Housekeeping

[rolanni]

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

Comments

[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.