As you pointed out, there are soon to be twelve novels written by Brian and Kevin, while there are only six novels written by the original author. For someone who is new to Dune, that means you will have to worm your way through perhaps six novels that are inferior in every which way to the originals, before you reach the originals.

It took me a minute to figure out what Secher was talking about. What do you mean, you have to worm your way through the Brian Herbert/Kevin Anderson prequels before tackling the original Dune? And then it hit me that there are plenty of readers out there whose natural inclination is to read a series in fictive chronological order. Under that scheme, Secher’s right: The Butlerian Jihad comes first, and then The Machine Crusade, and then more BH/KA subpar-ness, and finally you hit the original Dune several thousand pages later.

So the question is: in what order should you read an SF/F series, and why?

It’s an especially pertinent question to genre fiction, because serial storytelling is so much a part of what we do. I don’t recall anyone ever arguing or much caring whether you should read Richard Ford’s Independence Day before The Sportswriter, or God forbid skip straight to The Lay of the Land. Even most genre fiction besides science fiction doesn’t have this problem; I don’t think Sue Grafton gives a bloody razor whether you read E Is for Evidence before G Is for Gingivitis or P Is for Pterodactyl. (What, those aren’t the actual titles? Fine, you go look them up.)

But in science fiction and fantasy, it matters deeply whether the Empire struck back before or after the clones attacked. When I sit my children down to watch the Star Wars movies, you can be damn sure that I will make sure they’re properly shocked and surprised to see (spoiler alert!) Darth Vader reveal himself as Luke Skywalker’s father. And I will continue to send anonymous nastygrams to HarperCollins editors insisting that The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe comes before The Magician’s Nephew until they pry those old editions from my cold, dead hands.

This peculiarity of science fiction and fantasy and related genres is a weakness related, I think, to the overemphasis we often place on the plot in such stories. The obsession with “spoilers” is a related weakness. It reduces stories to a hollow enterprise of surface tension and mechanical plot twists. As if an SF/F story is nothing more than manipulative melodrama + funky SFnal idea.

But it’s a weakness I share with so many others. Believe me, if someone had told me ahead of time what happens at the Red Wedding in book 3 of George R.R. Martin’s “Song of Ice and Fire,” I would have been pissed.

So back to the question. What order should you read the books in? The easy answer, of course, is that you should read the series in whatever order the author believes you should read it in. It’s the author’s world, after all, and the author’s decision.

But can we always trust an author to know what’s right for his/her series? George Lucas would have you believe that you’ll get the most out of the Star Wars series if your first exposure to it is through the lens of a mercantile dispute between the Trade Federation and the planet of Naboo. And yet the number of people who would prefer to have seen episodes I-III of Star Wars before episodes IV-VI could probably fit into Yoda’s jockstrap. C.S. Lewis is on record telling readers to start the Narnia series with the somewhat-lacking sixth book, The Magician’s Nephew, instead of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Isaac Asimov suggested that you should read Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation before actually tackling Foundation, which is kind of, well, dumb.

I can think of a number of authors whose judgment grew somewhat… suspect, I guess you could say, as they grew older. Robert Heinlein didn’t hesitate to start trotting out old characters and planting seeds in long-fallow fields as he grumbled his way towards the grave. Orson Scott Card seems hell-bent on creating alternate storylines in the Ender universe, creating great consternation for borderline OCD sufferers like me who can’t decide whether to file Ender’s Shadow before Speaker for the Dead (where it belongs chronologically) or after Children of the Mind (where it belongs in order of publication). (Honestly, I think he would have been better off stopping after Speaker for the Dead.)

So let me answer the fucking question already. Personally, my feeling is that, when presented with a series of interconnected SF novels, it’s best to follow order of publication. I find that there’s a fascinating progression in the way authors gradually develop and unveil their imaginary universes which is part of the fun. One of the oldest and most satisfying traditions of Western literature is to begin stories in medias res, just like Homer did in The Odyssey. This lets the reader develop a sense of the characters, the setting, and the conflict; it gives us a viewpoint for the background that’s to follow. And it taps into that Western cultural drive for discovery. Give us something to explore! Show us the map, point out that blank area on the edge where Thar Be Dragons, and then let us get on over there and explore the sucker. Only textbooks start off by explaining everything outright. Where’s the fun in that?

Of course, there are exceptions where the first published work shouldn’t necessarily be read first. I’m thinking of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, which was begun decades before The Lord of the Rings ever saw the light of day — in the trenches during World War I, if I’m not mistaken — but only hit the shelves posthumously in 1977. Even had he completed the book back before LOTR hit the shelves, The Silmarillion would have been, frankly, unpublishable. And yet… if you crack open The Fellowship of the Ring without knowing anything about the First Age and the struggle against Morgoth for the Silmarils, you’re missing crucial context that Tolkien clearly intended to put there all along.

But to Secher Nbiw and all those neophyte Dune readers out there, I say: you’ll get the most bang for your buck if you pick up Dune and work your way through all six Frank Herbert books before you tackle the BH/KA books.

There were parts of this book that had me excited and intrigued, but then things would wander off into emotional dead ends. The tech and some of the social ideas were cool and nifty, but the business model stuff just never made it for me. And a glossary in the back? That’s just never a good sign. There are plenty of interesting bits in there and lots of promise, but the book as a whole just never gelled for me.

Most of the review I can just kind of shrug and say, “Well, if it ain’t your cup of tea, it ain’t your cup of tea.” But I’m a little puzzled by the comment about the glossary. Glossary = bad?

It’s not the first time I’ve heard this sentiment. A few other reviewers of Infoquake have stated that the book had a strike against it from the outset just by including a glossary and appendices. For another example, here’s what Paul Kincaid had to say in his (generally quite positive) review of Infoquake for The New York Review of Science Fiction last year:

Occasionally we have become used to extraneous material being introduced, a list of characters in a sprawling Russian novel or a map in a second-rate fantasy, but generally the more an author feels the need for this material the more justified we are in feeling that the author has failed in the primary task of telling it all in the story. David Louis Edelman has devoted the last 40 pages of his novel to no fewer than six addenda, including a glossary, a timeline, a history of the Surina family, a (cod) explanation of the (cod) science in the book and so on. There is nothing in any of these addenda that should not have been crystal clear through the story alone.

I don’t understand this sentiment, and I’m wondering how widespread it is. I mean, The Lord of the Rings, Dune, A Clockwork Orange, 1984, and The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant all have glossaries, to name a few off the top of my head. Do they have strikes against them too?

I can’t speak for why Mssrs. Tolkien, Herbert, Burgess, Blair, and Donaldson included appendix material in their books. For Tolkien, the humbug-scholarship aspect of Middle Earth was clearly central to his work. (See my post about Tolkien’s Unfinished Tales for more on this.) Herbert’s seem like something of an afterthought.

For me, the appendices were a way of compromising with the reader. Personally, I tend to enjoy the long-winded infodumps in stories. My favorite chapter in The Lord of the Rings? “The Council of Elrond.” My favorite part of The Matrix? Morpheus’ explanation to Neo about the world of the machines (followed by that near-incomprehensible speech by The Architect in The Matrix: Reloaded).

If I had written Infoquake solely for my own benefit, I would have filled it with chapter after chapter of people lounging around talking about the ethical implications of multi technology over dinner. But given that I’m writing stories for other people to enjoy, I realized that it would help move the story along if I excised some of these narratives from the story proper. Moving them into appendices seemed like a nice way to keep the rising tension while still satisfying the irrepressibly curious.

(As for the glossary? The world of Jump 225 is quite complex and filled with invented buzzwords, I’ll admit. That part of the story is entirely intentional, and meant to both reflect on and satirize our own society. Imagine how many footnotes you’d need to explain to a resident of 1965 how you used your Blackberry’s GPS to track down the closest Mickey D’s from an address you got on Google.)

It might sound like I’m starting to get defensive here, but I’m really not. I don’t get mad at people who have problems with my books, I get curious. So. The sentiment that glossaries and appendices are to be avoided. What to make of it?

My initial temptation was to write it off as the opinion of someone who doesn’t want to read anything they have to think about too hard. (Honestly, the reader who picks up Infoquake at the airport just because they want to stay awake on the plane isn’t a reader I care too much about.) But that’s clearly unfair to the two reviewers cited above. The NY Review reviewer clearly engaged with the material, even if he had some problems with it. And from what I can tell by browsing through his blog, the Whatta Fiasco guy seems to be well-read, engages with the material, and has generally good taste.

But after giving it some more careful thought, here are what seem to me to be plausible reasons an intelligent and engaged reader would object to seeing lengthy glossaries and appendices in the back of a book:

1. It’s a sign that the author is taking him- or herself too seriously.

2. It’s a sign that the author is really in dire need of a good editor.

3. It’s a sign that the author is falling prey to the (perceived) genre shortcoming of unnecessary complexity.

4. It’s a sign that the author is too lazy to introduce these terms organically into the body of the story.

5. It’s a sign that either the author, the editor, or the publisher don’t trust the reader’s intelligence enough to remember the important terms in the story.

Any that I’m missing? Any thoughts from glossary-lovers or -haters out there?

I felt like that in 1989 when I saw Terry Gilliam’s masterpiece The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

My friends and I had been weaned on Monty Python, we could recite long passages from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, we worshiped both Time Bandits and Brazil. So we had some idea of what to expect from a new Terry Gilliam film: visual surrealism, distrust of authority, antipathy to soulless reason, and a skewed sense of humor, among (many) other things. Pure chocolate-covered chaos covered in shiny tinfoil and encased in a neat plastic wrapper.

But Baron Munchausen was something else altogether. Imagine if someone tried to film Peter Jackson’s The Return of the King – without the benefit of CGI. It’s that grand of a scale. Gilliam gives us real armored elephants, ornately carved cannons, and hundreds upon hundreds of fully costumed soldiers engaging in mock battle. He gives us baroque, lovingly crafted setpieces and clockwork monsters that look like Muppets. He gives us cameos from Sting and Robin Williams, not to mention a stark naked Uma Thurman. There’s a story within a story within a story, with allusions to everything from Greek mythology to 1001 Nights.

My friends and I watched Munchausen with jaws dropped. Some Hollywood assholes had paid tens and tens of millions of dollars to make this movie. It was, at the time, one of the most expensive films ever made. And here we sat, on a Saturday afternoon, the day after opening — in Southern California, no less, the movie capital of the world — and there were less than 20 people in the audience.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. Someone had screwed up, and screwed up big time. I mean, of course if you’re running a Hollywood movie studio, you don’t give a mad genius like Terry Gilliam a blank check and virtually no adult supervision. Of course you don’t bet that an 126-minute postmodern retelling of an obscure 18th century German novel starring some British Shakespearean actor nobody’s ever heard of is going to do boffo box office.

Yet someone did. And we, a bunch of 16- and 17-year-old kids, got to reap the benefits. We left the theater giddy, feeling like we had come away from the vending machine with two candy bars for the price of one.

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen became one of those Hollywood object lessons in bad producing. The Wikipedia article for the movie tells me that the film cost $46.63 million to make (twice the original budget) and only brought in around $8 million in return. If I’m reading this box office chart from the week of May 12, 1989 correctly, the movie actually debuted at #21 in the weekend’s box office. It debuted on 117 screens nationwide. Contrast that to The Return of Swamp Thing, a B-movie from Miramax with a budget of probably a few hundred thousand, which debuted the same weekend on 123 screens.

So Baron Munchausen pretty much stank up the box office. And it hasn’t really even become a huge cult hit on video either, despite what Wikipedia says. It’s not one of those films like The Princess Bride or Blade Runner that went on from modest beginnings to become an enormous word-of-mouth success. This film isn’t widely discussed and admired the way that Gilliam films like Time Bandits and Brazil still are. I seriously doubt the movie made back any significant fraction of its original budget on VHS or DVD, even when factoring in inflation.

Yet given all that, Sony decided to suddenly give Munchausen the royal 20th anniversary treatment. I bought the film on Blu-Ray last night and loved the heck out of it once again (despite the fact that the Blu-Ray player crashed halfway through and took about 10 minutes to reboot). It’s just as chaotic, just as funny, and just as barbed as I had remembered. It’s much more postmodern than I had remembered too. Like the work of John Barth, the film spends most of its 126 minutes smashing through the fourth wall, even if you don’t always realize the film’s doing it. By giving us a tale within a tale within a tale, Gilliam refuses to stick within the bounds of story — in fact, he boldly and gleefully tells us that no such bounds exist.

The real treat of the new Munchausen disc isn’t the 1080p transfer or the Dolby TrueHD sound — because, let’s face it, few movies from 1989 are really going to benefit all that much from a high-tech makeover. No, the real treat is the documentary, “The Madness and Misadventures of Munchausen,” which details for the first time all of the studio infighting and bickering and financial malfeasance that went on behind the scenes.

These making-of DVD documentaries have become Hollywood’s version of reality TV. I find them fascinating to watch, because they basically show Hollywood cannibalizing itself. In 1989, Terry Gilliam was simply a wizard and who knew how the hell he did it. But today, Hollywood no longer just sells you the spectacle — now you watch the spectacle and you watch the spectacle-makers dissecting their own spectacle-making.

What makes the Munchausen documentary so fascinating is how all the players involved let loose on one another in a big circle jerk of blame. Gilliam relates production disaster after production disaster; Eric Idle goes off on how Hollywood is full of evil shits (his words) and that’s why he doesn’t work there anymore; Robin Williams talks about how he took over the role of King of the Moon from Sean Connery (!) as a favor, and how his managers insisted he not be credited lest the sleazy producers behind Munchausen plaster Williams’ image all over everything and sully his reputation.

Everyone involved points the finger at the producer, this German guy named Thomas Schuhly, in the kind of vicious language you generally don’t see in your standard DVD documentary puff piece. Schuhly, for his part, disclaims all responsibility and blames Gilliam’s people for unprofessionalism and anti-German bias. (The documentary filmmakers give Schuhly his say, but it’s clear where their bias lies. At one point in the Schuhly interview, you can hear what sounds like someone letting out a rather loud fart in the background. Nobody bothered to edit it out in post-production, which speaks volumes.)

But only Gilliam seems to be keenly aware of the irony of the whole thing. A bunch of stodgy Hollywood accountant types arguing over who’s at fault for letting this delusional (albeit brilliant) filmmaker go off and make such a movie… when the movie itself is about a delusional (albeit brilliant) adventurer who goes off to fight the Turks over the protests of a bunch of stodgy bureaucratic accountant types.

Life really has become a Philip K. Dick novel, hasn’t it?

Quick excerpt from my response:

From a publishing perspective, series are absolutely not a barrier to gaining new readership. And there’s a simple reason why: more books on the shelves equals more bookstore real estate devoted to the author, which equals more of a chance that the author’s books will attract the attention of a potential reader. Once you’ve caught a reader’s interest, it’s easy enough for them to find the earlier books online, or (gasp!) special order them from the information counter.

You can also find responses from my editor Lou Anders, my pal Chris Roberson, my buddy John Joseph Adams, and a blogger named Joe Sherry who I don’t know from (John Joseph) Adam(s) but seems like a nice fellow. In fact, he linked to my website from his blog Adventures in Reading, so he must be a nice fellow. (And I’m happy to return the favor.)

Perhaps I should have called this post “Dungeons & Dragons: An Appreciation,” since I really didn’t know Gary Gygax from Elric of Melniboné. I don’t think I ever heard the guy speak or saw his picture until this afternoon. I may have read an interview or two with him over the years, but they certainly didn’t make any lasting impression.

But to me, Gary Gygax was not primarily the inventor of a popular role-playing game; he was an unparalleled author of fantasy. Gary Gygax wrote three volumes that were highly influential to me as a kid. I speak of the Players Handbook, the Dungeon Masters Guide, and the Monster Manual. I present them below in the editions that will forever be branded in my memory:

My experiences as a player of Dungeons & Dragons have generally been pretty miserable. I played my first game at perhaps the age of eight, with my brother as dungeon master and my older sister serving as co-adventurer. I’m guessing this was 1979, because the module we were playing, In Search of the Unknown, was published that year. I believe we were playing the Basic rules, using the set pictured below. (Gawd, do these pictures bring back memories…)

We made an awful team. My sister and I spent a couple of hours building our characters — I was a dwarf, if I remember correctly — and got into a horrific argument about how we should order our party for the inevitable foray into the dungeon. Tears and screaming ensued. (Hey, I was eight.) Finally, we decided to just put aside our differences in the interest of pursuing adventure, but the adventure proved to be short-lived. We found ourselves shooting arrows at a band of ravenous giant centipedes, which we pictured as these enormous Dune-sized worms with enormous jaws and enormous sharp teeth. Then my brother cheerfully informed us that these giant centipedes were only about a foot long, at which point the game dissolved into a fit of giggles and never resumed.

Over the next half-dozen years, I was determined to find a good game of Dungeons & Dragons and become one of those legendary dungeon masters you read about in Dungeon Masters Guide. But despite fervent evangelism to my elementary school friends, the most that ever materialized was a rather pathetic playthrough of The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh. I served as dungeon master to my then-friends, who wandered disinterestedly through a haunted house killing everything that moved, without ever realizing that the place was just a ruse set up by pirates to scare the locals away from their smuggling operation.

When I finally found a group of guys who were serious AD&D players, we were all heading into the dungeon of puberty. We had weekly sleepovers where eight or nine of us would earnestly head off for adventure, and then quickly drift off into Giggling & Gossip after an hour or two. This continued for a couple of years until my friend Geoff and I brought the entire role-playing phase of the group to a close by creating a game called Chutes & Dungeons & Ladders & Dragons. The raucous game, played only once, went something like this:

ME: You turn the corner and you see a giant ladder.

PLAYER: I’ll climb the ladder.

ME: You get to the top of the ladder, and you see Matt’s dad yelling at you to take out the trash. He summons Cthulu, who zaps you with a lightning bolt that costs you four million hit points.

PLAYER: I’m rolling a saving throw… it’s a 3! That means the lightning bolt bounces off me and kills Matt’s dad instead. [throws Cheetos]

And that, in a nutshell, is my history with fantasy role-playing.

Despite the fact that I never had a satisfactory Dungeons & Dragons gaming experience, I spent years poring over those books you see above. I read them cover to cover multiple times. I studied the artwork. I sketched out a million dungeons and was never far from a pad of graph paper and a felt bag full of 20-sided dice. I would daydream about the world of Greyhawk and psionic powers and what would happen if I gathered a group of a hundred adventures and we all screamed “Hastur!” at the top of our lungs. (Readers of Deities & Demigods get the joke.)

Through those books you see above (along with others like The Fiend Folio, Deities & Demigods, The Monster Manual II, and Oriental Adventures), Gary Gygax opened my eyes. He introduced me to Norse mythology, Michael Moorcock, Robert E. Howard, and H.P. Lovecraft. He gave me a hard-on for imagination that’s been with me ever since. (And if you’ve ever spent any time poring through those books, you can imagine that they produced hard-ons of a more literal variety too. Let’s just say that in the ’70s, topless large-breasted she-demons were about as hard core as it got for a preadolescent kid in Orange County, California.)

What was so fabulous about Gary Gygax’s Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks?

I think it was a combination of Gygax’s boundless enthusiasm, his slightly cornball sense of humor, and his ability to gleefully cannibalize any piece of film or literature in the service of adventure. It wasn’t armor classes and spell requirements that I was learning by reading those books. I was learning how to turn life into an adventure that would never end no matter how good you got at it. I was learning how to size up the world around me with a rigid set of rules and statistics and dice rolls. I was learning a handy set of moral rules in the alignment chart, which taught me more about human nature than eight years of Hebrew school ever did.

Detractors of D&D often stereotype RPG fans (as well as SF fans) as people with poor social skills. (And I suppose one must admit that there does seem to be some kind of correlation.) But to me, the hallmark of the D&D player is the tendency, on unfolding a map of Greyhawk, to look at those peculiar countries on the edge, the ones with the strange names about which the accompanying booklet simply says “not much is known about this land,” and instantly want to be there, to yearn beyond all else to jump into that map and be the first one to trek through it and map it out and provide a complete description of its history, customs, and politics for the world’s edification.

E. Gary Gygax unlocked that tendency in me in the late ’70s. And the fact that he’s gone now makes the world that much poorer. Damn it, how come there’s never a 25th-level Cleric with a Wish spell around when you need one?

Late last year, I was asked to write the introduction to Overlook Press’ new edition of Mervyn Peake’s Titus Alone, last novel of the so-called Gormenghast Trilogy. Considering that the first two books, Titus Groan and Gormenghast, had introductions written by Anthony Burgess and Tad Williams, respectively, I felt pretty honored to get the invitation.

Today I’ve received word that the books have actually come off the press and should appear in bookstores all across the U.S. soon. So, with the permission of Overlook Press, I’ve posted the introduction in its entirety below. After you’re done, go visit the Overlook Press web page for the book, and pick up a copy from Amazon. (Update 5/29/08: And also visit the Mervyn Peake blog, run by his son Sebastian. Sebastian was nice enough to write about this introduction there.)

Now here’s the introduction. You may notice that I’ve borrowed liberally from my blog entry about Titus Alone posted over a year ago. Page numbers refer to my Vintage Press UK edition of Titus Alone (because I don’t actually have the Overlook Press edition in my hands yet).

*

Did Mervyn Peake go mad writing Titus Alone, or does Titus Alone merely predict his madness? Is it a work of dystopian science fiction, or a work of psychological symbolism? Is the book a terse masterpiece, or is it just the half-formed ravings of a crumbling mind?

What the heck is this book you’re holding?

Let’s start with the facts. Mervyn Peake was a noted artist and illustrator of children’s books who spent his formative years in China. He published the novels Titus Groan (1946) and Gormenghast (1950) to excellent reviews, though not resounding commercial success. After the failure of his play The Wit to Woo (1957), Peake suffered a nervous breakdown. Parkinson’s disease, electroshock therapy, and brain surgery would follow over the next decade. Peake spent his last years in institutions, finally passing away in November of 1968. His works would dip briefly into obscurity and academic disfavor — Kingsley Amis once famously dismissed him as “a bad fantasy writer of maverick status” — before enjoying a critical and commercial renaissance that continues to this day.

Eyre & Spottiswoode originally published Titus Alone in 1959, and the book has been the target of critical dissatisfaction ever since. It’s barely half the size of Titus Groan and Gormenghast, leading some to conclude that Peake was only half-done with it. Given Peake’s mental state at the time of publication, others have assumed that the author was in no condition to write a novel. Regardless of the reason, Titus Alone is generally considered the least of the three Gormenghast books.

Why the fuss? Well, there’s no delicate way to put it: this book is bizarre. Even by the standards of the previous Gormenghast novels (which aren’t exactly models of straightforward narrative), Titus Alone stands — well, it stands alone. Titus spends the entire book wandering through a sparsely described dream world pursued by two silent, faceless policemen. He journeys through an underground realm filled with derelicts and runaways. There’s a beggar who eats money, and a remote-controlled glass spy globe. One of the main characters spends a good deal of the book with an ape on his shoulder.

In the last words of Gormenghast, Peake writes that “Titus rode out of his world.” Who would have imagined that Peake meant it literally? Titus Groan and Gormenghast take place in some undefined location in what seems to be a pre-Industrial setting. But in Titus Alone, there are flying mechanical needles, death rays, and a factory filled with mysterious bad smells. Muzzlehatch drives a car, Cheeta rides in a helicopter, and Cheeta’s scientist father talks to his subordinates through a videoconferencing system. Crabcalf informs us that someone or something named “Molusk” has recently circled the moon. (A successor to Sputnik?) All this technology implies that the novel takes place in the near future, yet nobody Titus encounters has heard of Gormenghast. Gormenghast, a castle so enormous that you can wander its rooftops for days without seeing the end of it.

But the setting isn’t the only incongruity between Titus Alone and its predecessors. The books have vast differences in style and tone as well. Peake ambles through Titus Groan and Gormenghast with page after page of (glorious, lyrical) exposition; but in Titus Alone, he takes the linguistic express route, zipping through descriptions of even central characters like Cheeta and Muzzlehatch in a mere sentence or two. The first two books make only the vaguest mentions of a higher power; this book brims over with Biblical allusions. Titus Groan is entirely sexless, and Gormenghast approaches the subject with the utmost discretion; Titus Alone is bursting with sexuality, both expressed and repressed. (Can you imagine anyone in those first two novels saying, as Titus says to Cheeta, “let me suck your breasts, like little apples, and play upon your nipples with my tongue”?) (p. 166)

So the first question to ask is this: how much of Titus Alone is Mervyn Peake switching gears, and how much is Mervyn Peake losing his marbles?

It’s a fair question, given that so much of the novel is devoted to the question of insanity. Clearly the subject was on Peake’s mind. Titus begins to doubt the existence of Gormenghast almost as soon as he steps foot off the grounds, and his doubt is only magnified after he loses his flint. “I have nothing else to prove where I come from, or that I ever had a native land,” Titus laments. “…I have nothing to hold in my hand. Nothing to convince myself that it is not a dream. Nothing to prove my actuality.” (p. 105)

Take the hallucinatory strangeness of the novel, add Titus’s doubts about his sanity, mix in Peake’s eventual descent into dementia, and you’ve got all the ingredients for the proverbial novel of madness. Let’s not forget the fact that some of the known symptoms of Parkinson’s disease include language problems, memory loss, hallucinations, and depression. Maybe the author of the fantastic we should be comparing Peake to is not J.R.R. Tolkien but Philip K. Dick, the poet of paranoia, who believed that God sent him messages through a pink laser. It’s difficult to read Titus Alone and not think of Dick’s Time Out of Joint — also published in 1959 — which features a similarly anguished protagonist living in a dream world stitched together with carefully labeled pieces of paper.

So… case closed? Mervyn Peake went mad, and Titus Alone is just a half-finished, semi-coherent product of his deteriorating mental state, right?

Wrong. Outlandish as the novel may be, it’s also tightly plotted, thematically cohesive, vividly written, and slyly self-aware. In fact, in many ways the book not only extends the themes of Titus Groan and Gormenghast, but it challenges them and turns them on their head.

We can blame two things for the popular misconceptions about Mervyn Peake’s last book. The first is the poor editing job of Peake’s original editor. The original edition of Titus Alone omitted entire chapters and contained many dubious “corrections” that weren’t fixed until years after Peake’s death. But the second and more important reason for this misunderstanding is that the book is, by nature, incomplete. Titus Alone is a bridging novel. It’s what stands between the story of Titus’s childhood and the stories of his adulthood — stories that Peake never got the chance to write.

Titus Alone can be roughly divided into three parts: Titus’s explorations of the nameless city and his first encounters with Muzzlehatch and Juno; Titus’s sojourn through the Under-River; and his strange “courtship” of Cheeta, leading up to the final pantomime in the Black House.

Peake sets up the key metaphor of the novel early on, in Chapter 13, during the fight between Muzzlehatch’s camel and his mule. The two animals break free of their cages and set on each other with a frenzy, until they’re stopped by a naked Muzzlehatch wielding a hose and wearing a fireman’s helmet. (I did mention that the novel was bizarre, right?) Look at how Peake describes the animals’ walk back to their cages:

But the camel and the mule were anything but embarrassed. They had tasted freedom and they had tasted blood, and it was with a quite indescribable arrogance that they swaggered towards the cages, their thick, blue lips curled back over their disgusting teeth; their nostrils dilated and their eyes yellow with pride. (p. 25)

Clearly Peake’s not just talking about animals here; he’s deliberately drawing a parallel between the animals escaping from their cages and Titus Groan escaping from Gormenghast. Titus says so himself. (“Gormenghast was a kind of jail,” he tells the Magistrate. “A place of ritual. But suddenly and under my breath I had to say good-bye.”) (p. 86) And in case you missed that reference, there are several more: Titus locked in prison like “some kind of caged animal,” (p. 63) Titus asking Cheeta “Why can’t you set me free?” (p. 223), Titus “like a dancing bear on the end of a rope.” (p.171) As for the tasting of blood — wasn’t one of Titus’s last acts in Gormenghast to kill the traitorous Steerpike?

But it’s not just Titus that Peake wants to compare to an animal in a cage; these animal metaphors extend throughout the book. We’ve got characters named Cheeta, Muzzlehatch, Cusp-Canine, and Crabcalf. We’ve got characters compared to condors, crocodiles, foxes, snakes, birds, jackals, squirrels, tigers, tortoises, dogs, cats — the list goes on. At one point, while Titus is on the glass roof looking down on Lady Cusp-Canine’s party, he imagines the whole crowd as some kind of menagerie:

They were all there. The giraffe-men and the hippopotamus-men. The serpent-ladies and the heron-ladies. The aspens and the oaks; the thistles and the ferns — the beetles and the moths — the crocodiles and the parrots: the tigers and the lambs: vultures with pearls around their necks and bison in tails. (p. 38)

I tried to keep a running list of all the animal metaphors in Titus Alone, but finally I gave up and stopped counting at forty.

So in the first third of Titus Alone, our hero endlessly rehashes his escape from the prison of Gormenghast, the prison of being the 77th Earl of Groan. He soon finds himself in the dark and mysterious world of the Under-River, the symbolism of which should be obvious to anyone who’s ever taken a class in English literature. Dark passages, birth canals, furtive adolescent scrambling — you know the drill.

After his dark underground journey, in the last third of Titus Alone, Titus finally finds what he’s looking for — or at least what he thinks he’s looking for. He’s lived his entire life in the confines of Gormenghast, a place of stultifying ritual, where tradition rules for tradition’s sake and any breach of protocol is a mortal sin. What he finds in Cheeta, her scientist father, and his factory is the opposite extreme. What could be more unlike Gormenghast than a place of invention and experimentation? Peake hammers the point home by continually referring to Cheeta and the scientists in terms of newness and invention. Cheeta is a “modern” with “a new kind of beauty” (p. 160); she takes Titus to the Black House to see “a hundred bright inventions.” (p. 213) She implores him to spend one last night with her, “not in some dusky arbour where all the ritual of love drags out for hours, and there is nothing new; but in the bright invention of the night, our egos naked and our wits on fire.” (p. 194)

Yet for all their differences from the ancient, moldering castle, Cheeta and her father clearly represent a kind of evil, like the relentlessly ambitious Steerpike in the first two books. Notice that despite all the air of newness about the factory, it never seems to actually make anything; all the scientists accomplish is the destruction of Muzzlehatch’s zoo with their death ray. (You’ll remember that the forward-thinking Steerpike never accomplished much in Gormenghast either, except to burn down the library.)

It’s hard to see anything noble about Gormenghast in the first two novels. The castle never felt particularly malignant in itself, but all those centuries of relentless tradition did seem to have a malignant effect on its inhabitants. The only proper reaction to such immenseness is to close oneself off, like Sourdust and Barquentine and — well, just about every other character in Titus Groan and Gormenghast. But in the last third of Titus Alone, Peake shows us that there’s an entirely different side to the castle. As Cheeta discovers, living in the shadow of all that monumental history has given Titus a strength of character that she lacks:

From the cold centre of elegance and a life of scheduled pleasure she was now being shown the gulches of a barbarous region. A world of capture and escape. Of violence and fear. Of love and hate. Yet above all, of an underlying calm. A calm built upon a rock-like certainty and belief in some immemorial tradition.

Here, tossing and sweating on the bed below her, lay a fragment, so it seemed, of a great tradition: for all the outward movement utterly still in the confidence of its own hereditary truth. Cheeta, for the first time in her life, felt in the presence of blood so much bluer than her own. (p. 162)

Gormenghast, a place that ennobles the soul? A place that provides Titus with the foundations to survive and thrive in the world? It’s enough to make you reevaluate all of the truths you thought you knew from reading Titus Groan and Gormenghast.

By the conclusion of Titus Alone, the 77th Earl of Groan has come to a kind of acceptance with his past. He’s escaped from the prison of stifling tradition, he’s rejected the false promise of the new, and he’s confronted the demons of his upbringing and overcome them. Why, then, does Titus reject Gormenghast in the book’s final pages? Why does he turn away from the castle with a fairy-tale finality, to be “never seen by him ever again”?

Clearly Mervyn Peake was not finished with Titus Groan. We know that Peake planned to write further episodes in the saga, with tentative titles that include Titus Awakes and Gormenghast Revisited. Unfortunately all the author ever put to paper were scattered notes and fragments. I’d like to think that Titus goes on to achieve great deeds, now that he’s armed with the mighty tradition of Gormenghast but not controlled by it. What final destiny Peake had in store for him, we’ll never know.

The more I study Titus Alone, the more I realize that Peake knew precisely what he was doing with this book. Perhaps the author didn’t have the opportunity to polish his last Titus story to the same bright sheen as Titus Groan and Gormenghast. There are some individual passages that have a sketched-out or unfinished quality to them. (Who exactly is this village girl that Titus is frolicking with shortly before the book’s climax? What exactly does it mean that Juno’s hallway was “daringly yet carefully… furnished”?) (p. 66)

Still, I can’t imagine that a Mervyn Peake at the height of his intellectual powers would have produced a book much different than the one you’re holding right now. Titus Alone may stand alone, but it stands on its own two feet.

I’m absolutely loathe to do this, considering that I scrupulously try to avoid any hint of self-promotion on my blogs. But I suppose I should mention that this is my second and final year of eligibility for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction or Fantasy Writer.

I should also point out that last year, I missed getting a Campbell nomination by 4 lousy votes. The award ended up going to Naomi Novo something-or-other, who writes these lurid fantasy novels about Loch Ness monsters on the moon, or basilisks on Boot Hill, or something like that. I can’t be bothered to look it up. I heard they sold a few copies.

So this year, in an effort to avoid being screwed once again by Big Hugo, I’m immediately commencing my sinister, take-no-prisoners campaign to get nominated for this year’s Campbell Award. My eligible works are (in order of reverse chronology):

• Infoquake

Okay, so it’s not a very large oeuvre at this point. But it’s a good one. And all you have to do to qualify to vote is be a supporting member of the World Science Fiction Society, which costs $50. (You can sign up for your membership here.)

In order to ensure my victory, here’s what I’m prepared to do. Everyone who emails me photographic proof that they’ve nominated me for the Campbell Award will receive the following:

1. A check for $20,000, plus 20% of all my future writing profits;
2. Ten copies of the deluxe illustrated edition of my upcoming novel MultiReal, personally inscribed and annotated by me;
3. Three nights of raunchy and deviant adventure with a pair of bisexual French runway models or David Beckham (your choice);
4. A lifetime supply of Dinty Moore canned Beef Stew, plus gold-plated can opener;
5. A three-picture deal with Joss Whedon, with guaranteed participation by Jason Lee, Paris Hilton, and Ozzy Osbourne; and
6. My eternal gratitude.*

And what’s the use of having a blog if I can’t pimp my friends who are also eligible for the award? In particular:

• Mary Robinette Kowal is not only the owner of the coolest steampunk laptop in existence, but she’s been building quite a portfolio of short fiction. And she’s, like, way cool.
• Cat Rambo seems to be publishing short fiction everywhere these days, not least of which is a collaboration with Jeff Vandermeer called The Surgeon’s Tale. And she’s also way cool. (Update 1/7/08: Alas, Ms. Rambo informs me that she is not eligible for the Campbell. But she’s still way cool.)

Presumably the frontrunners for the Campbell this year are Patrick Rothfuss (The Name of the Wind) and Scott Lynch (The Lies of Locke Lamora). Although Patrick’s not listed on the Writertopia Eligible Authors page, for some reason. I don’t want to dissuade you from nominating either of these fine gentlemen, even though they’re both wanted in twelve states for peddling narcotics to homeless children. And they were major investors in Michael Vick’s dog fighting ring. And they’re Scientologists. But really, if none of that bothers you, by all means please nominate Patrick Rothfuss and Scott Lynch for the Campbell Award.

Update 1/7/08: Turns out Patrick Rothfuss may not be eligible, according to Bill at Writertopia. See comments on the Livejournal mirror of this article.

March 1, 2008’s the deadline, people. What are you waiting for?

* All prizes subject to availability and/or author’s whims.

The highlights:

• Scott Edelman and I bumped into each other several times and shared a plane flight home. As you can see by the photo on the right, the meeting didn’t go so well. (You can see more of Scott’s photos from WFC 2007 on his Flickr photo set.)
• I had a long, rambling conversation with the inimitable Hal Duncan, beginning as a summary of his next work, continuing on to a discussion about the subtext of the Epic of Gilgamesh, moving on to Joseph Campbell and primitive mythology, and concluding with the psychology of the animal kingdom. Fookin’ great guy, that Hal Duncan.
• Matt Jarpe and I came up with the brilliant idea of Photoshopping authentic photos so they look like they’ve been badly Photoshopped. He’s going to try to track down a photo of him and George R.R. Martin taken the other night, and make it look like he’s Photoshopped himself into it. Personally, I think we may have started a whole new art form, and I can’t wait to get started myself. (Who knows — perhaps Robert Stanek got there ahead of us?)
• I finally met Patrick Nielsen Hayden, one of the editors at Tor! Patrick said that he didn’t recognize me without my hat, and that he reads my LiveJournal, and that he’s amused about how I boldface the important phrases in my blog posts, just like a Spider-Man comic book. (Eat yer heart out, PNH. ‘Nuff said!)
• My reading of chapter 2 from MultiReal went off swimmingly, despite my horribly sore throat and need to sip water every four seconds. Nick Sagan praised my “excellent word choices,” and Paul Cornell continued to call me his “favorite current SF writer” (which hopefully he also repeats when I’m not in the room).
• At the very classy party put on by UK publishers Orbit, I got a chance to meet the fabulous Scott Lynch (he of The Lies of Locke Lamora). I also had plenty of opportunity to act like a big shot and pretend like I know how to promote books online in conversations with Jon Armstrong (whose Grey came out from Night Shade this year), soon-to-be-published author Daryl Gregory, and also soon-to-be-published author David J. Williams.
• Guest of Honor Kim Newman, Paul Cornell, and I had a great time poring over the SFWriter.com newsletter and catching up on all the Robert Sawyer news fit for Robert Sawyer to print.

• Speaking of whom, damn it, Robert Sawyer does appear to be a genuinely nice guy, as I discovered chatting with him at the Tor party. Not only is he very friendly, but he was very generous with his time and advice as well.
• Hung out here and there with my copy editor Deanna Hoak and F&SF Slush God John Joseph Adams (see pic to the right).
• Award winning artist John Picacio gave me lots of sage career advice, and related the story of how he brought Graham Joyce home with him from a World Fantasy Con. (Not for those reasons, you sickos.)
• I had dinner with “the Brits,” including Solaris honchos George Mann and Marc Gascoigne, novelist and telly writer Paul Cornell, and Waterstone’s buyer Michael Rowley. As the only American at the table, they obliged me by talking only about cricket, the BBC, fish ‘n chips, and various types of cloudy and rainy weather. (Michael Rowley also set the record straight by telling me that socialized medicine works just great in the UK, thank you very much, although dentistry is a separate issue and quite problematic. So fuck you, Sean Hannity.)
• Jay Lake signed my copy of his Night Shade novel Trial of Flowers, though exactly what he signed I have no clue.
• I had a good time attending the Shimmer Pirate Issue group reading. Stand-out reading honors went to Marissa Lingen for her story “Pirates, by Adeline Thromb Age 8,” which had everyone in the room spitting out their pirate grog in laughter.
• Have I mentioned Jess Nevins and the 1939 British pulp story about the six-gun gorilla? Okay, I have now. Jess, it turns out, is a terrific guy and one of the coolest people I met all weekend. He also knows more about the old pulps than just about any person alive.

Someone asked me the other day why exactly I write these detailed posts of my con experiences where I name-drop everybody I met. It’s simple. I write them mostly for me, so that I can remember later the names of people I met. Of course, I also hope that they’re entertaining for you, whoever you are reading my blog.

They also handed out large blue duffel bags full of free books at sign-in. Which is a terrific freebie in theory, but none of the books in my bag looked all that fabulous to me on first glance, and it’s going to cause me some headaches lugging this thing to the airport.

Yesterday at WFC, I did actually manage to attend one panel. That panel was “How a Book Cover Is Chosen,” featuring my editor Lou Anders, my buddy John Picacio, the sagacious Irene Gallo, the venerable Tom Kidd, and the seemingly-nice-but-too-soft-spoken-to-actually-hear Jacob Weisman. Lou chose to single me out by asking me to stand up, calling me an “absolute genius,” and proceeding to tell the story behind the recovering of Infoquake to an audience of about 100. (In case you missed them, go check out the new Stephan Martiniere covers for Infoquake and MultiReal.) It was a little embarrassing, but hey, good publicity is good publicity.

I continue to be approached by strangers who loved Infoquake and are eagerly awaiting MultiReal. Someone else knew of me as “the super blogger” and another thanked me for my posts on DeepGenre. Made me feel not quite so sheepish as I felt sitting in the autographing party between my fellow SFNovelist Garth Nix and YA superstar Scott Westerfeld, both of whom had gobs of adoring fans hauling bags full of books for them to sign.

I also saw one of my favorite people on Earth, Nick Sagan, at the signing party, and will hopefully get a chance to hang out with him more. One of my other favorite people on Earth, Mary Robinette Kowal, finally showed up at the party for the Shimmer Pirate Issue (edited by pal John Joseph Adams). Going for the trifecta, yet another of my FPOE Matthew Jarpe was around to hang out with at the parties.

Meanwhile, I continue to enjoy any of the precious minutes I get to hang out with Interzone editor Jetse de Vries. My adoring fans Geri Diorio and Mark Edwards, who hold the distinction of being the first strangers I ever sold a signed copy of Infoquake to, were on hand to say They Knew Me When. And I finally got a chance to meet the legendary Hal Duncan, who was in his element (drunk, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, describing everything in sight with the adjective “fookin’”). Gordon van Gelder, Jeffrey Ford, and Richard Bowes were also on hand for that conversation. Also, John Adams introduced me to Fictionado writer Diana Sherman, and I would be obliged if someone would go shoot her dead before I fall head over heels for her. Just shoot her dead painlessly, please, and don’t tell her I sent you.

And now I head off for another day of schmoozin’ and boozin’ at WFC before I keel over from butter overload.

Yesterday at the World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga Springs, I had drinks with, caught up with, or otherwise hung out with Chris Roberson, Lou Anders, George Mann, John Picacio, Paul Cornell, Deanna Hoak, John Joseph Adams, Douglas Cohen, Allison Baker, David J. Williams, Tom Doyle, and Raani Graff.

I rubbed elbows and said hello briefly to Amy Tibbetts, Beth Delaney, Eugene Myers, Garth Nix, Chris Cevasco, Jay Lake, Elizabeth Bear, Jeremy Lassen, Cat Rambo and her husband Wayne, Christian Sauve, Dennis Danvers, Joy Marchand, Scott Edelman, Cheryl Morgan, Carol Berg, Carol Emshwiller, Ian Randall Strock, Stephen Segal, Andrew Wheeler, Ellen Datlow, Michael Rowley, and Neil Clarke.

And I also met Marc Gascoigne, Diana Pharaoh Francis, Lucienne Diver, Rob Sawyer, Meg Turville-Heitz, Kim Newman, John Klima, Jess Nevins, and at least a dozen other folks whose names I don’t remember.

I was accosted by no fewer than four strangers who wanted to tell me how much they liked Infoquake, and received compliments from at least ten people about the new Stephan Martiniere covers for Infoquake and MultiReal.

I learned that Johnny Depp is very shy in person (from Allison Baker), that John Picacio won an International Horror Guild award for his Cover Story collection, and that Chris Roberson believes he wasted many writing years trying to emulate John Barth and Paul Auster. Lou Anders gave me a synopsis of the entire plot of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Someone took a picture of Scott Edelman strangling me.

Somebody told me that Rob Sawyer was a dick, and someone else told me that Rob Sawyer was a terrific guy. Then I met Rob Sawyer and joined a big group of his for dinner at the pub across the street. So far my impressions of him slant towards the latter, but I was sitting at the other table.

I attended parties for Australians and for Zombies, and wandered through an ice cream social (without actually remembering to get any ice cream).

I attended Tom Doyle’s reading of his Oz story for the third time, and it keeps getting better each time.

And that… was just Day 1. Whew.