Classic Read: The Road Back

When I was in school, I had a love/hate relation with my English classes. I loved creative writing. I hated having to analyze the classics and there are certain books much beloved in literary circles that bored me to tears.

But there was a bright spot in all the assigned reading. Sometimes I actually did find a book I enjoyed, no assigned reading book reached me and possibly influenced me as much as All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. It's the story of a young German soldier assigned to fight in the trenches in World War I and how it whittles down everything and everyone he cares about. Perhaps because the main character was only a few years older than me, I found him relatable.

Some years later I heard that there was a sequel called The Road Back that followed characters from the same combat company, but since Paul dies at the end of All Quiet I wasn't sure I wanted to read it. And then I was busy with college, then work, and for a good long while I forgot about the whole thing.

Until I had a hankering to read All Quiet again, and finding myself without a copy at home, I drove over to the public library to check out a copy. They also had The Road Back and I figured, Why not?

I wish I hadn't waited so long.

Though many of the characters who appeared in All Quiet on the Western Front are dead, Tjaden makes a return, still very much the light-hearted prankster of the group, and we're given names to newer characters who presumably were always there in the first book, but weren't as close to Paul (the first person narrator of All Quiet) to have been worth mentioning by name.

For instance, there's a reference to the time they caught two suckling pigs and made pancakes during an air raid. In the first book Paul mentions there were eleven people in the group, but we didn't know the names of all of them at the time. Now we know a few more.

Ernst, the main character of The Road Back, is a similarly eloquent first person narrator to Paul, but does not suffer from the same despair that Paul eventually falls into. He and his friends come back from the war only to find it difficult to fit back into society, which is going into upheaval due to a revolution that has driven the Kaiser from the country and turned Germany into a republic.

Aside from political issues, food is still scarce among civilians and there is little effort to integrate the veterans, several suffering from what we now call PTSD, back into society. Ernst and some of his friends attempt to resume going to school, where they had been studying for their teaching credentials, but their schoolmasters have no idea what it's been like for them in the war and the former soldiers have little patience for what they see as useless work.

All the former soldiers deal with their return differently. Some recover quickly, becoming successful business men. Others fall prey to the demons still haunting them. Ernst himself runs in the middle, for though he cannot escape his memories of the front, there is a certain spark to him that refuses to back down.

Though The Road Back gives the feeling that civilians didn't learn anything from the war, the epilogue even shows a bunch of children just a few years shy of drafting playing war games under the direction of adults, it ends on a brighter note than All Quiet on the Western Front. Ernst realizes that his road is going to be long, painful, and most likely traveled alone. He might never get back to the way he was before the war, but he's going to try.

And I really like that hope that All Quiet never gave. Ernst is a broken man who has trouble fitting into society, but he still fights for what he believes in. He still hopes. He's not beyond repair.

Remarque writes at the start of the All Quiet on the Western Front that:

"This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war."

The Road Back shows us that what has been destroyed can still be salvaged, and perhaps with time, restored to what it was.

The Promise Made with a Series

I finished rereading a much loved book from my middle school/high school years. It's book 3 in a seven book series (and no, it's not Harry Potter, I'm not that young), and the series had been designed from the start to be exactly seven books. None of this extending the series because it's popular or because each novel is a stand alone deal. It was intended to be seven books. No more, no less.

I really liked the third book because it took the series to another level. It was the dark turning point where the stakes were raised and ancestral enemies realize they might not be enemies at all. And I fell in love with one of the periphery characters introduced in the book. He had to grow up fast and became a tragic character by the end. I think I may have cried the first time I read the ending.

After that, I was very bright-eyed and optimistic about the series, and while books 4 and 5 never quite peaked as high as book 3 with me, they were solid. Then something happened with books 6 and 7.

Without going into specifics, the spelling of my favorite character's name in book 3 was changed by one letter. Not much, but it certainly threw me off. The prophecy from book 3 never came back again (despite being a huge deal in that book) and my favorite character didn't do much of anything except act like a talking piece of furniture (and he'd been the one the prophecy was about).

There were other issues too. Some minor. Some big enough that one could drive a truck through. The implied gender of a character's child was swapped between books. And even within the same book an implausibility happens that makes sense on an initial read (while the main characters and the reader don't know better), but fails once a certain character is revealed. Astute readers will catch it on the first read and check back a few chapters to see if the events leading up to the reveal make still sense. I remember I did (and they don't).

I still appreciate the series for its characters and fine world building, but finishing it bothered me as a high school reader because I thought someone would have planned the whole thing out from start to finish, since it was known from the beginning that it would be a seven book series. I felt like the tail end of the series had been phoned in, nobody cared anymore. Or, the series really had not been planned as well as I thought it was, and so the series had been wrapped up as neatly as possible given the circumstances.

There's probably a reason behind the ending sagging that I'm not aware of. But as that high school kid, I was really disappointed. I was promised awesome sauce all the way up through the fifth book, and I got middling sauce by the end. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't good, and felt worse because it wasn't awesome.

When I think of the most popular seven book series of today, when I think of Harry Potter, I realize that whatever I may think of Rowling's prose, I respect her ability to write a plot. She might have added and subtracted things behind the scenes that the reader never knew, but what was laid down made sense and I didn't feel any promises betrayed.

I've never written a long book series, but this is something I want to keep in mind for when or if I do.

Listening to Feedback

I recently finished playing through the Dragon Age 2: Legacy DLC. For those a little less video game savvy, that's extra paid download content beyond what comes with the game itself, and what it exactly contains varies from game to game. It could be bonus items, levels, costumes, etc.

Legacy is like an extra adventure which story-wise takes place during the main game. It's also a bit remarkable in that the developer said they took pains to listen to player feedback in what they didn't like in the main game when they crafted the DLC and even now maintain a feedback thread on their forums to get a handle on what people liked or didn't like about this particular DLC.

The reason I find this interesting as a blog topic is because writers, particularly new writers, are often in pursuit of feedback. It's not uncommon to balance reader feedback (often in the form of a critique) with what to do in the next draft of the story. The difference here is that writers often focus on the current project they're working on and that game developers look foward just as often to the next iteration (be it patch, DLC, or sequel).

The result of feedback is quite good when it comes to Legacy. It immediately fixed common criticisms of the main game such as recycled area maps and nonsensical waves of enemies. It is also more story-based than previous Dragon Age DLCs, culminating in a very nice "lore" moment where astute followers of the series can be shocked by the complete identity of the last boss. I quite enjoyed it all.

Legacy is an example of where audience feedback was taken to heart can judging from forum comments, the result was received well. It's not possible to please everyone, but it's a good thing when people who didn't like the main game as much found the DLC to be quite enjoyable.

As writers I've heard there's a point where you want to avoid "writing by commitee." In games "designing by committee" isn't considered much better, especially since the fanbase may want conflicting things, but I think if the target audience is saying something, it's a good idea to listen. They're the ones paying the money.

And here where it gets murkier for a writer. Until we have a fanbase, and a particularly ardent one, it's not likely we'll hear from those who are paying the money.

I can't think of a solution to that, aside from making sure your critiquers are also in the target audience you want your readers to be, so what they're suggesting or asking for as a reader is more likely to match up with what potential readers who've yet to discover you want.

Solaris Rising Table of Contents Released

The table of contents for Solaris Rising: The New Solaris Book of Science-Fiction is out! This anthology, edited by Ian Whates, will be featuring my story "Mooncakes" in collaboration with Mike Resnick. I recognize several names that I'm quite happy to appear in the company of.

Introduction - Ian Whates
A Smart-Mannered Uprising of the Dead - Ian McDonald
The Incredible Exploding Man - Dave Hutchinson
Sweet Spots - Paul di Filippo
Best SF of the Year Three - Ken MacLeod
The One that Got Away - Tricia Sullivan
Rock Day - Stephen Baxter
Eluna - Stephen Palmer
Shall I Tell You the Problem with Time Travel? - Adam Roberts
The Lives and Deaths of Che Guevara - Lavie Tidhar
Steel Lake - Jack Skillingstead
Mooncakes - Mike Resnick and Laurie Tom
At Play in The Fields - Steve Rasnic Tem
How We Came Back From Mars - Ian Watson
You Never Know - Pat Cadigan
Yestermorrow - Richard Salter
Dreaming Towers, Silent Mansions - Jaine Fenn
Eternity's Children - Eric Brown and Keith Brooke
For the Ages - Alastair Reynolds
Return of the Mutant Worms - Peter F. Hamilton

The book will be available in paper and ebook in November. With any luck, that means copies will be available in time for Loscon.

Shopping at Borders

I stop by the physical bookstore maybe once a month. I admit, I have a certain fondness for paper (despite my affinity for computers and video games) and there's nothing quite like adding to the stacks of books on my shelves. I wish they were better organized, but that's a different issue.

This was my first time at the bookstore since reading Kristine Kathryn Rusch's observations about bookstores. My local bookstore of choice is part of the Borders chain, which unfortunately is working through a bankruptcy at the moment. It's not in danger of being immediately shut down, but I'm concerned that a couple years from now it won't be there. There isn't a single indie bookstore that sells new books in the entire city, so when this Borders goes, I'm likely to have to do all my shopping online.

I first started shopping at this Borders as a senior in high school, which was about the same time that the B. Dalton's and Waldenbooks started to disappear from malls. At the age I was though, I didn't think much of it. As long as I could get the books I wanted, which was usually fairly often, I didn't have a problem with where I shopped.

After reading Kris's article though, and planning my most recent trip to Borders, I realized that I had a rather bizarre habit.

I dislike driving to the bookstore and not finding what I want, so I've developed a habit of checking online whether or not a potential half dozen books I'd be interested in were inventory. That way I know whether or not the trip would be a waste. I do like browsing the shelves to see if I find anything interesting just by happenstance, but I don't like leaving empty-handed.

I've actually starting picking up manga as stop-gaps if the novels I want aren't available, because a popular manga series will generally have various volumes in stock, and if one volume of a series I'm reading is missing I can probably find the next volume I need of a different one. (Sadly, I'm now facing a different problem where I'm getting far enough in various series that it's less likely the volume I want is in the store.)

I didn't used to do this. I remember in high school I could go to a bookstore and find nearly all the books from Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series in stock. These days she occupies half the shelf she used to and there isn't nearly as much of the older Pern material (mostly the newer stuff with her son Todd). I imagine other authors' shelf spaces have shrunk as well. If it's not relatively new, it's not on the shelf.

I've been wanting to start reading Naomi Novik's Teremaire series, but had some trouble finding the first book in stock. How a bookseller expects to market book six without book one available I don't know, but His Majesty's Dragon had been on my "I hope to find it in stock one of these days" lists for a while.

Finally, I found it... as part of a boxed set containing the first three books. It was a score as far as I was concerned (I'd read a sample of the book already so I had a reasonable sense that I could gamble on three books and enjoy them all), but still a little annoying that the book just hadn't been there, on its own, months ago. I would have bought it months ago as well if it'd been there.

I can't really pinpoint why a bookstore's selection seems so much worse than in previous years. Borders does have a section of the store devoted to Kobo, but the science fiction and fantasy rows don't feel that much smaller. Though, I admit the tie-in portion is a lot bigger than before.

That makes me wonder, just as a wild idea, if perhaps the future of printed books will be in franchises.

Living Rooms: Now on Kindle

There's been a lot of chatter around the blogosphere and writing communities about ebooks, their relevance, and the path to success. Perhaps most telling is that at this year's Writers of the Future workshop, the judges could not agree on what the industry was going to look like in the next five years.

Some people have jumped whole-heartedly into independent publishing. Others are quite stubborn about sticking to tradition. The best way may well indeed be a mix between the New York model and the indie one. I'm not in a position with my novel manuscript to be worrying about that right now, but I figured I would begin to experiment with my previously published work, since ebooks seem to lend themselves to novelette and novella length stories, which is a hard sell in the traditional world.

"Living Rooms," my Gold Award winning story of the Writing of the Future contest, is now available for purchase on Kindle (other formats forthcoming) for just $0.99. The artwork is by my friend Denis Takara, who happens to also be the Dungeon Master for the D&D group I play with on Sundays.

That does mean we sometimes get nifty illustrations of his custom made monsters when we play. Isn't that cool?

Japanese Light Novels

Last year I started reading the Spice & Wolf series by Isuna Hasekura. It's what is called in Japan a "light novel" series. It's a short novel comes with a few illustrations up front and more or less makes for "light" reading, though I'm a little skeptical about whether that's where the name comes from.

Light novels appear to work much like comics in that they are serials marked by volume number rather than with a separate title for each installment. If Spice and Wolf is anything to judge by, each volume is a self-contained story, an episode if you will, of the larger series, with an overarching storyline running between multiple books.

It's not quite the same as a fantasy trilogy, which is why the serial analogy works.

For instance, in volume 1 of Spice and Wolf, the characters of Lawrence and Holo begin traveling together, with the goal of returning Holo to her long forgotten home in the distant north. That's the overarching story. But the climax of volume 1 has nothing to do with her homeland, so much as to what lengths do Lawrence and Holo want to remain traveling companions when they have the opportunity to part ways.

Volume 2 covers a deal gone wrong where Holo has to bail Lawrence out of a mess of his own creation, which of course is at a city that's a stopover on their travel north.

Volume 3 looks to further the relationship between Lawrence and Holo as their journey continues (since there's definitely some unresolved sexual tension between the both of them), with of course another wrench thrown in the plan.

Persumably the series, which has gone up to sixteen volumes as of this writing, continues in this way until Lawrence and Holo inevitably find Yoitsu. Or, perhaps, there will be a different reason for them to keep traveling.

Spice and Wolf is a fresh and breezy read. It's a very minimalist sort of narration with short paragraphs, lots of dialogue, and the pages turn fast.

I don't think we really have an analog to the light novel in the US, save the ones that are translated from the Japanese, and that's too bad. I feel like we're missing some sort of marketing niche.