An open letter to authors, editors, and publishers of
fantasy and science fiction epics.
There is a quality problem that has been plaguing our
industry for a long time, and I think the time has come to address this issue.
The issue to which I’m referring is the “subtle” insertion
of catch-up exposition added to sequels. Recaps are always annoying for hardcore fans of the series,
though it gets worse as series get longer. When a quick recap of the events of
book one pop up in say, book three of Gentlemen Bastards or book two of Mistborn,
it is extremely annoying. It pierces the cloud of suspended disbelief and
reminds you that you are reading a fictional story. It grinds the narrative to
a halt and flashes there like a giant beacon of mediocrity, but, in most cases,
one is able to simply sigh, grit one’s teeth, and power through until the book becomes its
own story again a paragraph or two later – a whole chapter, if you’re unlucky. But these
irritating recaps get exponentially more disruptive, the longer a series
continues. When you’re in book six of Harry Potter and having to read about how
Slytherins crave power and Ron comes from a big family, when you are in book
eleven of Wheel of Time and are being told that the Aes Sedai are a powerful
organization of women who can use magic – well, it sucks. It ruins your reading experience.
And the more catch-up authors, editors, and publishers feel the book needs to engage new readers, the more profoundly the narrative suffers. When book two comes out it's three paragraphs of exposition spread
out over the first five chapters, but by book ten it has become a
solid 10% of the book. A tenth of your book is now annoying and repetitive and slows down the narrative even as it bores and irritates your biggest fans and dedicated readers.
I recognize that these things are not done for no reason. An
author’s hardcore, dedicated fans make up only a tiny portion of their
readership. If you are writing books just for that specific audience, you will
not sell enough books to be able to keep writing for a living. I know a person
who picked up book three of “A Song of Ice and Fire” and started the series
there. I know someone who was going on
vacation and grabbed book seven of “The Wheel of Time” at the airport bookstore
so they’d have something to read on the beach, and they read it and enjoyed it “well
enough” and that was all the Jordan they ever read. I know that these people
exist, and if the recaps aren’t in the book, they will be completely lost and
unable to enjoy the book that they randomly picked up halfway through a series. And I recognize that there is also a huge population that
reads these books without obsessing over them. As each new book in the series
comes out, they will read it once, then put it down and wait until the next
book comes out, without ever re-reading the last volume. A few years (sometimes
longer) might pass between each book in the series, and they simply don’t
remember the details. The recaps mean that they can happily read the new book
without getting confused or having to go back and re-read the whole series in
preparation of the new addition to the series.
Now, we know that dedicated fans of the series are likely to
be annoyed by recaps, but there is one other big victim of the practice – your own
legacy. See, in a hundred years, no one is going to be waiting for your next
big release. Your legacy, for good or ill, will be set and established. When
someone sits down to read A Song of Ice and Fire, they will have a complete seven-book
series in front of them (I dearly hope, please, please GRRM). They aren’t going
to be waiting a year or more between each volume, they are going to binge the
whole thing, and the recaps are going to be so annoying. It will be like when
DVD seasons of shows from the 80s and 90s came out, and people starting
binge-watching series that had never been consumed in that way before, and
getting really annoyed when Friends had to keep reminding people that Monica’s
boyfriend was super old so that the jokes made sense to the people who hadn’t bothered
to tune in the last five episodes. Eventually, people realized that [good]
shows were going to mostly be binge-watched by posterity, so they started formatting
them different. You got “previously on LOST/Battlestar Galactica/Spartacus”
recaps right at the beginning, and then you no longer had characters awkwardly recapping
things just so that the audience didn’t get completely confused. When you are
binge-watching the DVD set the “previously on” can be easily skipped; some DVD sets
don’t even include them as part of the autoplay, you have to specifically click
on them if you want the recap.
So, what to do when it comes to books? “Previously on” doesn’t
work nearly as well in written word – you can recap massive happenings with a
single cool-looking shot in visual media, but a terse sentence describing
events with little detail is just going to be boring, and a massive infodump
right at the beginning of a book is just about the fastest way to kill the
excitement of a reader before they can even begin to enjoy a novel.
Well, here is my suggestion: You publish your standard version
of the novel that has all of the recaps intact for new readers or casual
readers who might not remember the details of previous books. BUT THEN, a
little later down the road, you publish a special “I’m-reading-the-whole-series-and-I-don’t-need-pointless-recaps”
version of the book, and these editions become the official, canon version of
the series.
Personally, I suggest that we take a similar approach to
Brandon Sanderson. For those of you who are unfamiliar, many of Sanderson’s
works (Elantris, Warbreaker, Mistborn, The Stormlight Archive) are set in a
shared universe called the Cosmere, and the books have some (so far mostly very
minor) characters and events that very loosely tie the different worlds and
series together, presumably building to a massive, epic, universe-spanning
conclusion a few decades down the road. When working on such an ambitious
project (most people expect the Cosmere novels to number somewhere in the
forties by the time the series is concluded), some world-building inevitably
falls between the cracks no matter how meticulously you plan. Sanderson’s elegant
solution to this problem came out last year in the form of a gorgeous “Tenth Anniversary Author’s Definitive Edition” of his first published novel,
Elantris. Sanderson and his team went through the entire novel with a
fine-tooth comb, correcting minor spelling and syntax errors that had fallen
through the cracks of the first edition, and, more importantly, altering some
of the events of the book that did not make technical sense within the context
of the book itself, like the direction a character ran during a key scene. In addition, he also published a limited-edition run ofleather-bound copies of this new edition, full of international covers and other
artwork. Sanderson has stated that he’d
like to continue to publish these “Author’s Definitive Editions” as each of his
novels hits its tenth anniversary, and I hope that he does continue. I think it
is a really wise idea. It pays service to his biggest fans right now, in the
moment, and helps to secure his legacy as an author in the long term by showing
how committed he is to making sure that his worldbuilding is consistent.
Wouldn’t it be amazing if “definitive”
editions like this of our beloved fantasy novels included a recap clean-up as part of the editing
process?
I truly believe that doing
this will benefit the long-term interests of the author, the publisher, and
the public, and that it will improve the very existential nature of epic fantasy/science
fiction series for the generations to come.
