I’m very angry with David G. Hartwell.
Hartwell, for those who don’t know his name, is a very distinguished editor of science fiction, with a long list of anthologies and scholarly essays to his credit, not to mention fabulous taste in clothes. He’s also an editor for Tor Books, where he appears to be the king of splitting long books in two. He’s responsible for splitting Scott Westerfeld’s The Risen Empire and The Killing of Worlds and Charlie Stross’s The Family Trade and The Hidden Family, and also these two books, The Last Guardian of Everness and Mists of Everness. These are all long books chopped in two, and chopped very abruptly in two– The Risen Empire barely makes it to the end of a sentence before the “To Be Continued…” comes crashing in.
Given the vagaries of the publishing business, this has meant that I needed to wait for more than a year in order to get to read the second half of these stories. That’s pretty annoying when the second volume is a good one, as with the Westerfeld, but it’s downright maddening here.
The Last Guardian of Everness sets up an interesting syncretic mythology situation. There’s an ancient family, the Waylocks, who are charged with guarding the house that controls access to the Dreaming, where magic and mayhem abound. They have also been given various talismans to ward off the inevitable ancient evil that lurks in the depths and threatens to rise to take over the waking world. Galen Waylock is the last of his line, living in the house called Everness with his grandfather, and as the book opens, he dreams of the signs and portents that herald the end of the world.
The mythology here is kitchen-sink stuff, including bits and pieces stolen from all over the place. The shock troops of the evil forces are selkies, seal-men who can take human shape; the Titan Prometheus appears, chained to a rock in the Caucasus; the Waylocks’ charter comes from King Arthur; and the ultimate evil is referred to as the Morningstar. There’s also a bunch of American mythology mixed in– Ben Franklin is cited as a mighty wizard, and tracking down some of the crucial magical items involves a detailed understanding of American iconography.
It’s an interesting set-up, and the first volume ends on a cliff-hanger, with the only people standing in the way of the triumph of ultimate evil being Galen, his estranged Vietnam-vet father, a spacy young woman named Wendy, and her Russian husband who goes by the name Raven. They’ve got some of the magic talismans, but they’ve suffered severe setbacks, and things look fairly bleak for them, but good for the reader, who is set up for a killer sequel.
And then, a full year later, the sequel is screechingly awful. The interesting set-up gets completely drowned in horrible Ayn Rand speechifying and right-wing political grandstanding– on at least two occasions, evil characters remark that they had a really easy time taking over Washington and New York because of the tight gun control laws in those cities, but they’re stymied in the West because everybody is armed. And the conclusion becomes completely incoherent, with the goals and allegiances of the main characters shifting a half-dozen times, and one of the more literal deus ex machina endings I’ve ever had the misfortune of encountering.
So I’m pissed at David Hartwell. If he hadn’t split this into two, it still wouldn’t’ve been a good book, but at least I wouldn’t have spent a whole year waiting to read the godawful second half of the story.
I had almost exactly the same reaction on reading the second half. On rereading it as a whole I found that the first part was not as good, nor the second part quie as bad as I had thought. Perhaps in part because there were hints in the first book of some of the problems that overwhelmed the second.
The stupid Tor bookus interruptus is, in part, a result of the book buyers. The major sellers, B&N and Borders, said that midlist books priced above a certain price will not sell. That price, in effect, is a page limit. A large number of books were already in the pipeline to be published when the order came down, so a large number of books are split awkwardly in half.
Hopefully we will see the end of this.
Maybe we could just clearly label the books as being two-parters? I’ve been pissed off at Tor in general and Hartwell in particular that my consumption of Tor books has gone down significantly over the past few years… and I now actually look to see who editted the books, and don’t bother with Hartwell unless it’s a must-have book for other reasons.
I don’t actually care what the reason is– the effect has been several times to play me for a fool by getting me to buy incomplete books that were to all casual appearances, complete.
(And also, how could you read a Wright book and not expect horrible Ayn Rand speechifying?)
I understand the commercial reasons for splitting long books. I just wish they would deal with it by getting the authors to write shorter books, rather than by taking long books and chopping them in half in a very abrupt manner. I don’t object to reading series, but I would like the individual pieces to be reasonably self-contained.
This may be just a matter of time– the bias against long books is relatively recent, and many of the problematic works were probably in the pipeline before the new style came in. As authors become aware of the expectation, they’ll probably start writing shorter books. I sure hope so, anyway…
As for not expecting the speechifying from Wright, these were the first Wright books I’ve read. I never got around to reading his space opera trilogy, and I’m significantly less likely to read it after this.
I’m still annoyed at Tor for dropping Susan R. Matthews…no doubt because her books tend to run long. Nevermind that they sound like Tolstoy writing SF.
From comments by Charlie Stross (on-line)and Lois McMaster Bujold (on-line and in person), the split books thing was definitely a one-time event. They’d each signed contracts for books of length X which they had complete or nearly so, and then the word came from on high that ~X/2 was the longest book that would be published henceforth without explicit (and prior) approval from on high. (As I understand it, if you’re not Robert Jordan or Jo Rowling, you’re subject to the limit.) So, they each had to take the book they were currently working on and split it in two.
Lois was rather pleased with how well her split worked out – it wasn’t wonderful, but it was workable. Her next two books (which are direct sequels to The Sharing Knife are being written to the new length limit, and while they’re a pair, they aren’t two halves of the same book.