(Continued from page 2)
DR: Now the different Chronicles have been published in quite different ways. The original Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, I think I’m right saying, were actually published in the same year…
SD: Oh, they came out on the same day. The publisher in the United States published all three of those books in hardcover on the same day. It was a tactical manoeuvre to try to generate interest because I was a complete unknown and they were trying to launch me – and it worked. I mean, I thought it was a brilliant publishing stroke. Now, they didn’t feel the need to do that in the UK where they came out originally in paperback, but in the US they were trying to attract attention by doing something unprecedented.
DR: Right, and a very short time afterwards they appeared as a single, collected edition. That meant that for a great many readers, those books – and, likewise, The Second Chronicles were always read as a single story, in one go. The Last Chronicles are very different, with a few years between books and a larger number of readers waiting on each new instalment. Did you feel the need to bear this in mind when writing The Last Chronicles?
SD: I tried very hard not to make permanent writing decisions based on temporary problems. Ten years from now – assuming that I live and I carry out my intentions and whatnot – ten years from now these books will all have been in print for a while. People will have the chance to read them the way I originally intended which is to be able to sit down and, if you want, read straight through all four books – or read straight through all ten books. Those days will come.
So, if I change my writing methodologies today, to compensate for the fact that that hasn’t happened yet, it’s going to change the reading experience that I want my readers to have eventually, and I really try not to do that.
Now, I’m supplying this – it’s called ‘What Has Gone Before’ – in the Covenant books I supply a synopsis of the entire story so far, at the beginning of each book in the hopes that it will make it a little easier for people that have had to wait for three entire years between books, that they can pick it up and continue. But that is a stop-gap measure because my goal is to get to the point where all four books are available and people can read them straight through if they want to, and I intend that they [the books] should succeed in that way, not as separate volumes.
There’s a comparison here with the first Chronicles. Each one does actually have – in those old storytelling terms – a beginning, a middle and an end. In the first three books, Covenant goes to the Land, reaches a crisis in the Land, comes back to his real world. I did that, in part, because I was an unknown looking for a publisher and I thought, perhaps, I could maybe find a publisher who was willing to risk one book, but maybe not three. So, I wanted to make it possible for them to standalone in the same way that C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books can standalone or that Steven Erikson’s tales of the Malazan Book of the Fallen can stand alone. You know, they’re obviously better if you read them in order throughout the epic, but each one contains stuff that can stand on its own. Having gotten established, however, I haven’t felt that desire again.
In Mordant’s Need, for example – A Mirror of Her Dreams and A Man Rides Through – it’s a two-volume story, but each book is actually divided into two parts, so it’s a four-part story and the first three parts all end in cliff-hangers. You read this huge first volume and what you get is a complete cliff-hanger. I didn’t do that because I like to torture people – I’m a reader too and I hate cliff-hangers, I don’t like being left there at the end of a book – I did it because it is my eventual goal that you should be able to read the whole story at once, and then the fact that it is a cliff-hanger isn’t going to hurt you, because you can pick up the next book and immediately continue. Same reasoning applies in The Last Chronicles.
DR: Where, perhaps unlike the previous Covenant books, we also see cliff-hangers…
SD: But they won’t be painful once I get the whole story in print! They’re only painful now, while I happen to be in-process. So, I’m not going to make my final decisions based on in-process problems, because those problems are going to go away.
It’s not that I like cliff-hangers. I assure you, once somebody has read Fatal Revenant, they will understand why I had to end The Runes of the Earth
Okay, so it’s a cliff-hanger – I’m sorry! The two books are out now, that cliff-hanger is no longer a problem. Fatal Revenant ends in a cliff-hanger – I’m sorry! – eventually the third book will arrive and it will no longer be a problem, so hang in there and it’ll be okay.
(Continued on page 4…)
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