Evening, squiders. Why is summer so hot? Ugh.
I’ve been reading through Terry Brooks’s Sometimes the Magic Works, which is part writing how-to and part memoir, for the past two months. It was written in 2003, and is one of the many writing books I’ve inherited from my mother each time she moves.
(I’ve just finished it, actually.)
I discovered a very interesting chapter in my reading yesterday, however. In a chapter entitled “The Word and the Void” (which is the name of the first trilogy in the Shannara series, and the one I’m currently in) Mr. Brooks talks about the dangers of writing outside the series/genre you’re known for, and he uses the Word and the Void as an example, as a separate series from Shannara.
Yet here I am, twenty years later, and the Word and the Void is included in every list of Shannara books you can find on the Internet.
So I can only assume that sometime between 2003 (when he wrote this memoir/how-to) and the publication of Armageddon’s Children (2006, the first of the Genesis of Shannara trilogy), the decision was made to include the Word and the Void trilogy as part of the Shannara universe as opposed to its own, and that the Genesis of Shannara trilogy is the bridge between the Word and the Void and the later Shannara books.
(Also an interesting note, while the Word and the Void and a few related-ish short stories are included on the lists of Shannara books and reading orders, Mr. Brooks’s own reading orders for Shannara do not include them.)
All my questions are answered. The Word and the Void books don’t feel like Shannara, and have no obvious ties to the later Shannara books, and the magic is all weird, because they were not written as part of Shannara.
I wonder what happened. Did Mr. Brooks have an epiphany that tied everything together? Was it a marketing thing, where someone was like, well, you know, these books take place hundreds (thousands?) of years before these other books, so why not just kind of shoehorn them in? They’re close enough?
I guess I won’t know for sure until I get farther in the series.
Anyway, I just thought that was interesting. See you Thursday, squiders!
