The Re-Read: The Journeys of McGill Feighan, Superluminal, Lord of the Crooked Paths
Sunday's Child Is Bonny and Blithe
Everybody’s familiar at this point with the frustration of an involving, engaging book or television series that ends up unfinished. But every unfinished series has a different reason to it, and in many cases, we’ll never know entirely what cut it short.
Unfinished series give me such a melancholy feeling when I re-read them, such a desperation to know how it would have come out. Fanfic might let you imagine a way to fix a terrible authorial mistake (I have a much better pair of sequels for “The Matrix” that would have worked…) or ship characters together and so on. But even fanfic can’t really give you the series continuation that you would have wanted. You need the author for that.
Everybody has a theory about George R.R. Martin and Game of Thrones, even if Martin keeps telling us that it’s none of our goddamn business and we’re all wrong anyway about what the hold-up is. I’m of the mind that Martin wrote himself into a hole that he can’t get out of, and that the woeful last season of the adaptation made the situation even worse because it ups the ante still further. He set out to write against established fantasy tropes and hit the jackpot with Ned Stark’s execution and the Red Wedding in particular. But one of the ways he kept everybody on their toes in the third and fourth books was by multiplying the viewpoint characters and then dispatching them gleefully, revealing that we’d just wasted hundred of pages in the company of somebody who didn’t matter one bit. From here on out, he’s either going to have to really do the unexpected: leave Jon Snow dead, have Daenerys decide to stick to being a khaleesi and live happily ever after with the Dothraki on a continent that isn’t going to have snow and ice on it, let the White Walkers win and kill everyone with cold and starvation that they don’t kill directly, or he’s gonna have to start converging some of the characters and plotlines towards the expected tropes. My guess is that he doesn’t want to do either, so he’s stuck.
My feeling is that another famously stuck fantasy author, Patrick Rothfuss, is in a similar situation, though he’s also spoken movingly about struggles with mental health. I think he’s told some great stories through his interestingly unreliable narrator, Kvothe, and the concluding book to the series would have to be like opening Schroedinger’s Box: after it’s open, the cat has to be either dead or alive, rather than half-dead and half-alive. The cat was more interesting when we didn’t know. Kvothe either has to be mostly lying or mostly telling the truth, and somehow he seems less interesting if either is true. That’s a hard storytelling problem to solve.
What I’m interested in today are series I got invested in a long time ago that never came to an end either. In the pre-ebook, pre-Amazon, pre-Borders era, an active genre reader quickly learned that publishers didn’t feel any commitment to keeping a series going if its sales weren’t unusually strong. There was typically a lot of churn at the bookstores as well—you’d have to visit a moderately well-stocked chain store like B. Dalton or a specialty bookstore like A Change of Hobbit at least once a month or so to grab anything that looked new or interesting—you had a relatively narrow window before it just disappeared. Even series that gained enough of an audience to continue indefinitely could be a damned annoyance if you came in to reading it too late, because publishers often didn’t keep the earlier books in the series in print.
So, the three series I’m remembering today?
The first went four books before it stopped: Kevin O’Donnell Jr.’s The Journeys of McGill Feighan, with each installment getting a simple title based on the geography of the planet at the center of the adventure (“Lava”, “Cliffs”). On some level, it’s pretty formulaic: the lead character is one of a small number of very important beings able to teleport across interstellar distances, which he discovers in the course of the first book. He sets out to find out the secrets of his parentage, stay ahead of the sinister crime syndicate that has wanted to kill him since he was a baby and track down the mysterious Far Being, who is tied to his destiny, in a series of lightly picaresque adventures. It reminded me at the time of Alan Dean Foster’s Pip and Flinx books, and like them, didn’t seem in a great hurry to get to some tightly plotted conclusion. A re-read of the first two shows me that they’re still fun and engaging reads—and the cover design originally was really catchy. I can’t really find anything specific on why the fourth book was the last—O’Donnell became very involved in the Science Fiction Writers Association afterwards and died in 2012. It’s safe to guess the sales didn’t warrant a continuation. There are ebook reprints available through WordFirePress. Of the three series I’ve re-read for today, this is the one I can most easily imagine another writer picking up and carrying forward.
Tony Daniel wrote two books in a sprawling science-fiction series, Metaplanetary and Superluminal, the first appearing in 2001. They reminded me a bit of a more space-operatic version of Iain Banks’ Culture novels, or John C. Wright’s far-future trilogy that started in 2002 with The Golden Age. Superluminal ends on an exciting cliffhanger—lots of reader reviews of the series talk about being “hooked” and anxiously waiting and hoping for a conclusion. But I recall seeing Daniel saying in response at one message board that the publisher felt the sales were too low and they decided not to continue with the series, and that he was ready to throw in the towel on it. It’s hard for me to figure what made Wright’s three books worth sticking with for his publisher—I can’t imagine that the sales were that much better than Daniel’s, and they were his first published novels, as far as I know. But Daniel moved on and evidently is not ever going to go back.
Patrick H. Adkins, on the other hand, said as recently as 2012 that he’d be willing to finish his re-telling of Greek mythology that fleshed out the mostly untold stories of the Titans and their rivalries—in the last book, a teenage Zeus who is restless with the need to be hidden from his father begins to take a role. Same story: the publisher didn’t think it was worth continuing the series. On re-reading, I’m really impressed particularly with the first two books, which seem to be available in a collected omnibus edition. The third, Sons of the Titans, begins to lose some of the tonal and narrative pleasures, maybe because it begins to converge on stories more familiar in Edith Hamilton, the D’Aulaires and other modern works, or maybe because Adkins knew that there likely wouldn’t be a continuation of the series by the time he was writing it. If he’s still out there and still willing, I wish he’d give it a shot.
Completism isn’t always a commanding impulse. At some point, I’ll probably write about a couple of old SF and fantasy series that I can barely stand to re-read because they went on for so long to no good end. But there’s really no more powerful a question for readers than “And then what happened?” And nothing more mournful to know that no answer will ever arrive.