Zahabi's Newsletter - June 24

The Ones Who Walk Towards Omeshraz (rather than away from Omelas), Worldcon, structuring a series.

Dear reader,

This month I’ve got a short story coming out, I’m attending Worldcon in August, and we can talk at length about structuring a series – and how that might mimic the way we structure individual books.

What’s happening with the book – The Ones Who Walk Towards Omeshraz

The Lightborn has now been out a month, and I’m starting to sometimes spot it in bookshops. Here it is being unpacked before going on the shelves at Blackwell’s – it’s always a thrill to see it out in the world. It makes the whole story feel real, to see it as a physical object, out there.

If you’re interested in short fiction, my short story The Ones Who Walk Towards Omeshraz has just been published by Infinite Worlds. It’s an answer, of course, to The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin, but also to The Ones Who Stay and Fight by N. K. Jemisin. I love trying to write utopia – an honest utopia, that aspires to be a good place – and find where it fails, and how we may improve on it. I was frustrated reading N. K. Jemisin’s story because, as a pacifist, I felt it should be possible to achieve some sort of utopia without violence. This story was my attempt at it. There is a long conversation happening from authors answering Le Guin. In a different vein (it’s not an attempt to write a utopia, as such) but tackling the same question, there is Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole by Isabel J. Kim.

Last but not least, Worldcon Glasgow is coming up soon – I’ll be looking forward to seeing other readers and fans at the event!

What’s happening on the page – Structuring a Series

How to structure a book series? In some cases, a series is a collection of standalones, like The Wayfarer series by Becky Chambers – I read A Closed and Common Orbit well before The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, and didn’t feel that changed my enjoyment at all. One way to structure a series is simply to have each story serve to enrich a living, breathing world, without needing to engage with it in any given order. Part of the pleasure, as readers, is in the exploration, without any map to guide us.

Similarly, the Discworld novel are sort of standalones. But within the Discworld, some novels do follow each other: the Watch/Vimes novels read as a series that progresses, and is best read in order – so do other characters, like the witches, for example. In this case, we have pockets of chronological stories, often following one character, within a living world where you can follow whoever you want, or just snack on standalones. Here we’ve got a mix and match between series that require that you read them in order to get an arc across several books, and standalones that enrich the world without requiring a specific reading order. Monstrous Regiment is an interesting example – although Vimes features in it, it’s not a Vimes novel. It’s very much a standalone, that happens to feature a main character cast in a secondary role, for once. I love that this is possible, as it gives us a sense the world lives beyond the main characters we know and love.

Another way to structure a series is to have books that are best read in order. In the same way a novel follows an internal logic and structure, the books within the series at large follow their own structure or arc.

A good example would be the Xenogenesis / Lilith’s Brood trilogy by Octavia Butler. One book is from a woman’s POV, one from a male alien, and one from a non-gendered alien. One book is from the POV of an adult, the second from a child, the third from a teenager. I doubt this is a coincidence: it’s a conscious effort to structure the story in that way. The series follows characters from the same family, through genealogy, which is relatively common for big legacy stories – but it also makes an effort to vary genders and ages, so we get a breadth of understanding on the central themes. Across the trilogy, we go from a highly conflictual situation, with an ambiguous human/alien association, to a more positive blending together at the end of the series, which finishes on the image of a shoot of grass growing – a hopeful ending about growing in new directions. The series as a whole tells us something that the books, taken individually, don’t. It’s more than the sum of its parts.

While we’re on Butler, Parable of the Sower & Parable of the Talents are also interesting to look at. Parable of the Talents is a brilliant novel, in my opinion, mostly because it is a sequel. Its power derives from the fact that it dismantles what came in Parable of the Sower, teaching us that what we’ve gained may be taken from us, and may need to be redone. After a whole book of struggling to set up an Earthseed community, we may expect the second volume to focus on that community – but in the first third of Parable of the Talents, our current Earthseed community is destroyed. The two books are about resilience. That theme is echoed in the reading – I found the second volume difficult to get through, because of the way it’s structured and placed into the series. The sequel dismantles what we’ve spent the whole first novel building, and teaches us that we need to rebuild as many times as what we love is destroyed – but that’s not only the message, it’s in the bones of the book, reflected in the experience of reading it.

Lois McMaster Bujold has said she’d be interested in seeing structure studied across a full series, and I can see why. The Vorkosigan Saga has an interesting arc. It goes from a harsher, harder world towards a more tolerant and happier one. Around Mirror Dance and Memory, the story hits some dark and intense moments – there is military SF, battles and dying, but also torture, sexual violence and depression being tackled –, then moves on to lighter books and rom-coms, like A Civil Campaign and Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance. For me, A Civil Campaign worked in part because of where it was placed in the series. I was ready, after so much struggling, to be happy, to have an easy time with my main character Miles. By the time we get to books such as, say, Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance, we are ready to see Ivan (the aforementioned Vorpatril and main POV character) be redeemed and get a happy marriage, because we’ve known him and engaged with him as a secondary character from the start of Miles’s life. He’s grown from a slightly unlikeable second fiddle to a redeemed and engaging character. We know all his love-life mishaps, thus preparing us for the tone of the book – I knew, picking it up, that I wasn’t getting a space opera or a thriller but a romance. I knew this simply because I knew the character so well from his role in other books of the series.

The Vorkosigan and Discworld series can both afford to have a breadth of stories, from YA to detective stories to time-travel pieces to thrillers to rom-coms, while keeping a central set of characters and themes, as well as a consistent tone or voice. That, to me, is quite a feat – making individual novels is hard, but making a large group of novels that can be read in different orders and give a different reading experience is skillful.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, some series are not thought of as series – they’re very long books that got cut into chunks. The Gods Cycle by Bernard Werber is a prime example of this. The second book cuts off abruptly, and is then picked up by the third volume exactly where the last chapter cut off. These aren’t always the author’s decision, and can be due to printing limitations, for example – so not all series are conscious, structured choices. Even if it’s not one book in several bits, it may be one long story, that just happens to take more than one volume tell.

To summarise, a series can be anything from a simple publishing constraint to a structure intended to create a certain effect in readers: from multiple standalones that give a sense of a living world, to mirroring or breaking patterns over several books, it’s possible to use the series format in original, interesting ways.

What’s happening with me – Medieval Music & Guildford

With the nice weather, I’ve been hiking around Guildford. Funnily enough, the Downs in Guildford are at the top of hills, just like the Puys (lit. “the wells”) in Clermont also mean the top of big hills – in Clermont, this is because a lot of hills are old volcanoes, with craters down the centres. It seems wherever I live, up is down and down is up!

My family is very musical (from a mother who plays the violin, an aunt and uncle who are in a folk band, a brother-in-law who was a singer) and, although I don’t pretend to have as good a musical ear as they do, I do enjoy folk songs. This month, I went to see the band Mortlake at the Faerie Festival – a great chance to tramp around stands with art of dragons and fairies, while listening to Medieval music and letting Sancho join the fun. We didn’t have a harness with fairy wings (which one dog had) but we did try to get into the mood by tying a little scarf around his collar.

If you want to listen to some folk music while writing the next chapter of your fantasy novel, I’d recommend giving Mortlake a try!