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NEWS AND VIEWS - NOVEMBER 2023
WRITING NEWS The latest Signalverse novel, Galatea and the Dupe, is available now! This is the ninth Signalverse book, and although it's pretty short, I think it's one of the better ones. Here's the cover (the art is once again by Josh Howard, who also did the cover for the previous Signalverse novel, The White Ribbon and the Heart of the Night): 
Like most of the Signalverse books, it's a standalone novel and enjoyable enough on its own, but you'll get a little more out of it if you read the previous books first. The next book in the series, which I've just started working on, is called City of Strange Gods. It's going to be epic, basically the Avengers: Infinity War of the series, bringing the protagonists of several of the previous books together and wrapping up many of their storylines. I also put the finishing touches on the Sam Fortune sequel this month, and received the completed cover art from Tom Martin as well. Here it is: 
Tom's done a lot of covers for me over the years, but I think this one might be my favorite. It's just beautiful. It's going to be a few months before this one is released, though -- I'm thinking I'll bring out in March or April of next year. And I finally got around to uploading the redesigned Signalverse site, which you can find here. It's nothing special, but it's got a few new sections which I intend to update a little more frequently from now on. * * * * * * * * WHAT I'M WATCHING Still working my way through some Korean dramas -- Abyss and Go Back Couple, which I talked about in September (I don't binge on these shows; I usually only watch one episode a week). I did pick up another series, though -- an anime based on Falcom's Trails of Cold Steel video game series, subtitled Northern War. I'm a huge Kiseki nerd, so I was pretty excited about this show, especially because the series was supposed to be about Erebonia's war with North Ambria, an event which isn't covered by the games and which seemed like it could serve as a pretty good basis for a show. But then I started seeing the ratings it was getting: 5.5 out of 10, 6.5 out 10, etc. Uh-oh. What was this about? So I watched the series, and yeah, I hate to say it, but it's not very good. The show obviously didn't have a huge budget -- the animation looks cheap -- but it was the story and the characters that were really disappointing. I thought this was going to be a fairly serious story, with lots of Sturm und Drang, lots of battle scenes, lots of pathos. If all you had to go on was the opening credits, that's probably what you'd be expecting. Instead, the show gives us ridiculous terrorist clowns in giant rainbow-colored blimps. What the hell? In addition, the characters are not particularly interesting or original, and the show doesn't introduce them to the audience very well at all -- the four protagonists are already having these crazy episodic adventures by the second episode, before the audience has even learned their names. 
So yeah, if this show hadn't been based on the Kiseki games I probably would've given up on it after the third or fourth episode. As it was, I felt kind of obligated to finish it, just in case the show's original characters happen to appear, or happen to be referenced, in future games. * * * * * * * * NON FINITO I've been hearing rumors that George R. R. Martin has been telling friends that he's no longer working on and has no intention of actually finishing A Song of Ice and Fire. Wouldn't surprise me. The guy is seventy-five years old and, just to look at him, probably not in the best of health. He's made his millions. Why should he keep working into his retirement years? Besides, the Game of Thrones TV show has already brought the story to a conclusion, which means there's no more big plot twists or anything for his readers to get excited about. He also admitted that the show's ending was pretty close to what he himself had in mind, but that ending was extremely unpopular, which I'm sure he found disappointing. The trouble started after A Storm of Swords. He had originally planned for the next book to jump ahead a few years, but then he realized that he'd be spending most of the book catching the reader up on what had been happening in Westeros. So he was forced to scrap all that and start from scratch, and I don't think the series ever really recovered -- the last two books have had a "meandering" kind of feel to them, which wasn't helped by Martin's seeming reluctance to resolve the series' various plotlines. Instead of working to advance the overall plot in A Dance with Dragons, and to begin to bring the story to its conclusion, he introduced a bunch of new characters and new situations instead, making the story even more complicated and convoluted, while leaving many of the established characters in a kind of limbo. There's no way he could wrap this story up in just two books now. Maybe there's something else going on here, though. I read an article the other day suggesting that, artistically, it was Martin's goal to subvert the fantasy genre, but that in the end, the fantasy genre subverted him. The dark, pessimistic ending he had in mind for the series was no longer appropriate, because he had accidentally created a genuine fantasy epic, with some genuinely heroic characters like Jon and Brienne, but he still wanted that dark, pessimistic ending, because that was the whole reason he had started writing the series to begin with (to subvert the genre with grimdark realpolitik stuff). According to this theory, he found himself unable to square this circle and so finally just gave up. I think that's possible, but I'm not sure he consciously set out to subvert the fantasy genre. Just about everything Martin has written is dark and pessimistic in one way or another; that's just his thing. More likely, it's simply the fact that he's a gazillionaire now, and in his mid-seventies, and just not all that interested in spending the rest of his life tearing his hair out writing these extremely long and complex novels. It's a shame, especially for his fans, but hey, that's just how things shake out sometimes. If my books suddenly became extremely popular and turned me into a multi-millionaire, I might have trouble finding the motivation to write, too. |