which it owes without that title.