McGuiness wrote:Oh dear, my first reply from RFC and I've ticked him off. I was hoping when the day arrived I'd feel honored. Instead I feel like an uninformed idiot, and rightly so. Time to grovel at all four of RFC's feet...runsforcelery wrote:McGuiness wrote:
BSRA and BHD were originally written as one book, then split just like the latest Honor Harrington novel, which left BSRA a bit short of major battles. RFC wrapped up BSRA so it seemed like a complete novel, although it left us hungry for BHD where all the action was.
Don't get me started on the ending of "A Rising Thunder," there's entire threads dedicated to the abrupt and unanticipated ending of that book which Tor split in two for marketing purposes. Since we've been given tantalizing snippets from its sequel, it's possible RFC wrote both and Tor picked where to split them. I have nothing against RFC getting filthy rich, after all I greatly enjoy his books and look forward to them all with great anticipation. But RFC and I are merely mortal, and I really don't want him to pull a Robert Jordan on us. (Jordan died 10 novels into the 13 novel "Wheel of Time" series.) And I'd like to be around to read the final Safehold and Honor Harrington novels, so the quicker he can get the books and e-arcs into our grubby little hands, the better! [G]
Two minor nits.
(1) The Honorverse books are from Baen, not Tor.
(2) Baen didn't decide to "split" the book, or where to do it; I did. And I made the decision fairly early in the process, actually. There's been a lot of misunderstanding and misinformation on this point. The first time I ever said anything about "splitting" anything was at a science fiction convention, where, in response to a question, I said I was splitting the amount of storyline I'd originally intended to put into the next book. The "book" in question, at that time, was less than 30% written, so this wasn't a case of anyone getting to the end and saying "Oops! Too big!" I'd already realized that I wasn't going to be able to get this chunk of the story told in a single set of covers, and that didn't even consider the fact that Eric Flint is doing another collaboration with me which covers some of the same time period, and that I couldn't complete the part of the story arc that he's working on until I knew how the collaboration was going to come out.
A Rising Thunder is not a "shorted" book. It's got over 230,000 words in it, for goodness sake! If I tried to include both parts of the story arc, instead of splitting it between events around the Star Kingdom proper and those operating out of the Talbott Quadrant — which, by the way, is exactly what I've been doing previously — you'd have been talking about a single novel on the order of 500,000 words long. Somehow, I don't think that would have worked very well. Just a little cumbersome, maybe, although that's only my opinion.
I decided where and when to end both books well before Baen ever saw word one of the rough draft, and, frankly, I'm a little bit ticked off with people who insist on seeing Rising Thunder as having been "sawn off" or left as a cliffhanger, when I strongly suspect that they wouldn't have thought anything of the sort if there hadn't been this absurd story about Baen cutting the book in two, presumably for some nefarious marketing purpose.
There. I feel better now.
On point 1), Baen publishing the HH series - I goofed. This being the Safehold Forum, we're always grumbling about Tor's lack of e-ARCs, so that was on my mind when I wrote my prior comment. Oops!
On point 2) I sincerely apologize for misunderstanding the reasons for the size of ART. I saw lots of posts claiming it had been split, much like BSRA and BHD appeared to be, and I'd never seen you correct that until last night when I read the "Next Book Pleaseee" thread in the Honorverse Forum. I muttered "OOPS!" and really wished I'd read your post there earlier so I wouldn't have posted this and looked like a complete idiot! Your reply here is the clearest explanation I've seen that ART wasn't cut short, so I'll post it on the Honorverse Forum so there will be fewer misconceptions on this in the future.
The main reason that the ending of ART seemed abrupt to me was caused by reading the e-ARC. I didn't realize I was at the end until I tried to flip to the next page and there wasn't one. The dead tree version wouldn't have seemed as truncated, since I'd have known the end was nigh.
I wouldn't have complained about a 500,000 word novel, but I only read e-books. I imagine the hardback version would be just a wee bit heavy, and the paperback would be so big the cover would probably fall off!
Thanks for clarifying the reasoning behind the contents of ART, SoF, and the next Torch book.
Like all your fans I'm naturally impatient for your next book to arrive. So I, like so many others was upset when I came across posts claiming that ART was cut in half, not knowing that you'd divided the main story line from the Talbott Quadrant line. Now I understand, and I apologize for my uninformed remarks on the subject. I'll spread the word.
I think I've said this before, but I'll say it again, the problem, so to speak, with ART isn't the technical length of the book, it's the amount of story. Temporally speaking, ART covers a shorter amount of time in-universe than the rest of the novels, and it doesn't really feel like it's come to a conclusion in any sense - it feels like there's still a largish chunk that didn't get printed and bound into the book. Okay, Crown of Slaves and might actually be chronologically shorter, but it still feels like a complete story.
People are talking about ART being short, and in some ways, the story feels like it is shorter than we've come to expect from a Weber novel.
Cutting out the stuff going on in/with Talbott and Torch made the story 'narrower', not 'shorter', imo.
It's something that he's otherwise been able to avoid, even with In Enemy Hands, which arguably has as good a technical argument for feeling incomplete, while still leaving the reader wanting to know what comes next.
I find myself wondering if in a few years we'll be able to look back and look at ART and its immediate sequel the same way we look at In Enemy Hands and Echoes of Honor today. I certainly hope that's the case.