Bite-sized epics: a proposal
5 o'clock, August 6, 2004
Remember when burritos were small enough to eat?
So now that the anthology is nearly off the ground (proof / advance reading copies should be coming back from the printers any day now; final cover art in a few weeks and then it’ll all be over bar the shouting) I have, predictably, gone insane and decided I want to do another one.
Not All-Star Robot Adventure Stories. That’s still a definite possbility, but ASRAS would pay real money. (pause, while half the audience realizes this new idea will not pay real money, and leaves the room) So the robots have to wait, while the Zeppelins pay themselves off. (You can speed up this process by pre-ordering!). Meanwhile, a different idea, as follows.
First, you should all go buy Rabid Transit: Petting Zoo and read “How to Write an Epic Fantasy” by David Lomax.
Done?
No?
I’ll wait . . .
Okay; you can read it later, if you insist.
Here’s the idea:
All-Star Stories Presents: Twenty Epics
The problem: Epic fantasy takes too long. It takes too long to read, it takes too long to write. The industry has too many incentives to make the author write the same book over and over again, piling up the foreshadowing, wearing out characters’ boots, to no good purpose except to give the reader more time to spend in the author’s fantasy world.
Now, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, if you’ve got the time. But for the busy reader/writer on the go, I think we need an alternative, and that’s where Twenty Epics comes in.
Twenty Epics would be, to the traditional epic, what the false pasts created for the replicants in Blade Runner are to real human experience. Each of the twenty would create in the reader the same kind of emotional and aesthetic experience one has on finishing, say, Titus Groan, or the original Earthsea books, or the Fantasy Masterworks collection of the Viriconium stories, or Orlando — or, for that matter, War and Peace or Lonesome Dove. (All of these are a little short already by modern epic standards, I admit — I’m going for sublimity here, not exhaustion.) But they’d do it without making the reader or the writer sit through ten books and ten years.
Now, I know what I’m getting into. If I just advertise for twenty condensed epics at, oh, say $50 a pop, I know what I’m going to get: A lot of gaming-module backgrounds and poorly written plot synopses crammed with unpronounceable names. I can cope with that (the Editor’s name is a tower of strength), but what I’m looking for is something different, and harder to define — a Silmarillion with sophistication, a “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” with narrative drive. The closest examples I can think of are the aforementioned David Lomax story, and some of the stories in Angelica Gorodischer’s Kalpa Imperial.
Oh, and maybe this piece my friend Jon wrote in college, excerpts from the marketing literature produced by the estate of one “G.L.L.L. Kerpim”. (Beautiful stuff, pure vitriol. “Lo! The Fire-Sheep are closing in! Use the Jewel-Sword-Ring!”)
Beyond that, I think we’re back to Herodotus.
Am I the only one who would read this?
Help me pin this down.
You've piqued my interest, David, as a reader and a writer. I love strong epic fantasy, but I don't have the patience to read endless series (or the stamina to write them). What sort of word count range are you considering for this prospective collection?