Housekeeping

[rolanni]

Have updated the Correct Reading Order page to include Dragon in Exile, which will be published in June.

Comments

[bandicoot.livejournal.com]

Ah - thank you. I wondered where Dragon was going to fit in. Will Alliance be a sequel to Dragon, or does it fit in somewhere else?

(Working my way again from Scout's Progress through the Theo arc...)

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

Alliance of Equals follows Shan, a couple of characters who start their run in Dragon, and Theo. Some of the action happens concurrently with the action in Dragon.

This is why, when our agent asked us if we were going to pitch another Theo book to Baen, we instead pitched the Five Book Dash. There are a lot of characters and narrative lines in motion, and they would not have gotten the attention they deserved (IOHO) by simply writing another Theo book.

The Five Book Dash is, in essence, "the sequel" to both I Dare and Dragon Ship.

[bandicoot.livejournal.com]

Wonderful! I love how the books intertwine. It can be frustrating to re-read, remembering the sequence(s) but not being able to remember in which book they occur, but so very rewarding once I get it all in my head. The concurrent narrative lines create a particular richness I savor (being, at the moment, in the throes of Ghost Ship...)

[pedanther]

There's a thing I've been wondering about that page: the Internal Chronology suggested reading order has "Fledgling" after "Plan B", but Daav's scenes in "Plan B" are obviously after his scenes in "Fledgling".

Is that a left-over from before "Mouse and Dragon" was published, when it made sense for a new reader to read "Plan B" as an introduction to Daav and Kiladi before tackling "Fledgling", or is there something else I'm missing?

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

Well, let's look at it...

Plan B isn't about Daav; he doesn't even show up until the last chapter in the book. Breaking the story-arc at Carpe Diem in order to introduce a walk-on made no sense (to us). It made more sense, and was, in a way, tidier to bring Theo and Daav on-stage before I Dare, because:

1. Daav and Aelliana have substantial parts in I Dare, and Theo appears in an important scene

2. I Dare jumps all over the time and place, so asking readers to come up to speed with Fledgling didn't seem as. . .disruptive to the reading experience (IOHO) as asking them to break story before Plan B

Where we had to compromise, Steve and I, was in the placement of Saltation, which could just as well follow Fledgling before I Dare. We opted to place it after I Dare because of the last chapter of I Dare, which has, in this order, had its original impact slightly defused because readers already know who this bedraggled pilot is (the original readers of I Dare had NO IDEA who this person was, after all).

Since the story arc in which I Dare resides is, once again, about Val Con and Miri and the action put into motion by their meeting in Agent of Change, it seemed best to us to leave the story of how Theo came to be in that garden at that particular time until after we had (sort of) resolved Val Con and Miri's problems.

This is not an easy thing, we're doing, with all the braids. The next series of books I write will only have one character and she will do nothing.

[pedanther]

For what the opinion of a single fractious reader might be worth, I like the placement of "Saltation". As you say, it avoids disrupting the flow of Val Con and Miri's story, and it preserves some of the surprise of Theo's appearance. Placed between Theo saying she has a problem at the end of "I Dare" and Theo having finished explaining at the beginning of "Ghost Ship", there's kind of the feel of Theo's explanation being depicted as a book-long flashback.

What I still don't understand about "Fledgling" is why it's not placed earlier in the order. I quite see that it would be disruptive to put it between "Carpe Diem" and "Plan B", but that's not where I would have put it anyway: it takes place before "Agent of Change" ("Saltation" ends at the same moment as the Agent of Change sequence and covers a longer period of time, so "Fledgling" must end before "Agent of Change" begins), so why not place it before "Agent of Change" in the reading order? That would also avoid any worries about disrupting the flow of Val Con and Miri's story, and potentially gives you a slight chance of regaining the surprise at the end of "I Dare" if it takes the reader so long to get through the Agent of Change sequence that they've forgotten about Theo by the time she reappears.

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

The short answer is, "Because Fledging isn't the start of the story."

The longer answer is, "You really can't start a series with a minor character who is incidental to the main problem of the series, then abandon her in favor of telling the story of the characters who are central to, and who have framed, the problem for five entire novels. It's unbalanced in terms of storytelling and characterization, and! readers will miss all kinds of things in those five intervening novels and blame the authors for poor craft because the series was supposed to be about The Kid, and where the heck is The Kid?"

Theo is a bit player -- and Fledgling is about Theo; not Daav -- who gradually gets drawn into the larger drama. So, Fledgling and Saltation act as flashbacks ("Meanwhile, in another part of the galaxy...") to the main action.

[pedanther]

Well, of course Fledgling isn't the start of the story, not when we're talking about a list of all the Liaden novels in something resembling internal chronological order. Crystal Soldier is the start and Fledgling is somewhere around the middle.

Agent of Change is also somewhere around the middle, allowing it a largeish territory to claim as "before". So when I suggest putting Fledgling before Agent of Change, I don't mean to position it as the beginning of the story of Val-Con-and-Miri; I mean "before Agent of Change" the way Conflict of Honors is, or Scout's Progress, or any of those other novels about people-who-later-got-tangled-with-Val-Con-and-Miri before they got tangled with Val-Con-and-Miri.

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

And at this point, without prejudice, I am putting down my end of this conversation.

[pedanther]

In retrospect, I have not done well by my end of the conversation, so I thank you for your forbearance throughout.