Sunday March 31, 2013 The Long and Winding Tale

The art of storytelling is a broad and complex field.  Some stories can be told succinctly in a few hundred words.  Some can be told in a novel of 300 pages or so and some novels are longer than others, (I’m looking at you, War and Peace!)   The publishing industry can only work so many miracles, so what happens if the tale an author wishes to tell exceeds the bookbinding technology available?   It is at this point that a story can become a trilogy of volumes or perhaps a lengthy series of them. With the recent release of A Memory of Light, the final volume of Robert Jordan’s masterful epic, A Wheel of Time, I have been given cause to ponder the concept of the multi-volume epic and its prevalence in the fantasy genre.

When interviewed on the subject, Jordan’s wife and editor, Harriet, and Tom Doherty of Tor Books explained that when Jordan first submitted his first book, he had only intended it to be a trilogy.  Then it turned into a series of 6 and then morphed overtime into the 14 book epic it is today.  Even the final book, A Memory of Light, was supposed to be only one novel but Brandon Sanderson, who was contracted to finish ‘A Wheel of Time’ posthumously, ended up needing to publish it in three volumes with the final volume bearing the title of the finale.

Epic narrative is nothing new of course.  The epic of ancient India, The Mahabharata, of Hindu faith spans 18 books and nearly 2 million words.  But it seems that fantasy has co-opted this literary vehicle and made it its own in recent years.  Maybe it has something to do with the art of world building, a technique of which all great writers of fantasy are adept.  The virtuoso world builder J. R. R. Tolkien always intended The Lord of the Rings to be read as a single volume but the publishing world has split it into the trilogy the world has come to know and love.

The fantasy genre is unique among fiction in that it is littered with authors whose tales span volumes. Sanderson himself has also embarked upon his own magnum opus:   The Stormlight Archive:  a planned 11 book series beginning with the already published Way of Kings.   In fact, it seems that the list of fantasy authors who choose to write stories spanning several books seems to outweigh those that don’t.  Other authors of epic tales include, Terry Goodkind, Steven Erickson, George R. R. Martin, L. E. Modesitt Jr., and David Eddings, to name just a few.  The library has amassed quite collection of fantasy series by the above authors and others, all of which are available to order through your Thunder Bay Public Library.

Andrew Hare