(1) IN THE BEGINNING. Philip Athans asks everyone, “Don’t Be Hatin’ On Prologues (Again)” at Fantasy Author’s Handbook.
… Anyway, once again we’re being told that all prologues are bad, no books should ever have a prologue, and all authors who write prologues are bad, and anyway, it’s best to just skip over them if one should have the nerve to appear….
…Let’s take this monumental misconception in two parts. First, the notion that prologues are optional and no one reads them.
As both an editor and a reader I have never in my life skipped a prologue or in any way went in thinking it was not necessary to the story. Not one time, not ever. This notion is so alien to me I can’t even begin to understand the origin of it.
Richard Lee Byers, author of Called to Darkness and The Reaver (neither of which happen to have prologues) tried to help: “…the assumption is that the prologue is an info dump. Beyond that, even if it’s exciting in its own right, there’s a feeling that if Chapter 1 switches to different characters or is Ten Years Later, you’ve thrown away whatever narrative momentum you might have built up.”
There should never be an assumption that a prologue is an info dump, because prologues should never be info dumps—not ever, not under any circumstances. And yes, even if your world is really complex and you’ve spent years worldbuilding and you’re sure no one will understand your story unless you “set the scene” or teach them all about your amazing world, and all that nonsense. If this is what your prologue is doing, that’s why your book is being rejected, not because it has a prologue, but because it has a crappy prologue….
(3) HISTORY AND MORAL PHILOSOPHY. Canadian sff author D.G. Valdron writes about “Moral Compromise and the Lesson of the Hugos” on Medium.
… Well, the Hugos Scandal isn’t the battle for Civil Rights. But the sort of moral compromise and coercion that King criticized is on display here, and it’s frightening how unnecessary it was, how shallow virtue turned out to be.
How do we really act, how do we really think or behave, how virtuous are we if we are genuinely tested, if there’s a real push. How often have you bowed your head and simply gone along to get along.
And how brave will you be when there are real consequences? When taking a stand actually can get you arrested, or get you fired from your job, or get you beaten up? How principled are you, when there’s money involved, either to lose or to gain? When principles mean some form of inconvenience? When principles mean going against the crowd?
Sadly, I think that most of us won’t be. We’ll be just like the Hugo folk….
(4) THE FIRST. “’No one had done it before him’: the groundbreaking stories of Black astronauts” – the Guardian discusses the documentary film The Space Race.
…Glover describes the tension of code switching between his professional and personal lives. He is a military officer and Nasa astronaut – he will pilot the upcoming Artemis II mission that will orbit the moon – but also a Black man in America. “Is it really possible to have a double consciousness? No, but you almost have to think of it that way: there’s a bit of me that I am at home and then there’s a bit of me that I am at work, and the overlap is kind of small.”…
(5) STEVE MILLER (1950-2024). Sff author Steve Miller died this afternoon. His wife and co-author Sharon Lee told Facebook readers:
He went downstairs to take a walk at about 4:30. At about 5:30, I thought he’d been awhile and went downstairs to see what was going on.
He was on the floor, unconscious, and not breathing. I called 911, and did CPR until the ambulance and EMTs arrived. They did everything they could, but his heart just wouldn’t beat on its own.
Miller’s health had been failing; he recently wrote his own obituary, which Sharon Lee has allowed File 770 to post (see “Steven Richard Miller (July 31, 1950 – February 20, 2024)”.)
Steve and Sharon Lee declared themselves partners in life and in writing in 1978. They married in November 1980, and moved from Maryland to Skowhegan, Maine, in October 1988 after the publication of their first joint novel, Agent of Change, the first in what was to become a long series of space opera novels and stories set in their original Liaden Universe®. A book in that series, Scout’s Progress, won the 2002 Romantic Times Book Club Reviewers Choice Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.
Steve was an active member of fandom in earlier years, as Director of Information of the Baltimore Science Fiction Society for some time, and as vice-chair of the bid committee to hold the 1980 Worldcon in Baltimore (they lost to Boston).
The SF Encyclopedia says Steve began publishing work of genre interest with “Shalgiel” for Flux Magazine in 1976, one of his few solo works. He began collaborating with Sharon with “The Naming of Kinzel: The Foolish” (June 1984 Fantasy Book); and all his novels have been with Lee, primarily the Liaden Universe® sequence.
Steve ran his own small press from 1995 through 2012, specializing in chapbooks containing 2-3 short stories set in the Liaden Universe® and other settings from books by him, Sharon Lee and other authors.
For awhile Steve and Sharon ran Bookcastle & Dreamsgarth, Inc., a genre bookstore with a traveling convention SF art agency component.
Steve and Sharon were honored together in 2012 with NESFA’s Skylark Award, given for contributions to SF in the spirit of E.E. “Doc” Smith.
(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born February 20, 1926 — Richard Matheson. (Died 2013.) Now we come to Richard Matheson. So where shall I start? From a genre viewpoint, we should start with the Hugo he would share at Solacon for The Incredible Shrinking Man, directed by Jack Arnold from Matheson’s screenplay based off his novel.
What next? Well The Twilight Zone, of course. He scripted thirteen episodes of which “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” with William Shatner is certainly the best-known. I’d also single out “Little Girl Lost” for just being out really, really scary, again it’s based off a story of his. Also, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” became part of the Twilight Zone film.
Oh, sweet mother, he was prolific! I mean really, really prolific. Just cinema films alone totaled up to at least twenty-eight: television work adds another thirty-four. So no, I’m not covering these in detail, am I?
Matheson’s famous novel I Am Legend was made into three movies – but he wondered in an interview why it kept being optioned when no one ever made a movie that actually followed the book. He hated The Last Man on Earth, so he’s credited as Logan Swanson instead. It got made twice more, as The Omega Man, and much later as I Am Legend with Will Smith.
Now where was I? (The phone rang from a medical office. Lots of those these days.) Ahhh, series work.
The Night Stalker was his greatest success. The Night Stalker first aired in January 1972, and garnered the highest ratings of any television movie at that time. Matheson would receive an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for Best TV Feature or Miniseries Teleplay.
He scripted but a single episode of The Girl from U.N.C.L.E., “The Atlantis Affair” and none of the other U.N.C.L.E. series.
He did “The Enemy Within” episode of the Trek series, not one that I consider to be all that great.
Remember in the Jack Palance Birthday I mentioned Dracula, also known as Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Dan Curtis’ Dracula? Well guess who the scriptwriter was for it?
He’s the scriptwriter of The Martian Chronicles, the good, the bad whatever of that series. Seen it at least three times, still love the original version much more.
He was involved in Twilight Zone: Rod Serling’s Lost Classics. The first and much shorter segment, The Theatre, was expanded and scripted by him from a Serling outline.
Now his fiction.
Thirty novels which with the exception of the ones of the ones I’ve already noted and The Shrinking Man and The Night Stalker novels, I recognized absolutely nothing. What I found fascinating is that half of the nearly thirty novels had become films. Nearly all with him writing the scripts for them.
Short stories. Oh yes. And as I’ve mentioned previously, many of them were adapted by him into scripts for such series as The Twilight Zone. He’s got literally dozens of collections but not being one who’s read him deeply, I cannot recommend what ones are the best to acquire.
(7) COMICS SECTION.
- Mannequin on the Moon makes a grotesque joke about early book bans.
- Nancy has a new take on a classic.
- Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal adds to the Three Laws – Lise Andreasen says, “I think you’ll find no. 4 is Wil Wheaton’s law.”
- Frank and Ernest make a dumb pun, but not too dumb to link to.
(8) HOW EDUCATIONAL! The New York Times declares, “It’s Alive! EC Comics Returns”.
EC Comics, which specialized in tales of horror, crime and suspense, and was shut down in the “moral panic” of the 1950s, is making a comeback.
Oni Press will publish two new anthology series under the EC Comics banner. The first, Epitaphs From the Abyss, coming in July, will be horror focused; Cruel Universe, the second, arrives in August and will tell science fiction stories.
Hunter Gorinson, the president and publisher of Oni Press, said the new stories will interpret the world of today, much as EC Comics explored the American psyche of the 1950s. The cover designs will feel familiar to EC Comics fans: Running down the top left is a label declaring the type of story — “Terror” or “Horror” or “Science-Fiction” — and the logo evokes the bold colors and fonts of past series like “Tales From the Crypt” and “The Vault of Horror.”
The series are a partnership between Oni and the family of William M. Gaines, the original publisher of EC Comics, who died in 1992. Gary Groth, the editor of The Comics Journal, told The New York Times in 2013 that EC Comics was “arguably the best commercial comics company in the history of the medium.”….
(9) IT’S A JUNGLE OUT THERE. “I Went to Hogwarts for Seven Years and Did Not Learn Math or Spelling, and Now I Can’t Get a Job” is a 2020 humor piece from The New Yorker.
Dear Headmaster McGonagall:
I am a recent Hogwarts graduate, and, although my time with you was a literal fantasy, I unfortunately did not learn a lot of basic skills, like math or spelling, at your skool.You may say, “Why do you need arithmetic? You’re a wizard. You can do magic!” To which I reply, sure, for some wizard careers that’s great, but other wizards work in middle management and just want a normal nine-to-five gig. When I graduated, I thought that all I would need was my wand and a couple of choice incantations, but these days, without at least a little algebra, you’re not even qualified to work in Bertie Bott’s retail department…
(10) ARTIFICIAL SURE, INTELLIGENT? MAYBE. Not including any copies of the images was an easy choice: “The rat with the big balls and the enormous penis – how Frontiers published a paper with botched AI-generated images” at Science Integrity Digest.
… The authors disclose that the figures were generated by Midjourney, but the images are – ahem – anatomically and scientifically incorrect.
Figure 1 features an illustration of a rat, sitting up like a squirrel, with four enormous testicles and a giant … penis? The figure includes indecipherable labels like ‘testtomcels‘, ‘senctolic‘, ‘dissilced‘, ‘iollotte sserotgomar‘ and ‘diƨlocttal stem ells’. At least the word ‘rat‘ is correct.
One of the insets shows a ‘retat‘, with some ‘sterrn cells‘ in a Petri dish with a serving spoon. Enjoy!…
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Kathy Sullivan, Daniel Dern, Lis Carey, Lise Andreasen, Michael J. “Orange Mike” Lowrey, John A Arkansawyer, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Steven French for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
Discover more from File 770
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
The Scroll Has Sailed.
ETA: First to Sail apparently.
(1) Yes. I’ve never skipped a prologue. But they have to be written the way you’re going to continue.
(4) And, very seriously, a toast to him. I really want to wave from the shore as they leave…
(10) Would you trust Clippy to do it? Or a spellczeker? They’re NOT AI.
(1) People have been going bonkers over the prologue discussion on Twitter. Some people even got upset because they were told not to skip prologues. Like, “How dare you tell me how to interact with books.”
“Okaaay.” backs away slowly
I’ve come across prologues that were unneeded (and even dull now and then). But I’ve come across more prologues that were great and necessary. So there! 🙂
(5) I uploaded my Liaden eBooks to my Kindle. (I don’t know why they weren’t already there…)
(6) Such a hugely influential author (and scriptwriter)!
(7) That was a great gathering today. (OK, they always are a great gathering, but I thought I’d mention it.)
(8) I hope the new EC comics turn out great. There have been modern tributes to pre-code horror, and they often don’t capture what made them interesting to begin with. I am psyched that they are also doing EC science fiction stories as well. (They had some stunning SFF tales.)
@Anne Marble I’ve come across entire chapters in the middle of books, and occasionally entire books in the middle of series, that were unneeded. On the whole I don’t think prologues have a worse batting average than any other section of prose.
(5) Steve’s death is a real loss. I don’t think I have anything more to say right now. Going to read, instead.
I’m fond of Matheson’s book, “Bid Time Return” which was filmed as “Somewhere in Time” I’d seen the movie and then tracked down the novel and it was as good as the movie. There were some small changes made but I could understand why they were made and they didn’t change the characters or the story at all.
6 – This day it had scandal. So much scandal. I watched it from my little scroll in the basement. Everyone hated it but they wouldn’t stop. Blaming someone who been yellow and had a cart. And a lot of people named hugo. I wonder who they are, the hugos.
1) Tolkien had prologues for “The Hobbit” and the trilogy. James Hilton had a prologue for “Lost Horizon.” There are many, many others, if you care to look.
3) Moral philosophy? Some have no morals, and philosophy, being a polysyllabic word, is beyond soooooo many. I had an ongoing discussion on religionnews.com with a person who insisted that I must have a strange view of the definition of “hate” and of religion. I pointed out to him the following selections, which shut him down:
“Love thy neighbor thyself.”
“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
and last, but not least:
“What you do to ‘the least of your brothers, so you do to me.”
I asked, who are the least of your brothers, but the very people you’re discriminating against.
Principles are something you stand by. I just finished “Diary of the Dark Years, 1940-1944,” by Jean Guehenno. It’s a professor”s diary during the Occupation in France. It’s required reading in French schools, and is now out in English translation. He kept it hidden, and wrote about having to live under the Occupation. He came out, not unscathed by the experience, but stronger. It is, in some ways, heroic. I highly recommend it.
There IS a reason I opted not to attend the Chinese Worldcon. It wasn’t just the cost of travel or hotels. I figured there’d be some censorship, some political shenanigans, and some backlash. I was not disappointed.
(6) I listened to the audiobook of a Richard Matheson novel a few months back.
“Shadow on the Sun.”
It starts out as a fairly straightforward western (and I gather Matheson wrote several western paperbacks)… and then a creature from Native American mythology shows up and starts doing people in. BOOM!
So it’s horror-western from ’94, which I want to say is before such things were particularly common outside of Lansdale?
And yes, it’s good. But it’s also just odd because it’s TOTALLY a western and then there’s this demonic thing walking around. But, that’s the beauty of Matheson, too.
Jim Janney says quite puzzingly 6 – This day it had scandal. So much scandal. I watched it from my little scroll in the basement. Everyone hated it but they wouldn’t stop. Blaming someone who been yellow and had a cart. And a lot of people named hugo. I wonder who they are, the hugos.
What does this have to with the Birthday?
@Cat Eldridge – it’s a reference to what I thought was Matheson’s most famous short story, “Born of Man and Woman”. Which I now see was also his first professional sale. If you’re looking for story collection recommendations, any one that includes that story is a good start.
(1) Prologues are neither intrinsically good nor bad. It comes down to how well-written they are.
(I find myself having less & less time for prescriptivists.)
Born of scroll and pixel?
@Anne Marble:
I’ve even come across prologues which no longer exist, like Neil Gaiman’s lost prologue to Neverwhere, which seemed to disappear after we heard him read it at Dragon*Con but before the book was published.
Though maybe it has been restored in his newer “Author’s Preferred Edition” releases?
Carefully, and not without some trepidation, the man considered the merits of adding a comment to the on going discourse. Did he really have anything to add to the discussion and if not, should his comment just be some weak metatextual joke about the topic? Reluctantly, he began to type
I think prologues are fine actually.
Ray Radlein: “Author’s Preferred Text” of Neverwhere opens (after Dedication and Epigraph) with explanatory Introduction to This Text, then about two pages of Prologue (“The night before he went to London, Richard Mayhew was not enjoying himself.” to “His mother gave him a small walnut cake that she had made for the journey and a thermos flask filled with tea; and Richard Mayhew went to London feeling like hell.”) and then chapter 1 (“She had been running for four days now, a harum-scarum tumbling flight through passages and tunnels.”)
But then (warning: I am not a gaimanology expert, nor did have the time to research fully, which turns out less trivial than I thought) the original UK edition contained this apparently too, followed by Another Prologue – Four hundred years earlier (“It was the middle of the sixteenth century, and it was raining in Tuscany”), of which the Introduction says
“My editor at Avon Books […] wanted the second prologue gone, too, in which we got to meet Croup and Vandermar for the first time, before the story began, and, although I missed it, I decided that she was right, and moved the description of them into the text. (It’s reprinted here, at the back, in its original form, for the curious.)”
Another disappearing prologue is the one for Bester’s “The Demolished Man” which appeared in the original magazine publication of the novel but not in any later publication.
(1) This tweet is a fun summary of the the prologue “controversy.”
9) I kept trying to rationalize in my head that the students must be learning regular subjects too, but finally gave it up and realized they weren’t.
Although being a mundane teacher teaching a mundane subject at a school for wizards (or say, X-men) would be a fascinating character study. Has anyone tackled THAT?
Hoiw many parts of this scrolls are from the original?
A mundane teacher teaching a mundane subject at Hogwarts wouldn’t just be a character study, it has a lot of plot possibilities.
@Anne Marble:
I’m certainly no expert, but I had the impression that a great deal of what made the pre-Code horror comics so intense and meaningful was that they were written by recent war veterans with PTSD, similar to how the noir genre came out of the experiences of traumatized WWI veterans with PTSD.
@ Paul Weimer:
Tried it once, but the transposition of matter left quite a mess. In fact, I believe it’s a superfund site at the moment! Science, indeed! Why are they teaching pseudoscience now?
Math, passable, English, YES! Social Studies, muddled (outside research required for most historical events), but I could never understand why English was so hard for some, until I learned French!
(8) There’s been an awful lot of horror comics over the years (not so much in the western mainstream, but plenty of manga, small press, and webcomics), and I’ve got to wonder if this new EC thing is going to be in any kind of conversation with that or if it’s just going to be focused on the originals.
1a) If you don’t like prologues, simply put an antilogue with an equal number of words at the end of the work and let the word-antiword annihilation fix the problem. Bonus points if you can use this as a carbon free energy source. If you can, then we should demand that all works have prologues.
1a-bar) Best Prologue Hugo when?
@Peace Is My Middle Name
I’ve never seen anything beyond speculation that any of the noir or EC writers had PTSD. Do you know of anything further to support this? (Chandler, Hammett, and Cain did serve in WW1; many of the EC writers did serve in WW2. I’ve just never seen any indication that any of them actually had PTSD)
And bill says I’m certainly no expert, but I had the impression that a great deal of what made the pre-Code horror comics so intense and meaningful was that they were written by recent war veterans with PTSD, similar to how the noir genre came out of the experiences of traumatized WWI veterans with PTSD.
Larry Niven once said, and this is only a paraphrase so I’m hoping someone can find the exact words, that people are idiots that think what writers put down in their fiction reflects who they are.
BTW, it wasn’t just EC’s horror comics that were good — they were good across the board — SF, war stories, crime fiction, satire, fantasy, etc.
I think at least as good an explanation was that they had good writers who worked in a supportive environment. Publisher Gaines and editors Feldstein, Kurtzman, etc. all wanted to make good comic books.
@Jan Vanek, jr
Yes, that was the missing prologue I was thinking of! Quite liked the introduction to Croup and Vandermar.
Gaiman’s narration of Neverwhere is a most stellar listening experience. And yes, it’s the author’s preferred text with everything here that’s cut out of other editions.
Don’t get me wrong — I cherish the BBC full cast performance as well, but that’s a difference experience altogether.
@Cat — you attribute to me a quote from Peace Is My Middle Name, and then seem to be calling me/Peace an idiot? Am I reading that right?
Regardless, I don’t think Peace was inferring things about the writers from the stories, but was saying that the stories were influenced by the writers’ experiences. Which would seem to be a fairly mainstream position to hold.
In contrast to what Niven said, Robert Shea (the co-author of Illuminatus!) was once asked why he had written so many characters who fathers had died when the character was a small boy. Shea said he hadn’t noticed the pattern, but that it was probably because his own father had died when Shea was too young to remember them.
I agree that it would be unreasonable to assume that the author of a novel agrees with what the viewpoint character said. But if someone keeps writing about the same thing, there’s probably a reason, and it’s not always because that’s what sells best, or sells at all.
@Vicki; Niven’s statement was about characters’s opinions, as you suspected. It goes like this:
9) That explains why the banks are run by goblins I suppose, they can do math.
I’d love to see some brave writer start their book with the heading “Prologue”, and then not have any other chapter headings or breaks anywhere. Just to mess with the minds of the prologue-skippers!
Now I have to wonder: do we also have a weird cult out there that skips epilogues? Or is it just prologues? (I wonder if some of these people have “prologue” mixed up with “foreword”. I can understand skipping a foreword.)
Forgot to tick the box (in case it still matters at this late date).
I usually skip forewords, then come back after I’ve read the book. Like to form my own impressions first.