George R.R. Martin is not my bitch
Not that I, or anyone else, ever claimed otherwise...
Daniel Keys Moran's latest comment threads point me to this driveling idiocy, which, given the source, surprises me not at all with either of those two qualities. In that first mentioned comment thread, I respond thusly:
As for entitlement issues, and Neil Gaiman:
It's interesting that Gaiman opens that essay complaining because American Airlines won't provide him with what he considers to be a necessary tool to facilitate his writing while on one of their flights, at a price he thinks is reasonable. American Airlines provides him with a service (getting him from point A to point B within an acceptable time frame) for a price he's willing to pay. Gaiman seems to feel there's a contract between him and AA, that they will also, for the price of his ticket, facilitate his word processing while he's in their care, just like, apparently, all the other airlines he normally flies with do. But, as he points out later on in an entirely different context, the contract doesn't exist. His sense that they should give him this thing that he wants cheaply, that is not part of the service they render, is, er, hm, what should we call it... oh, yeah... an 'entitlement issue'.
Then he goes on to say this, in re: the astonishingly lazy George R.R. Martin:
You're complaining about George doing other things than writing the books you want to read as if your buying the first book in the series was a contract with him: that you would pay over your ten dollars, and George for his part would spend every waking hour until the series was done, writing the rest of the books for you.
No such contract existed. You were paying your ten dollars for the book you were reading, and I assume that you enjoyed it because you want to know what happens next.
Yeah. We want to know what happens next. And the author isn't telling us. Know what he's doing instead? He's taking the money we've paid him to tell us this story and he's spending it doing pretty much every other thing in the world except what we're paying him to do, which is, finish the story.
There is a contract. When you pay your money to the storyteller in the marketplace, the contract is, he tells you a story. Now, I'm willing to accept that when I toss a shekel in his upturned turban, maybe I won't LIKE the story, but unless the motherfucker dies before he chokes out the ending, at the very least, I believe that the implicit contract betwixt him and me that came into existence when he said "I'll tell you a story for a shekel, my good man" and I said, "Very well, here is your shekel, prate onward, o scribe", encompasses him telling me the ENTIRE story. Not just half or two thirds of it, at which point, he'll decide it's much much more important for him to watch a Giants' game, or go off to some storyteller's convention where people will kiss his ass for a week or so, or head back into his hotel, where he can sign a lot of merchandising and film contracts regarding the half or 2/3s of a story I've paid him to tell me and that he hasn't finished yet.
I'm not paying for a book, I'm paying for a STORY. He hasn't finished the story yet. And sure, if it's a long story he's entitled to breaks and meal time and some rest & recreation, but when I keep coming back to the marketplace looking for him to pick up where he left off and he's still over by the fountain under an awning watching the Punch & Judy show while good looking matched Swedish twins put butter on his toes, and it's pretty obvious that the operators of the Punch and Judy show and the good looking Swedish twins are both being sponsored by my shekel, I'm going to start feeling a little bit put upon, a little bit aggravated, a little bit as if someone is failing to live up to their end of the unstated contract.
But there is a contract, and the contract is this: You start a story, you finish it, and if you're having trouble finishing it, you at least show that you're making an effort to do so, that your contract with me is a priority for you, that it matters, that it's important.
You want to break that story down into increments and charge me for each increment, that's fine, but I want to see that you're making progress. I want to see good faith. And if I don't, I'm going to scream my head off about it, and why? Because that's really all I can do. If the storyteller is indeed so feckless and faithless that, while continuing to take my shekels through all his merchandising contracts and such, he still puts every other thing in his life ahead of continuing to tell me the story I'm paying for, well, there's not much I can do, except scream my head off, which I'm going to do.
This is one of those things where you're either a paying audience member or a story teller. If you're one, you simply have no sympathy for the POV of the other. I can understand this, vaguely; there are only six people in the world who have read my first novel UNIVERSAL MAINTENANCE, but I regularly hear from all six of them, wondering when I'm going to write the sequel. And I tell them all the same thing: when someone wants to pay me a realistic amount of money to set aside a year or so of my finite lifespan to turn out that sequel, I'll write it. Which I think is fair.
George R.R. Martin has been fairly compensated for not only the entire projected SONG OF ICE AND FIRE series, but, most likely, at this point, for every single other thing he's ever written in his life, and, most likely, he's been compensated at a pretty high rate for every football game he's ever going to watch again before he dies, too.... all of it, out of the coin that has been generated by A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE... a story that he has, as yet, to finish. The contract is for the story, not the increments of the story. If he can't finish it, he can at least keep working on it. He can show us it's a priority for him.
Or he can start issuing refund checks.
And if he can't do that, or he chooses not to do that, then, at the very least, while he's living in the million dollar home the Ice and Fire fans bought for him, watching football on the big screen high density TV the Ice and Fire fans bought for him, jetting to various exotic foreign lands using tickets that his Ice and Fire fans bought for him, and staying at hotels that his Ice and Fire fans are paying for, and going to cons to receive the adulation of his Ice and Fire fans, when we ask him "say, George, when's the next Ice and Fire book coming out", he could not whine and shriek and stamp his feet and wave his arms and cry like a giant fucking grey haired baby and call all of us names because, you know, we've given him millions of dollars for this story and he doesn't even want to bother pretending he's actually working on finishing it.
There is a contract. There is. I'm sorry if other authors of serial fiction out there take all this personally and find it all very inconvenient, but there is. And it's not for the book, it's for the story. You start a story, you need to at least make a pretty game attempt at finishing it. George R.R. Martin not only wants to cop out on his contract, but he also demands universal respect, admiration, and adulation from his fans while he takes our money with one hand and flips us off with the other.
Beyond all that, let me say this: Nobody, not one single Ice and Fire fan, has ever assumed that George R.R. Martin is our bitch. That's a straw man, and an egregiously dishonest, ludicrously stupid one, at that. We just think George R.R. Martin undertook to tell us a story, and he's fucking off, on our dime. And it pisses us off.
Or at least, it pisses me off.
Here endeth the lesson.
It's not exactly succinct, and given that nobody reads this blog any more, it's not going to inspire any fawning sycophant to record a catchy little You Tube ditty, but, still, I think it's much more cogent than the entirely self serving nonsense it refutes.
* * *
Brief recap, for those who aren't sf/fantasy geeks like me: George R.R. Martin is a prolific author of fantasy and science fiction who, until 1996, had enjoyed only middling success in the genre, having had many books published over the course of the previous decades, most of which were pretty good, but none brilliant, and all of which were out of print by '96, when A GAME OF THRONES came out and became an instant bestselling fantasy classic.
A GAME OF THRONES, alas, was merely the first in a projected trilogy. However, the next book, A CLASH OF KINGS, came out in 1998, and these are big books, so two years was about right. And the book after that, A STORM OF SWORDS, came out in 2000.
However, by this time the story had gotten out of control, with Martin adding dozens of new characters and plotlines with each subsequent volume, and the projected trilogy had grown from three books to four, then to five, then to six. But, still, if he could keep kicking them out every two years, and they maintained the same quality as the first three, well, okay, so we'd all have to wait another six years to get the complete series, but it would be worth it.
Then 5 years went by, and people started to get antsy, wondering when the next projected book, A DANCE WITH DRAGONS, would come out, and Martin became increasingly more harried and less courteous with each such inquiry, until finally he was banning people from his blog comments threads and cursing them out in the blog itself for even having the temerity to ask. And in 2005, we got a new book, and it was called a A FEAST FOR CROWS, and it was half of the promised A DANCE WITH DRAGONS... Martin hadn't been able to finish it, but the volume had grown uncontrollably anyway, so he divided the next installment in two and published the first half, while the volume with all the really cool characters that everyone was really interested in anyway has yet to appear.
Martin's fans were not pleased with this at the time, and we have grown more vociferous in our displeasure in the subsequent four years, as Martin has grown surlier and more truculent and more exasperated and the eventual completion of A DANCE WITH DRAGONS seems to recede further and further beyond the event horizon with each passing day.
And so a controversy has grown up, with a loud contingent of Ice and Fire fans feeling that Martin is not holding up his end of some nebulous 'deal' or compact between him and his audience, while another faction, whom I shall refer to most of the time as 'the asskissers', continues to reassure poor Mr. Martin that they will continue to be patient, they still love him, they eagerly await the next book but nonetheless he can take all the time he wants, they'll wait.
This last faction is supported and embraced by every other professional author in the world, apparently, all of whom seem to feel it would be a bad idea to allow fans to feel like they are entitled to any kind of consideration at all from those whose works and lifestyles said fans support, regardless of circumstance.
So that's why I wrote the above essay.
And it's here because I don't get much time to write these days, it's some of my better writing, I'm sure that out there among the political junkies (like me) there are at least a few sf/fantasy geeks who might be interested, and a lot more people read my work here than do on my blogspot page.
Okay?
Daniel Keys Moran's latest comment threads point me to this driveling idiocy, which, given the source, surprises me not at all with either of those two qualities. In that first mentioned comment thread, I respond thusly:
As for entitlement issues, and Neil Gaiman:
It's interesting that Gaiman opens that essay complaining because American Airlines won't provide him with what he considers to be a necessary tool to facilitate his writing while on one of their flights, at a price he thinks is reasonable. American Airlines provides him with a service (getting him from point A to point B within an acceptable time frame) for a price he's willing to pay. Gaiman seems to feel there's a contract between him and AA, that they will also, for the price of his ticket, facilitate his word processing while he's in their care, just like, apparently, all the other airlines he normally flies with do. But, as he points out later on in an entirely different context, the contract doesn't exist. His sense that they should give him this thing that he wants cheaply, that is not part of the service they render, is, er, hm, what should we call it... oh, yeah... an 'entitlement issue'.
Then he goes on to say this, in re: the astonishingly lazy George R.R. Martin:
You're complaining about George doing other things than writing the books you want to read as if your buying the first book in the series was a contract with him: that you would pay over your ten dollars, and George for his part would spend every waking hour until the series was done, writing the rest of the books for you.
No such contract existed. You were paying your ten dollars for the book you were reading, and I assume that you enjoyed it because you want to know what happens next.
Yeah. We want to know what happens next. And the author isn't telling us. Know what he's doing instead? He's taking the money we've paid him to tell us this story and he's spending it doing pretty much every other thing in the world except what we're paying him to do, which is, finish the story.
There is a contract. When you pay your money to the storyteller in the marketplace, the contract is, he tells you a story. Now, I'm willing to accept that when I toss a shekel in his upturned turban, maybe I won't LIKE the story, but unless the motherfucker dies before he chokes out the ending, at the very least, I believe that the implicit contract betwixt him and me that came into existence when he said "I'll tell you a story for a shekel, my good man" and I said, "Very well, here is your shekel, prate onward, o scribe", encompasses him telling me the ENTIRE story. Not just half or two thirds of it, at which point, he'll decide it's much much more important for him to watch a Giants' game, or go off to some storyteller's convention where people will kiss his ass for a week or so, or head back into his hotel, where he can sign a lot of merchandising and film contracts regarding the half or 2/3s of a story I've paid him to tell me and that he hasn't finished yet.
I'm not paying for a book, I'm paying for a STORY. He hasn't finished the story yet. And sure, if it's a long story he's entitled to breaks and meal time and some rest & recreation, but when I keep coming back to the marketplace looking for him to pick up where he left off and he's still over by the fountain under an awning watching the Punch & Judy show while good looking matched Swedish twins put butter on his toes, and it's pretty obvious that the operators of the Punch and Judy show and the good looking Swedish twins are both being sponsored by my shekel, I'm going to start feeling a little bit put upon, a little bit aggravated, a little bit as if someone is failing to live up to their end of the unstated contract.
But there is a contract, and the contract is this: You start a story, you finish it, and if you're having trouble finishing it, you at least show that you're making an effort to do so, that your contract with me is a priority for you, that it matters, that it's important.
You want to break that story down into increments and charge me for each increment, that's fine, but I want to see that you're making progress. I want to see good faith. And if I don't, I'm going to scream my head off about it, and why? Because that's really all I can do. If the storyteller is indeed so feckless and faithless that, while continuing to take my shekels through all his merchandising contracts and such, he still puts every other thing in his life ahead of continuing to tell me the story I'm paying for, well, there's not much I can do, except scream my head off, which I'm going to do.
This is one of those things where you're either a paying audience member or a story teller. If you're one, you simply have no sympathy for the POV of the other. I can understand this, vaguely; there are only six people in the world who have read my first novel UNIVERSAL MAINTENANCE, but I regularly hear from all six of them, wondering when I'm going to write the sequel. And I tell them all the same thing: when someone wants to pay me a realistic amount of money to set aside a year or so of my finite lifespan to turn out that sequel, I'll write it. Which I think is fair.
George R.R. Martin has been fairly compensated for not only the entire projected SONG OF ICE AND FIRE series, but, most likely, at this point, for every single other thing he's ever written in his life, and, most likely, he's been compensated at a pretty high rate for every football game he's ever going to watch again before he dies, too.... all of it, out of the coin that has been generated by A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE... a story that he has, as yet, to finish. The contract is for the story, not the increments of the story. If he can't finish it, he can at least keep working on it. He can show us it's a priority for him.
Or he can start issuing refund checks.
And if he can't do that, or he chooses not to do that, then, at the very least, while he's living in the million dollar home the Ice and Fire fans bought for him, watching football on the big screen high density TV the Ice and Fire fans bought for him, jetting to various exotic foreign lands using tickets that his Ice and Fire fans bought for him, and staying at hotels that his Ice and Fire fans are paying for, and going to cons to receive the adulation of his Ice and Fire fans, when we ask him "say, George, when's the next Ice and Fire book coming out", he could not whine and shriek and stamp his feet and wave his arms and cry like a giant fucking grey haired baby and call all of us names because, you know, we've given him millions of dollars for this story and he doesn't even want to bother pretending he's actually working on finishing it.
There is a contract. There is. I'm sorry if other authors of serial fiction out there take all this personally and find it all very inconvenient, but there is. And it's not for the book, it's for the story. You start a story, you need to at least make a pretty game attempt at finishing it. George R.R. Martin not only wants to cop out on his contract, but he also demands universal respect, admiration, and adulation from his fans while he takes our money with one hand and flips us off with the other.
Beyond all that, let me say this: Nobody, not one single Ice and Fire fan, has ever assumed that George R.R. Martin is our bitch. That's a straw man, and an egregiously dishonest, ludicrously stupid one, at that. We just think George R.R. Martin undertook to tell us a story, and he's fucking off, on our dime. And it pisses us off.
Or at least, it pisses me off.
Here endeth the lesson.
It's not exactly succinct, and given that nobody reads this blog any more, it's not going to inspire any fawning sycophant to record a catchy little You Tube ditty, but, still, I think it's much more cogent than the entirely self serving nonsense it refutes.
* * *
Brief recap, for those who aren't sf/fantasy geeks like me: George R.R. Martin is a prolific author of fantasy and science fiction who, until 1996, had enjoyed only middling success in the genre, having had many books published over the course of the previous decades, most of which were pretty good, but none brilliant, and all of which were out of print by '96, when A GAME OF THRONES came out and became an instant bestselling fantasy classic.
A GAME OF THRONES, alas, was merely the first in a projected trilogy. However, the next book, A CLASH OF KINGS, came out in 1998, and these are big books, so two years was about right. And the book after that, A STORM OF SWORDS, came out in 2000.
However, by this time the story had gotten out of control, with Martin adding dozens of new characters and plotlines with each subsequent volume, and the projected trilogy had grown from three books to four, then to five, then to six. But, still, if he could keep kicking them out every two years, and they maintained the same quality as the first three, well, okay, so we'd all have to wait another six years to get the complete series, but it would be worth it.
Then 5 years went by, and people started to get antsy, wondering when the next projected book, A DANCE WITH DRAGONS, would come out, and Martin became increasingly more harried and less courteous with each such inquiry, until finally he was banning people from his blog comments threads and cursing them out in the blog itself for even having the temerity to ask. And in 2005, we got a new book, and it was called a A FEAST FOR CROWS, and it was half of the promised A DANCE WITH DRAGONS... Martin hadn't been able to finish it, but the volume had grown uncontrollably anyway, so he divided the next installment in two and published the first half, while the volume with all the really cool characters that everyone was really interested in anyway has yet to appear.
Martin's fans were not pleased with this at the time, and we have grown more vociferous in our displeasure in the subsequent four years, as Martin has grown surlier and more truculent and more exasperated and the eventual completion of A DANCE WITH DRAGONS seems to recede further and further beyond the event horizon with each passing day.
And so a controversy has grown up, with a loud contingent of Ice and Fire fans feeling that Martin is not holding up his end of some nebulous 'deal' or compact between him and his audience, while another faction, whom I shall refer to most of the time as 'the asskissers', continues to reassure poor Mr. Martin that they will continue to be patient, they still love him, they eagerly await the next book but nonetheless he can take all the time he wants, they'll wait.
This last faction is supported and embraced by every other professional author in the world, apparently, all of whom seem to feel it would be a bad idea to allow fans to feel like they are entitled to any kind of consideration at all from those whose works and lifestyles said fans support, regardless of circumstance.
So that's why I wrote the above essay.
And it's here because I don't get much time to write these days, it's some of my better writing, I'm sure that out there among the political junkies (like me) there are at least a few sf/fantasy geeks who might be interested, and a lot more people read my work here than do on my blogspot page.
Okay?
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As a professional author in the genre, I have to agree with most of what you say. If it's labeled a series, a contract with the reader is implied, especially if the first few books leave the story unfinished.
However, I must say you're taking this shit way too seriously. So what if he never finishes the story? You're out a few bucks, I sympathize, but the price is not that much more (if that) than what you would throw away taking a date to a shitty movie. If Mr. Martin pisses you off that seriously, put your thumb on your nose and wave goodbye, vow to never buy another one of his books, etc. There are many, many more authors out there who'd love to have you reading their books instead. Reward them with your passion for the genre.
September 1, 2009 5:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
I enjoy the George R. R. Martin series and hope he finishes, but if he doesn't, I'm not going to be upset. Disappointed, but not really upset. He can do what he wishes, and my life will go on.
September 1, 2009 7:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yeah, I dig all that. It's mostly his shitty attitude that bothers me. Also, it's a REALLY GOOD series, and I want to know what happens next. If he can't finish it, I wish he'd just own up, get a collaborator, or tell us "hey, I'm not going to finish it". But saying "I'm working on it", and then constantly blogging all the things he's doing besides working on it, and then getting really really pissy when people ask him when he's actually working on it... it gets old. Real old.
Plus, it's a REALLY REALLY GOOD series.
September 1, 2009 8:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
Can anyone recommend a good alternative series? It does not have to be the same genre.
September 1, 2009 10:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
John Varley's GAEA trilogy - TITAN, WIZARD, DEMON... just got reissued a few years back, and it's terrific. More hard SF than fantasy, but well worth reading.
Martha Well's Ile-Rien stuff is great. Starts with THE ELEMENT OF FIRE, continues through THE DEATH OF THE NECROMANCER, and wraps up with her most recent trilogy... the last two of which are THE SHIPS OF AIR and the THE GATE OF THE GODS, I think, I can't remember the first one.
Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan series is fantastic. Starts with SHARDS OF HONOR, continues with THE WARRIOR'S APPRENTICE, and then there are six or seven more... do a Google search, they'll come up. I envy anyone who hasn't started reading them yet.
Among the classics, there is David Brin's UPLIFT books (STARTIDE RISING, THE UPLIFT WAR, most notably) and Roger Zelazny's AMBER series (there are actually two of them, but start with NINE PRINCES IN AMBER and carry on through. While reading Zelazny, you'll find a side trip into stand alone novels like LORD OF LIGHT to be rewarding, too.
September 2, 2009 6:17 AM | Reply | Permalink
It would certainly be better if each book stood alone, so the author could quit anytime he likes. But that's not how these series are usually written or published. I'm as guilty as anyone - I'm still outlining a fantasy series that so far is four books (or is it five?). Of course, I'm outlining the whole thing first, so I can find out if I can sustain the thing before actually beginning to write it, for the very reason that you mention. I don't want to begin a long book series that I can't finish.
Strangely, I don't have this problem in other genres. I have one paranormal mystery finished, with plans for two more, but each book stands on its own.
September 2, 2009 1:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
This was an...interesting post.
"Know what he's doing instead? He's taking the money we've paid him to tell us this story and he's spending it doing pretty much every other thing in the world except what we're paying him to do, which is, finish the story."
Except that the author is finishing the story. These are substantial books. A DANCE WITH DRAGONS is going to be almost nine hundred pages long at least. In hardcover. That's three times the length of an average novel. Unsurprisingly, they take longer to write than an average novel. Funnily enough, that's what the author has been doing.
You may want to ask Dan Brown what he's been doing for the last six years only to churn out a fairly slim book in return.
"There is a contract. When you pay your money to the storyteller in the marketplace, the contract is, he tells you a story."
The contract is fulfilled. You paid for the first book. You got the first book. You paid for the second book, you got the second book. Etc. You want the fifth book, you have to wait for it and since you have not paid any money for it, you have absolutely zero say in how it is written, how fast it is written or when it comes out. If you do not like this arrangement, then you are free not to give the author your money when the book comes out. Thanks to the power of the library system, you can even still read it without giving the author your money.
If you honestly believe there is a contract, I suggest you do not pursue a legal career.
"But there is a contract, and the contract is this: You start a story, you finish it, and if you're having trouble finishing it, you at least show that you're making an effort to do so, that your contract with me is a priority for you, that it matters, that it's important."
Ignoring the contract point, the other criteria has been fulfilled. The author has reported his progress on writing the book fairly regularly (most recently last week), including the fact that in order to deliver a superior work, he's added many years to the writing of the series and extended the amount of work and effort involved by a colossal factor when he could have just phoned in any old crap and still made a ton of money (see the works of GOODKIND, TERRY and FEIST, RAYMOND E.). And then, of course, people would be screaming blue murder because the quality would have gone downhill.
To quote Tim Powers: "A book is late once, but it's crap forever."
"And if he can't do that, or he chooses not to do that, then, at the very least, while he's living in the million dollar home the Ice and Fire fans bought for him,"
Actually, George R.R. Martin bought his houses (both of them) in Santa Fe with the money he made from his earlier, bestselling novels like FEVRE DREAM and the money he made as a scriptwriter and producer in Hollywood, many years before starting to write AGoT.
"Jetting to various exotic foreign lands using tickets that his Ice and Fire fans bought for him, and staying at hotels that his Ice and Fire fans are paying for, and going to cons to receive the adulation of his Ice and Fire fans,"
The author has been doing this since the late 1960s, thirty years before AGoT came out in the first place.
"The contract is for the story, not the increments of the story."
Well, if we're actually talking about the situation where money has exchanged hands, then the transaction actually is just for increments of the story and absolutely nothing more.
Unless...you went to some bookshop and paid them for A DANCE WITH DRAGONS and now they're refusing to give you your money back. Is that what happened? Because then I would understand your evident rage and frustration and support it wholeheartedly. Not with the author, obviously, but with scurrilous underhand pirate booksellers who presell books that aren't out yet.
"when we ask him "say, George, when's the next Ice and Fire book coming out", he could not whine and shriek and stamp his feet and wave his arms and cry like a giant fucking grey haired baby and call all of us names because, you know, we've given him millions of dollars for this story and he doesn't even want to bother pretending he's actually working on finishing it."
This part confuses me. When people ask, "When is the next Ice and Fire book coming out," the reply is, "When it is done," which is fair enough. And the author has been fairly consistent over the last few months in reporting that work is ongoing on the next book, and more recently, specifically what scenes, chapters and characters he is currently working with. For example, as per his last blog report, he is currently finishing off the final 15% or so of the book and is dealing with chapters involving Daenerys Targaryen and the city of Meereen. To improve the pacing of the final chapters of the book he's broken two big chapters into four small ones and moved an incongruous Sansa chapter into Book 6.
I think this qualifies as a fair and reasonable update of progress. If you'd made this complaint a year ago, when there was radio silence on the book, it would be a fairer one.
The biggest problem is that the falsely-entitled commentators don't actually have any kind of coherent mandate to present to the author. Some of them actually got incredibly annoyed with the author when he presented frequent, regular updates on progress on the book and urged him to shut up until he'd finished it. So he did that. And then others got incredibly annoyed with the radio silence, so now he's reporting progress again. And, on other sites, people are now demanding he shuts up again until it's done. In this case, the author cannot win.
"There is a contract. There is."
Then go and sue him. And you would find, very quickly, that there isn't. There is no actual contract. There is no implied contract. There is no metaphorical contract. There is no unwritten contract.
Actually, I tell a lie. There is a contract. A contract between George R.R. Martin and his publishers, in this case Bantam Books in the United States and HarperCollins Voyager in the United Kingdom.
That contract calls for the author to deliver the best work possible to the publishers, work that he is happy with and wants to sign off on. If the publisher was unhappy with this arrangement, then they would obviously drop him. Clearly the publishers, since they have not done this, don't have a problem with the situation. And they are the people who actually have a contract with the author unlike, for example, us.
The bottom line is that having read and enjoyed the author's previous books, you want to read the next book immediately. I sympathise with this. I am currently following about seven or eight unfinished series by authors such as Peter F. Hamilton, Richard Morgan, Steven Erikson, Scott Bakker, Scott Lynch, Paul Kearney, JV Jones and Patrick Rothfuss. But that gives you or me or anyone else (save the publishers) absolutely no right to dictate or demand anything from the author, just as we had no say on how quickly George Lucas got back to making STAR WARS movies or how long Peter Jackason took to get moving on THE HOBBIT or how fricking long Valve are taking to make HALF-LIFE 2 EPISODE THREE (seriously, that's a much fitter target for a rant of this nature). We are consumers, nothing more.
If you didn't want to wait for the next book in the series, you should have waited until all seven are out before reading it. Committing to reading a series before it is finished without the sure knowledge that it will ever be finished is something you do at your own risk, as fans of Frank Herbert, David Gerrold, Jean Auel, JRR Tolkien, Mervyn Peake, Robert Jordan and plenty of others will attest to.
Cheers.
September 7, 2009 7:58 PM | Reply | Permalink