a.k.a. The Question of the Long-Running Series
If spend any time at all in fantasy wonk-rooms, you’ll inevitably encounter advice about How to Write Your Fantasy. And, joking aside, there’s a tremendous amount of advice to be gleaned and SFF writers are an uncommonly generous and supportive sub-culture.
That said, not all advice is created equal, and what works for one writer won’t necessarily apply to everyone. Still, in general, they’re a good investment of time and effort, especially for the writer (of any genre) who is still laboring in the vineyard. Advice from a Fantasy writer is not Fantasy-specific, and good writing is good writing, whatever the subject and theme.
There is, of course, advice that’s specific to SFF, which has its own conventions, tropes (there’s the word that TVTropes has made both dreaded and dreadful), and peculiarities. Foremost among which is the Long-Running Series.
Whence the Long-Running Series arose is less a mystery than the convention of Capitalizing Random Nouns. I’m not talking about its genesis, but its popularity. For much of its life as genre(s), SFF has been a ghetto discipline; according to scholars in Literature Departments and High School English Teachers alike, SFF is a form that is Not Serious and Not for Serious People. Trouble is, a lot of people enjoy reading it. When a good writer happened along with a good book that featured compelling characters and challenged readers’ imaginations, readers bought it eagerly and wanted more. Therefore, series. (Personally, I think series writing was enabled by the endurance of Lord of the Rings, which started life as one large book but was cut into three pieces by publishing constraints and post-WWII economics. Kind of funny to think that J.R.R. Tolkien eased the way as much for Thomas Covenant as for Aslan, but such is our world — thank Allen & Unwin for it and, no, the link is not wrong. Their main business office is now in Australia.)
The Long-Running Series as a concept really took off in the 1970’s when, in fantasy, the idea of a stand-alone novel became a rarity (still is, truth be told). When a stand-alone book is a commercial success, the author is encouraged to continue into a series, part of the pressure coming from publishers who favor sure sales, and part from fans; social media has made it far easier for fans to reach writers, and writers are encouraged to cultivate their fan bases. When it’s good, it’s very very good (see Neil Gaiman’s or Delilah Dawson’s Twitter feeds) and when it’s not good, well...results are predictable. You can look at G.R.R. Martin’s or Patrick Rothfuss’ social media for further explanation about how possessive and presumptuous, and ultimately destructive, some fans can be.
Anyway, since the Long-Running Series is a form peculiar to SFF, there’s a fair amount of attention paid to it: the Care and Feeding of Your Series. And there’s a split in opinion, writ large, about how to handle a series successfully.
The first school of thought is “Up the Ante.” In every scene (and this holds true within novel structures as well, despite the genre), the stakes get raised, tension ratcheted up and up until the climax becomes an all-or-nothing situation. This formula generally works well in a single novel; writ large, the results are mixed. In a single novel, against all odds, the battered hero must prevail against the forces arrayed to take her down. The prevailing advice: torture your hero! In volume 2, the stakes must be higher than they were in volume 1; volume 3 higher than volume 2, etc. Series that take this form, at least in my (alas, limited) experience, appear to be the ones that were surprise successes, or sold far better than the publisher and/or writer expected, and now comes the pressure to keep the narrative arc going, until by the tenth volume or so our magically-enhanced and empowered hero is going up against gods and demi-gods and other forces of the universe, with stakes so stratospheric they challenge the credulity of even the most tolerant reader. I won’t name any series that fall in this trap, although they’re out there; suffice it to say that Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden series seemed to be going down that road before Butcher navigated a course correction that makes the series sustainable. A lesser writer would have had a lot more trouble pulling that switch.
The other school of thought depends on a novelist who has planned out the whole damn arc in advance, or planned it out well enough to accommodate a master structure. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire (currently five novels and counting) and Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen (ten glorious doorstops) follow this form. Each book stands on its own and also forms, not a chain of events, but pieces of a puzzle that collectively reveal a larger picture.
And then there are hybrids. Ari Marmell’s Mick Oberon series is one; I suspect the first novel was a one-off “with series potential,” which means that Marmell had enough of an overall plan to build out his currently four volumes, with at least one more necessarily to come. (I seem to have a weakness for wisecracking Chicago detectives, be they wizard or fae, whatever the era.) Each novel with a different focus; not raised stakes, but different ones.
Mick Oberon has been working in four novels without a lot of narrative intrusion, Harry Dresden in — can it be, eighteen!?! Explains one reason why there’s so much backstory, and readers counsel newbies to read in order.
Same thing holds true for C.J. Cherryh’s Foreigner. Nineteen novels so far, the twentieth in the works. Cherryh started with idea of the series as a series, a story-line that required more than one, two, or even three volumes. And there is criticism about the series, much of it grounded in the sheer size of the work, the need for each volume to stand as a single novel but still fit into a narrative arc. Which means that, by now, at least half the plot of a Foreigner novel reprises the plots of earlier novels. It’s either that, or alienate new readers and/or risk veteran readers having forgotten something important that happened six books ago. Another criticism centers on how closely-written and detailed the novels are. We follow the characters, principally Bren and, more lately, Cajeiri, from meeting to meeting, breakfast to tea to dinner to bed. It’s charming, but it can also wear on the attention span.
How does Cherryh manage to keep readers going and not dropping away? Ingeniously. She lets them grow with the characters. Each time we hear about an event from an earlier novel, the perspective has shifted slightly; we know more than we did before. Stories told from one point of view get reprised from another, until, eventually, we get something approaching an accurate perspective. Case in point: the mystery of Captain Ramirez’s secret plan. Spoilers to follow, up to and including Visitor and maybe a little beyond.
In the first book, Foreigner, we’re introduced to the Starship Phoenix, which goes astray in folded space (a.k.a. off course in a wormhole) and ends up in orbit around a habitable planet, which has the disqualifying characteristic (to the ship) of being inhabited . Meaning, the people on board the ship can’t land, and the planet natives have technologically advanced to steam-power. The ship builds a space station in a fixed orbit, hangs out for a while, and then leaves to explore the neighborhood, maybe get its bearings and figure out where home is. The ship is commanded by members of the Pilot’s Guild, a sort of professional union, and when Alpha station is finished and staffed, the Pilot’s Guild extends its authority to run it. The station authorities become so autocratic and heavy-handed that rank-and-file on the station find life difficult, and the allure of the green world below too tempting. They start to abandon the station; the station-masters grow more autocratic, more people leave, and the cycle continues until the station no longer has manpower to operate, and it’s abandoned.
Two hundred years later, the ship returns. Not the same crew, of course; generations of ship-folk have developed their own society. The earth-bound populations of humans and native atevi build shuttles and in time, repopulate and run the station. And Bren, the human paidhi, (see part one of this series for more about this, or wait until next week) meets Jase, who parachutes to earth from the ship on behalf of the ship. Jase also becomes a paidhi, and his working relationship with Bren over time becomes a familial bond.
Jase is one of “Taylor’s Children,” born from genetic material (maybe egg, maybe sperm, maybe both) from the original crew that saved the ship from annihilation when it went off-course. Twenty years before the ship returned to the planet, the head captain, Ramirez, ordered Jase and another child to be born and brought up as linguists, having them learn multiple languages from the original Earth.
Jase reveals to Bren (and everyone else) that the ship built another station way out there called Reunion, and that some time when Phoenix was off exploring stuff, some alien enemy destroyed it. Without recourse, Phoenix came back to Alpha. One thing that bugs Jase: he doesn’t know why Ramirez ordered that he be born. There’s no explanation that holds up to scrutiny. When Phoenix first left Alpha the station was self-sufficient and the planet below off-limits. Two hundred years later, when Phoenix returns, the ship’s officers are surprised to find the station abandoned. It’s certainly handy that Jase and his counterpart can learn atevi, but neither Ramirez nor any of the other three captains expected they would ever have to communicate with the planet. And Jase and Yolanda are already grown, so Ramirez would have had to know something he couldn’t have known twenty years earlier.
Unless Alpha and the earth of the atevi weren’t part of Ramirez’s plan at all, and Alpha was a fall-back. Trouble is, in volume four, Precursor, Ramirez dies. Without explaining anything. Oh, except that Reunion was badly damaged but there were survivors. There are still survivors. And there’s a story about Phoenix returning to Reunion and, arriving, finding the station had been hit by some alien enemy. Ramirez took on fuel and then abandoned the station and its survivors, and went back to Alpha, and kept the secret until his deathbed.
A ship’s technician happens to be in the infirmary at the same time Ramirez makes his confession (and, further complication: it turns out that the “confession” might not have come from Ramirez but from someone else with an ulterior motive); word gets out and within hours, the pressure to rescue the survivors of the alien attack builds. Volumes 4, 5, and 6 involve, not only the rescue mission at Reunion, but also Ramirez’s secret plans and motivations, the aliens, the kyo, who are still watching Reunion and what they intend. From there, we have to figure out who are the kyo’s enemy and why the kyo hit Reunion in the first place, why Jase was born and what Ramirez really was doing poking about in space.
This story arc unfolds over seventeen novels, and comes down to one figure in glass cell:
Was this the purpose of the kyo’s visit? That he should lend his skill to — whatever they wanted with this man? Who on Reunion could be worth so much effort, to bring him all this distance?
“Who are you?” Bren asked in ship-speak, the safest, most obvious question. And: “Are you all right?”
The man got up — he was dressed kyo-style, in thin robes. Hair and beard, a great deal of both, were matted and snarled. But the stare…
The stare was that of a man seeing a ghost.
(Visitor, p. 308)
Guy Cullen, a prisoner of war, a war that’s been going on for eighty or ninety years on the other side of the kyo’s territory.
Everything, everything began to make terrifying sense. He was standing still, trying to give no clue what he was thinking, but shaken to the core, and telling himself it had to be a trick, a trap, something other than a vast, star-spanning circle. Coincidence couldn’t stretch that far...that they had just met what Phoenix had been hunting for centuries.
Phoenix’s own point of origin. Human space. A location lost from Phoenix records hundred of years ago, when some trick of space and starship physics had thrown them off their course and into the radiation hell that had cost the ship so dearly.
Cullen had nothing to do with Braddock or Phoenix or Reunion...other than a distant common ancestor.
This was the Enemy. The kyo’s mysterious enemy.
(Visitor, p. 313)
Humans. From earth. Bren estimates that around two centuries of linguistic development separate Cullen and Mosphei’, as well as ship-speak.
What was Ramirez seeking? Home. Maybe. If he thought he found it and on the way raised a couple of translators to talk with their original home, instead he found … a war. One he never expected but certainly recognized in time to panic and run.
Or maybe he wasn’t looking for Home, but a home.
The ship captains operate under the command of the Pilot’s Guild, still in residence on Reunion (in the person of Louis Baynes Braddock, and that makes things sticky during the rescue mission, and after). If Ramirez went out on his own secret mission, planning to found a station free of Guild authority, that would involve extensive scouting to find mineral resources and maybe an unoccupied planet capable of sustaining life, to start a colony independent of the autocratic and outmoded Pilot’s Guild. His own private Eden.
In Phoenix, the kyo saw a similar style of starship, at Reunion a similar style of space station, similar to their enemies, that is, and concluded that Reunion was involved in their war, not realizing that centuries separate the two branches of humanity. And the devastating attack was a mistake.
It takes Bren seventeen volumes of sifting through disparate versions of truths, mistruths, politics and misleading stories to figure it all out. We might not have the definitive truth, even now. The other senior captain who might have known Ramirez’s plans is Jules Ogun, who is still alive and very certainly not talking.
It’s the evolution of the plot, the rounding out of details, that makes the series so intriguing, together with appealing characters. Although each novel adheres to the standard structure of ratcheting up tension to a climax and then a brief denouement, the series itself doesn’t. It’s a tale that certainly has grown in the telling, probably beyond even Cherryh’s expectations, but as a model, I’m telling you, mate, it works!
The mystery of Captain Ramirez is not, of course, the only significant mystery in the Foreigner series, but it’s one that’s easy to isolate and examine, despite the fact that I’ve given it only the lightest of treatments. In Cherryh’s universe, people are complicated, not always honest even with themselves, and truth is messy. Like in this universe. In fact, there are a great many parallels with our world and our reality, which is what you want in SFF of any stripe.
Structurally, despite a certain amount of creakiness over almost twenty volumes, Cherryh combines a mix of, not rising, but shifting stakes with generous doses of political intrigue and mutable political alliances to make a satisfying read that holds up well, (even if you take the crazy notion to read it all in one shot.)
For something completely different and, mindful that today is Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, I would like to recommend a brief essay at Senentiae Antiquae, a splendid Classics blog that’s well worth following. This was posted last year, Martin Luther King Jr. and Socrates, and will lead you to ponder the legacy of civil disobedience. At the very least, it’ll give you a new perspective on the great “Letter From A Birmingham Jail.”
Reference
Cherryh, C.J. Visitor. NY: DAW, 2016.
Foreigner Diaries
Bingeing on Foreigner