Endless Things

As I close in on finishing Swords In Darkness—only two volumes are actually available for purchase right now, but I’m nearing the end of writing—I’ve been struggling to work out how the plot should run. What to do? Well, there’s the old maxim that good writers borrow and great writers steal, so I decided to look for something to borrow or steal. (Interestingly, T. S. Eliot didn’t say that, though everyone thinks he did; he said that “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal,” and in saying this he was deliberately inverting the more traditional distinction between imitation and plagiarism—see The Quote Investigator)

I started racking my brain, and then I surfed the Web for a bit, and I noticed something.

When people say that this or that fantasy series is “the best series ever,” or “one of the top 10 fantasy series ever,” or whatever, the odds are enormous that it isn’t finished. George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, or Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles, or so many others. Now as far as I’m concerned, these series can’t be rated as series. It’s like saying that something is the best movie ever—because you watched the first 20 minutes and loved it, but then the projector broke. You don’t know if it’s good, and certainly not if it’s great, until you’ve examined the entire work. Which, in the case of most of these “best series ever,” does not actually exist.

Now The Lord of the Rings, in my view, has an entirely satisfying ending, although I know people who stop reading once the Ring is destroyed and skip the Scouring of the Shire. But in my view, that’s because The Lord of the Rings isn’t a series: it’s a very long novel. (And yes, I know that’s not an especially original or unusual take on it.) It’s structured like a novel, and has a nice coda or dénouement that brings the whole thing to a close.

Otherwise, I notice an awful lot of dissatisfaction with final volumes. People get to the end of a series they’ve been loving, and slam down the last book in a fury, and say, “That’s not how it should end! That sucks!” (Or some variant on same.) It’s kind of like the old tradition about movie sequels—and if you’re thinking “what about The Godfather?” I’m going to note that the attempt to finish that series with a final wrap-up film didn’t go so well….

Consider J. K. Rowling. I don’t love those books, to be quite honest, but volume 7 was a mess! Then again, at least Rowling tried. I mean, she could have just gone on endlessly. It’s not as though the plot is so tight that she couldn’t have dragged it out. I mean, hey, those kids were, what, 18 at the end? Send ‘em off to college! (Call it the Invisible College, just to pull in another historical reference to mangle.) And wouldn’t Harry make a great Dark Arts teacher, while Hermione takes over something abstruse? Oh, the joy of Hogwarts faculty meetings….

By contrast, a lot of these series writers never seem to consider concluding at all. Robert Jordan surely never intended to finish The Wheel of Time, and why should he? So long as people are willing to pick up the 1500-page volume 38 and keep him going, why stop? And indeed, Jordan did keep going until he died, and left notes for more volumes, which are being written up by Brandon Sanderson, who’s another “let’s keep this sucker going as long as possible” success-story.

Now I’m not really criticizing these folks. If I had a series that I could write forever, and get a solid paycheck for it, I’d do it in a heartbeat. And if lots of people are willing to buy the things, they’re presumably getting pleasure out of them, and who’s so critical (nasty, really) as to say that Jordan did wrong by bringing pleasure to so many people for so many years?

But my problem is that I don’t want to write Swords In Darkness forever. I want it to end. I planned it to be a trilogy, originally, and it rapidly expanded into 5 volumes. I have a sense of an arc, and a broad-brush structure. This is why volume 4 is coming out in three parts: unlike the first three, volume 4 has three concurrent stories happening in different locations with very different structures of their own. And so I’ve approached each of those three parts (all around 55k words, I.e., short full-length novels in ordinary publishing terms) as its own novel. They don’t read at all the same way, and have very different styles, which is why I’ve decided it makes better sense to release them one at a time, and only at the end re-bind them as a single volume.

Which brings me back to volume 5. It’s got to be a proper novel, not just “the last part” like The Return of the King. It’s got to be a proper ending, not a teaser for a hoped-for sequel. It’s got to wrap up loose ends and conclude without seeming uninventive (not just one endless battle-scene, for example). And above all, it’s got to get actually written.

To come full-circle with this post: I can’t think of a single series that concluded this way! Have there been any?

After some discussion with my favorite guinea-pigs Sam and Gina, here’s a list of possible examples (in alphabetical order):

N. K. Jemisin, The Broken Earth

Ann Leckie, Imperial Radch (the Ancillary series)

Ursula LeGuin, A Wizard of Earthsea (note that she added a late volume 4 and some stories)

Garth Nix, Keys To the Kingdom

Victoria Schwab, Shades of Magic

How about you? Have you read a series that came to a satisfying conclusion? When you finished, you thought, “that’s how it should end, and there shouldn’t be any more of these.” Any suggestions?