Return to Exile Book Launch!

Tonight, 7:00 pm, at The King's English Bookshop in Salt Lake City (1511 South 1500 East).  E.J. Patten will launch and sign copies of his debut middle reader novel, Return to Exile.  Appearance, emcee services and further autographing by Dan Wells, author of I Am Not a Serial Killer et sequelae.

The Other Fantasy

For a lot of people, "fantasy" literature means Tolkien, and his many followers.  This is what is often called "epic" or "high" fantasy.  Robert Jordan, Brandon Sanderson, Peter Orullian, Stephen R. Donaldson, Steven Erikson, etc., all write high fantasy.

From the birth of fantasy literature in the early twentieth century, there has been another fantasy, sometimes called "low" fantasy (of which "sword and sorcery" stories are probably a subset, heavy on action, flashy magic and romance).  Its characters aren't knights and wizards battling to save the world from ancient evils... they're thugs, thieves and drifters, trying to stay alive.

Most of Robert E. Howard's original Conan stories are low fantasy -- Conan is a thief or a mercenary or a pirate.

Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser tales are classic, excellent low fantasy.

As a kid, I loved the Thieves' World anthologies and Robert Asprin's myth books -- both low fantasy.

I just finished reading Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora.  It's a fine first novel, an entertaining caper story, and an example of low fantasy.  Its protagonist is a thief and a scoundrel, and (at least until quite late) he has scurrilous goals -- robbery and revenge, mostly.  It's good to know that low fantasy is alive and well.

Sequels and Expectations

When you write the first book in a series, you can do anything you want.

When you write the second, you can still do anything you want... but whatever you do that repeats or echoes the first book, becomes part of the shtick of that series, and your audience will expect you to do it again.

Think about Harry Potter.  You read the first book, in which there is a prologue, then Harry has a sequence in Muggle England, then he goes off to Hogwarts for a year of school.

At that point -- the end of book one -- the series could have looked like anything.  In the next book, Harry could have become an astronaut.  But parts of book two echo book one (Harry has a persecuted sequence in Little Whinging, travels to Hogwarts and goes through one year of school), so those parts become the shtick of the Harry Potter, and we expect to see them repeated in subsequent books (and we do).  Some parts of book one are not echoed in book two: book two has no prologue, for instance, and thereafter prologues are not a necessary part of the series (some books have them, and some don't).

E.J. Patten of the Story Monkeys wrestled with this recently in crafting the sequel to his epic horror middle reader book Return to Exile (released TOMORROW).  He had to consciously choose which parts of book one to repeat or echo, knowing that then he would be using them (or riffing on them) again in books three and so on.

And I recently read Endymion, book three of Dan Simmons's Hyperion Cantos.  And this book... man, it just didn't live up to books one and two.  Part of that may just be ordinary series fatigue (see Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Dune, etc.), but also, I think my expectations as the audience were violated.

See, the first two books -- Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion -- were really doggone smart.  Hyperion was actually very self-consciously literary, modeling itself on the Canterbury Tales, but the sequel dropped that conceit, so I knew literary models were not part of the series shtick (it would have been cool if book two was a science fiction take on Beowulf, but oh, well).  But the first two books were both cleverly plotted, with surprising ends.

And book three was not.  It violated my series expectations.  It was fine, it wasn't bad.  It continued the plot of the first two, more or less, and if it had been the first book of a series I probably would have enjoyed it without any complaint.  But its change of heart twist at the end was nothing like the surprises of the first two books (and was fairly predictable).  Add some mostly two-dimensional characters, and my goodwill for the series and author and the book's own actual high concept coolness (it's sort of Riverworld meets Terminator 2) weren't enough for me.  My expectations are violated, I don't know if I'll be able to pick up book four.  Certainly, not for a while.

Outsider Genius: Skip Spence

And here is Skip Spence:

Outsider Genius: Blaze Foley

I spent several evenings at World Con in Reno the other week filking.  Filk is (and probably always will be) something of an outsider art.  I'm going to honor the filkers I met and heard this weekend by posting songs by other outsider songwriters.

Here's Blaze Foley:

Bully That

Here's the audio / sham video for "Bully That" (lyrics posted earlier this week).

Sorry, I meant to capo it up into G minor, but I forgot until I already had most of the tracks down in the E minor basement.  Fortunately, my voice goes that low.

Congratulations again to E.J. Patten -- Return to Exile is available next Tuesday.

Story Monkeys, ho!

Witchy Hillary

The Kings of Cahokia (and its Queens, of which they have had many, for Ohioan rules of inheritance, including its laws of royal succession, do not favor the male of the species over the female) have long had a mysterious relationship with the beastkind and, if he exists, their legendary ruler, the Heron King.  The Cahokians are tightly allied with their near neighbors, or they wage fierce intimate war against one another, reliable informants tell me, but they seem unable to simply leave each other alone.  This may be simply the destiny of geography, as Cahokia is nestled in the very arms of the Mississippi, the great river that the Heron King claims as his capitol, but it is difficult to escape the impression that there is a more substantial connection.  I understand that from time to time the Heron King has taken to wife a Cahokian princess.

– Sir Edmund Percival Hillary, Mississippi: The Nile of
   the New World and Its Savage Glories, “Cahokia”