Monday 29 January 2024
New DEUS EX game cancelled
Friday 26 January 2024
Happy 50th Birthday to DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, and the tabletop roleplaying genre
Dungeons & Dragons turns 50 years old today, or at least today-ish. The first few copies of the original release of the game hit the wild in late January and early February 1974, although the ad hoc nature of the game's development and release means there's always been ambiguity over the precise date.
D&D was co-developed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, two wargamers from Wisconsin. Since the 1960s they'd been playing and designing wargames, starting off in traditional arenas like Civil War and Napoleonic War games, as well as naval titles (including their first co-designed game, Don't Give Up the Ship!). By the end of the decade they had developed an interest in fantasy fiction, with Gygax particularly driven by his love of the works of Jack Vance, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, Michael Moorcock and Robert E. Howard. Arneson and some of their friends were also fans of The Lord of the Rings, which had recently blown up big time (Gygax was cooler on Rings, which he considered boring, preferring the shorter, more focused adventuring of The Hobbit).
Merging fantasy with wargaming seemed an obvious move, and as early as the late 1960s Gygax was organising a play-by-mail campaign set in a fantasy land called "the Great Kingdom." However, assembling a large army of elves, orcs and goblins was difficult, forcing players to substitute models of, say, French line infantry or Prussian hussars. In 1971 Gygax and Jeff Perren collaborated to create a wargame, which they named Chainmail. Drawing on 1968 wargame Siege of Bodenburg for inspiration, the game focused on medieval battles but also had a "fantasy supplement" with rules on incorporating elves, dwarves and magic into the game.
Arneson was a fan of Chainmail but had also been working on a fantasy variation of Braunstein, an experimental rules system allowing for the control of individual characters on the battlefield. As he developed the project, Arneson added elements including character classes and levels, experience points and armour class, as well as a background setting, which he called "Blackmoor." Arneson invited Gygax to play the game and Gygax immediately saw the potential for it. He developed many of the ideas in greater detail and play-tested the first variations at home with his wife and children. He and Arneson agreed to develop the game as a commercial project; according to legend, Gygax's then-two-year-old daughter picked the title "Dungeons & Dragons" from a list Gygax had been mulling over.
Arneson and Gygax set up the company Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) in October 1973 to handle the project. Their budget for the project was just $2,000 (about $12,450 in today's money), with only around $100 budgeted for artwork. With the budget limited, they were only able to print 1,000 copies, which they sold through local conventions and mail order ads in magazines and fanzines. Arneson and Gygax did not expect big success, but all 1,000 copies were sold within a few months and they rushed through a reprint; more than 3,000 copies were sold in 1975.
To Gygax and Arneson's surprise, they quickly had interest from overseas. In mid-1975 they were contacted by Ian Livingstone and Steven Jackson, who had set up a London-based company called Games Workshop, which was designing boards for popular games like Backgammon and Go. GW became the exclusive European importer of Dungeons & Dragons, which drove the success of both companies. GW later invested in miniatures, co-founding Citadel Miniatures in 1978 and developing a generic line of high-quality (for the time) fantasy figures for use with D&D and other fantasy games like Runequest and Middle-earth Roleplaying. When Games Workshop lost the exclusive distribution licence for D&D, they decided to create their own tabletop wargame using their fantasy figures...although that is a different story.
The popularity of D&D rapidly grew. Arneson and Gygax published several supplements and expanded TSR, launching a tie-in magazine (called The Dragon, later shorted to Dragon) and incorporating new rules and ideas. Notably, D&D did not launch with an established setting or world, instead encouraging Dungeon Masters to create their own world. Gygax and Arneson eventually detailed their home campaign worlds, named the World of Greyhawk and Blackmoor respectively, for supplements, but these remained optional.
The encouragement was well-taken, however, with a young Canadian teenager named Ed Greenwood converting a world he'd created as a little kid for short stories into a D&D campaign world, which he dubbed Forgotten Realms, and started writing Dragon articles in the setting. A very young British writer, Charles Stross, was also encouraged to create his own monsters, "borrowing" the name "githyanki" from an obscure novel called Dying of the Light (by an ultra-obscure writer called George R.R. Martin) for a memorable species for the Fiend Folio tome. Meanwhile, a writer in South Carolina called Oliver Rigney, Jr. agreed to run D&D campaigns for his young stepson and started pondering his own ideas for a fantasy world. In California, the Abrams Brothers were inspired to create their own D&D world, which they called Midkemia. They quickly moved beyond D&D to other rules systems and developed the world further; when a friend from university called Ray Feist asked if he could write a novel called Magician based on the same world, they said okay. Over in the UK a press officer working for a nuclear power plant, named T. Pratchett, invited his co-workers to a D&D night at the local pub and was dismayed when they went totally off the rails and trashed the campaign; he was at least satisfied with one of his creations for the game, an ambulatory chest which ran around on tons of little legs, carrying the adventurers' gear.
Up north in Canada, two archaeology students started playing a D&D game. They quickly tired of the focus on killing monsters and looting their stuff, but became intrigued by applying archaeological principles to the game: who are the monsters, who built these dungeons, and what history led to these events? In 1986 they switched their gaming to the newly-released GURPS system and developed what became known as the Malazan world, with Ian Esslemont penning the first proto-Malazan novel, Night of Knives in 1986 and Steve Lundin (aka Steven Erikson) writing a film script in the same world called Gardens of the Moon; with zero interest from Hollywood he redeveloped it into a novel in 1991, and the rest was, as they say, history.
Back in the late 1970s, Arneson was not hugely interested in working in a corporate environment and bailed on the game, instead happy to collect his royalties as the game's success began to explode exponentially. This irked Gygax, who continued to work in the trenches of game development, writing and making new business deals. According to some theories, Gygax began development of a new D&D derivative which Arneson which would not be involved in, allowing Gygax to claim sole copyright (and thus royalties) over. This resulted in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, aka D&D 1st Edition, which appeared in 1978. Arneson's lawyers were unhappy with Gygax's argument, and later legal deals were settled in both parties' favour. However, the existence of "Advanced" D&D kind of required the continued existence of a "Basic" D&D, which appeared in 1981 (after a prototypical version was tested in 1977). The Basic D&D line eventually became the biggest-selling line of D&D projects, shifting over six million copies.
In 1983, TSR shifted strategies by planning a "multimedia event," one of the first of its kind, with a major new campaign set in a brand new world focusing on dragons. This resulted in the Dragonlance setting, spearheaded by a 16-volume adventure series and a novel trilogy, The Dragonlance Chronicles, by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. The novels became bestsellers, shifting four million copies before the end of the decade.
In the early 1980s, Gygax decamped to Hollywood to work on a D&D movie and TV show, eventually resulting in the release of a Dungeons & Dragons animated series, but no movie. With Gygax apparently distracted by partying at the Playboy Mansion (as you do), TSR recalled him and manoeuvred him out of the company in 1985.
With Gygax gone, designers felt uncomfortable carrying on using his Greyhawk setting. With Dragonlance featuring many deviations from "core" D&D rules, it was decided to develop a new campaign world. TSR called on Ed Greenwood, who'd been contributing to Dragon Magazine for a decade with articles set in the Forgotten Realms, and bought the setting from him, publishing it in 1987. Tie-in novels also appeared, with the third novel published, The Crystal Shard by R.A. Salvatore (featuring a dark elf protagonist, Drizzt Do'Urden), becoming an immediate big hit. The success of the Realms encouraged a whole slew of new campaign settings, although none became as big as the Realms or the earlier setting: Spelljammer (1989), Dark Sun (1991), Al-Qadim (1992), Planescape (1994) and Birthright (1995).
The 2nd Edition of Dungeons & Dragons launched in 1989, but the game started dropping sales in the early 1990s. D&D had effectively created the entire tabletop roleplaying game industry, resulting in a bunch of other games soon appearing: Empire of the Petal Throne (1975), Boot Hill (1975), Traveller (1977), RuneQuest (1978), Gamma World (1978), Call of Cthulhu (1981), Champions (1981), Star Trek (1982), Palladium (1983), Heroes Unlimited (1984), Paranoia (1984), Doctor Who (1985), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1985), MechWarrior (1985), Robotech (1986), GURPS (1986), Star Wars (1987), Cyberpunk (1988) and Shadowrun (1989), among many others.
Hugely important was Vampire: The Masquerade, which appeared in 1991. With a streamlined rules system and a cool setting with a ton of deep lore, the game quickly became hugely popular, eclipsing D&D in sales. Weird Western Deadlands, which launched in 1996, was also hugely successful in a similar vein. D&D was increasingly seen as old-fashioned and old-hat, with its rules system feeling archaic (with many core features largely unchanged since 1974, despite three distinct versions of the game having existed) and its overwhelming focus on combat over the social side of roleplaying feeling dated. Unbeknown to fans and players, TSR was also in financial trouble, trouble that continued to expand through bizarre business decisions and the policy of creating more product to push through publishers to create churn, even though the products were not selling.
In 1997 TSR effectively collapsed and had to be rescued by Seattle-based Wizards of the Coast, the company founded just a few years earlier to sell the Magic: The Gathering card game. Magic: The Gathering was a colossal, ludicrous sales success and it was easily able to buy TSR and settle its immense debts. Goodwill towards D&D was starting to build again, thanks to the success of the tie-in video games from BioWare and Black Isle Studios, including Baldur's Gate (1998), Planescape: Torment (1999) and Icewind Dale (2000), along with the various sequels. Wizards of the Coast released Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition in 2000 to immediate success and acclaim, reasserting the game's position as the market-leading roleplaying game. The d20 rules system pioneered by 3E soon spawned a whole host of other games.
However, 3rd Edition lacked the long tail of earlier versions of the game, something the release of a "3.5 Edition" in 2003 seemed to exacerbate rather than solve (fans angered by the release of new rulebooks barely three years after the last). Faced with dwindling sales, WotC released the 4th Edition of the game years ahead of schedule in 2008, but the game saw a huge move away from D&D's original rules, resulting in a lot more anger from fans. Many decamped to rival fantasy game Pathfinder, established in 2009 and carrying on the 3rd Edition line of rules. D&D went through a nadir of sales and popularity in the early 2010s, with WotC rumoured to be considering cancelling the game outright. The 5th Edition, released in 2014, was a big improvement, at least in the eyes of the game-buying public, and livestreams of games over the Internet (particularly the Critical Role webseries) soon triggered high sales. The game also got a boost from the major role it played in Netflix series Stranger Things (2016-present). 5th Edition's sales became the healthiest seen for the game since the early 1980s. A revision of 5th Edition is due for release later this year.
It's not always been plain sailing. WotC have been criticised in recent years for ambiguity over AI artwork, trying to cancel the Open Game Licence (allowing third parties to produce compatible material) and a lacklustre approach to D&D's heritage, with very few novels or decent setting material being published. An overzealous approach to copyright protection (resulting in private detectives storming a YouTuber's house after he received a product before its review date) has also proven controversial.
In its fifty years on sale, D&D has shifted around 20 million core rulebooks and sourcebooks, over 100 million spin-off novels and around 30 million video games. A minimum of 50 million people are believed to have played D&D. It spawned the entire tabletop roleplaying industry and played a key role in the development of video games. At least dozens and likely hundreds (maybe even thousands) of published fantasy authors have played the game. Its impact on fantasy, especially secondary world, epic fantasy, might be second only to that of The Lord of the Rings. Hopefully it can enjoy at least fifty more years of success.
Tuesday 23 January 2024
Netflix releases trailer and release date for AVATAR: THE LAST AIRBENDER
Sunday 21 January 2024
Franchise Familiariser: BattleTech (2023 update)
There has been a recent surge of interest in BattleTech, the venerable franchise about people piloting giant robots and trying to beat up or destroy other giant robots, all in a well-realised setting (think of Pacific Rim meets Game of Thrones and you're halfway there). The science fiction tabletop wargame is now one of the best-selling in its field, and more people are trying it out thanks to recent successful video games and Kickstarters for the wargame.
There’s more interest in the franchise than there has been in maybe a decade, but what to do if you’re intrigued but have no idea what it’s all about? Time for a Franchise Familiariser course!
(A previous version of this article was published in 2018.)
Saturday 20 January 2024
The Last of Us: Part I
Tuesday 16 January 2024
For All Mankind: Season 4
2003. Happy Valley has expanded into a full-scale colony on Mars, where technology is being developed to allow humans to capture asteroids and swing them into Mars or Earth orbit to exploit their resources. The United States and Soviet Union are now full-blown allies, marching jointly into the exploration of space. The many workers who lost their livelihoods with the collapse of the oil industry are now finding fresh employment on the Moon and Mars, but the same problems of low pay and class divides follow them. The discovery of a metal-rich asteroid which can solve Earth's shortages in a single swoop spurs a dangerous mission, but political turmoil in Moscow and growing discontent at Happy Valley make the mission anything but straightforward.
For All Mankind's first two seasons staked a claim for the show to be the best slice of science fiction on television at the moment (certainly following the wrapping up of The Expanse). A cool alt-history take on the space race, fantastic visuals and pretty good writing all made for a compelling drama. Season 3 abruptly reversed that course, with hackneyed love triangles and tedious personal drama threatening to undo all the good work achieved in worldbuilding (not the first time this has happened on a Ron Moore-produced show, to be fair).
Season 4 occupies a ground much closer to the former than the latter. Thankfully, it stops and reverses the rot from Season 3. The story is much better, the aggravating love triangle story from Season 3 has been fully exorcised from the show and we're back to the interesting mix of science and alt-reality politics that made the first two seasons compelling. However, the show hasn't fully swung back to that level of quality. There's still some rather far-fetched plotting, and the show's failure to commit to getting rid of its increasingly ancient central character is quite daft.
The season divides its plot between several character arcs. Margo Madison (Wrenn Schmidt) is a reluctant political refugee in the Soviet Union, where her space knowledge is being wasted, until a political realignment brings her to the attention of a new regime. Aleida (Coral Peña), still suffering traumatic after-effects from the bombing of NASA at the end of Season 3, decides on a new career path. Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman), now in his seventies, is comically squatting on Mars and refusing to leave, so NASA has left him in a command position (and, although it's under-explored, possibly studying the impact of low-gravity existence on his ageing body). Newcomer Miles Dale (Toby Kebbell) is a redundant oil worker who gets a new job on Mars, but finds the job isn't all that he thought it might be.
Season 4 balances these storylines well and ties them together nicely at the end of the season, creating a much more cohesive storyline than the spotty third season. This is no mean feat with multiple groups of characters active in the United States, Soviet Union, on Mars and on various spacecraft. The interaction of the storylines is pretty good.
However, the show continues to mix cool realism (the long travel times to Mars and the inability to engage in real-time conversation with Earth) with decidedly bonkers speculative elements (gigantic giga-engines that can steer asteroids). This mix was odd in Season 2 but has become de rigour for the show by this point, and does give us some cool visuals and awesome vfx sequences, so fair enough.
Anyone who's read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy can probably see some of the plot twists coming a mile off, with musings on capitalism-in-spaaaace and how it leads to the predictable repeating of patterns we see on Earth. So the Happy Valley colony quickly becomes a stratified society between the above-deckers and the maintenance workers belowdecks, complete with a black market and secret bars. We're not quite at the point of full independence (I suspect that will rear its head several seasons down the line) but this is a clear transitional story. It's not that original, to be honest, but Kebbell's solid performance as Miles Dale and fellow newcomer Tyner Rushing's great turn as Samantha Massey both help sell it.
On the negative side, the lengths the show goes to in order to keep previous main characters in the frame remains quite implausible. Ed should have been retired at least one season ago, and Kelly has relatively little to do. At least Margo gets a meaty storyline with some intriguing twists. And I'll forgive a lot of these problems for keeping Danny out of the picture this season. On another flipside, the absence of former-President Ellen feels jarringly abrupt, but I suppose her story purpose has been fulfilled.
Season 4 of For All Mankind (****) splendidly improves on the tedious third season and brings us back much closer to the quality of the first two. We're still not back to the show at its best, but this season is a big improvement over last year and opens the story up for a very interesting fifth season.
Monday 15 January 2024
RIP Howard Waldrop
News has sadly broken of the passing of Howard Waldrop, a highly-acclaimed author of science fiction and fantasy short fiction, at the age of 77.
Waldrop was born in Houston, Mississippi in 1946. He spent most of his life in Texas, and became a childhood fan of genre fiction and comic books. He began a correspondence with George R.R. Martin via nascent comics fandom in the 1960s and they became lifelong friends.
Waldrop's writing career began in 1972 with the short story "Lunchbox" in Analog. Notably, this was John W. Campbell Jr.'s last discovery before his death. Waldrop was best known for his short fiction, publishing only two full-length novels in his career: The Texas-Israeli War: 1999 (1974) and Them Bones (1984), along with the novella A Dozen Tough Jobs (1989), which some have pondered as an influence on the Coen Brothers O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) (especially as the latter has a character called "Vernon Waldrip").
Waldrop was more at home with short fiction, penning around eighty published stories in his career. "The Ugly Chickens" (1980), about the extinction of the dodo, was probably his most acclaimed work, winning the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards and getting a Hugo nomination. "Night of the Cooters" (1990) was probably his joint-best-known tale. It was adapted for film in 2022 by Vincent D'Onofrio, and produced by Waldrop's friend George R.R. Martin.
His other joint-best-known story also owes something to Martin: in 1987 he contributed "Thirty Minutes Over Broadway!" as the very first Wild Cards story, in the very first collection in the series. The story depicts the adventures of Jetboy as the Wild Card virus is released over New York City and acts as the origin story for the franchise. The story also features the franchise's most-quoted line of dialogue: "I can't die yet! I haven't seen the Jolson Story!" Waldrop was offered the chance to pen more stories but he declined, only allowing that he might return to write the very last story in the series if Martin decided to wrap it up. Alas, that opportunity will now not arise.
His stories were assembled in numerous collections, most notably Things Will Never Be the Same (2007) and Other Worlds, Better Lives (2008). Waldrop's fiction was noted for its sense of humour and he became popular for his lively readings of his stories at conventions, including the annual ArmadilloCon in Austin, Texas. More than once, he was called "the court jester of SF."
A smart and interesting writer of idiosyncratic, lively fiction, Howard Waldrop will be missed.
Saturday 13 January 2024
The SFF All-Time Sales List (2024 Edition)
After a lengthy break (six years since the last version), the (non-) patented, utterly non-definitive Wertzone Official SFF All-Time Bestseller List returns.
There have been some changes this time. The last list was getting on for 300 entries strong, and unreliable and variable reporting meant the lower half of the list had more holes in it than Swiss cheese after being visited by lactose-loving moths, due to patchy reporting. I have limited the numbered list to authors with more than 1 million copies sold for the sake of sanity. I have left in the remainder of the list from last time, but take those positions and sales figures with a pinch of salt the size of Greenland.
The usual string of caveats: reporting of sales for authors is bizarrely spotty, with some authors happy to broadcast their sales, some guarding their figures with incredible tenacity and others happily admitting they don’t have a clue what they are, reliant on intermittent reporting by various publishers across the world. There is also frequent confusion over “books sold,” “books in print” (i.e. the number of books that are currently sitting unsold on shelves or in warehouses across the world) or “sales-per-book,” which can sometimes lead to conflicting information. There is also tremendous lag, with reports sometimes being many years behind sales themselves. Some of the sales figure sources are brand-new, some are a few years old and some are twenty years old with absolutely no interest from the publishers in updating them. The sources for the list are therefore all over the place (but noted where possible).
Still, some interesting trends can be discerned: the rise of "Romantasy" is quite notable, with a massive explosion of sales for Sarah J. Maas, whose sales growth is eclipsing almost everyone else in the field (she's catching Brandon Sanderson up like a freight train), and newcomer Rebecca Yarros selling around 2.4 million copies in a year, which is the type of explosive debut we haven't seen this side of Patrick Rothfuss. YA and younger category sales also remain a huge deal, with the enormous sales growth of the Percy Jackson series being particularly eye-popping. Traditional epic fantasy still does quite well but at a much lower level, with solid growth for the likes of Joe Abercrombie, Mark Lawrence, Michael J. Sullivan and James Islington. Brandon Sanderson remains a strong outlier, and Robert Jordan is doing pretty well for someone who passed away seventeen years ago, with The Wheel of Time recently joining the 100 million+ club.
Should you take this list as Gospel? Nope! But it is, hopefully, a reasonable indication as to what's going on out there.
1) JK Rowling (600 million)
Rowling completed her ludicrously successful Harry Potter series seventeen years ago, and various attempts to follow up on that have not garnered anywhere near as much success. Legacy sales for the series remain strong but seem to be dropping; her reported sales in 2023 are not dramatically higher than in 2018, and her once-thought-unreachable position does seem to be in reach of several other authors. Still, sitting on her throne of dollar bills, she probably does not care very much. <source>
[Eiichiro Oda (500 million)]
I’m generally not including manga in this list because
that’s a whole other medium, but will note some of interest. Eiichiro Oda is the
biggest-selling manga author in Japanese history, with his well-known One
Piece pirate fantasy series surpassing 523 million copies sold as of last year. With the
enormous success of the Netflix live-action adaptation, a second season on the
way, dramatically increased viewership of the existing 1,000+ episode anime and
a new, revamped anime for overseas audiences on its way, expect this figure to
just keep shooting up and up. <source>
2) R.L. Stine (400 million)
Stine is best-known for his 62-volume Goosebumps
series of novels aimed at younger readers, as well as assorte spin-offs. His
other works include the Fear Street, Rotten School, Mostly
Ghostly and Nightmare Room series. <source>
3) Stephen King (350 – 400 million)
Stephen King had sold 350 million novels by 2006 and he
remains a perennial bestseller, with numerous books published since then and
two massive film adaptations of his novel IT, so I think it’s
comfortable to say he is in the 400 million range, although The Encyclopedia
of Fantasy (1996) makes a good argument that his sales/copies read are
incalculable given his myriad overseas rights and pirate copies. King’s Dark
Tower series, his most vital contribution to “regular” fantasy alongside Eyes of the Dragon, has sold
over 30 million copies by itself. <source>
4) J.RR. Tolkien (350 million +)
Likewise, J.R.R. Tolkien’s sales are incalculable due to
vast numbers of pirate copies of his books and unauthorised overseas
translations and sales (madly, the first American paperback edition of Lord
of the Rings as an unauthorised edition exploiting a copyright loophole).
Conservative figures from around 1995 suggested 150 million for Lord of the
Rings, but some research suggest that figure was drawn from sales of Fellowship
of the Ring alone (!) and Tolkien’s true sales total, including 100 million
copies of The Hobbit and millions more for The Silmarillion and
various spin-off books, probably stands at well over 350 million. The Lord
of the Rings also sold around 50 million extra copies in the five years
after The Fellowship of the Ring was released in cinemas in 2001. Even
this figure may be highly conservative. <source>
[Jin Yong (300 million+)]
The late Jin Yong has sold over 300 million copies of his
wuxia novels, which cross the boundary between fantasy and historical fiction. He is best known for his Legend of the Condor Heroes series. <source>
5) Stephenie Meyer (250 million+)
The Twilight series has sold over a quarter-billion
copies. Sparkly! However, there have been no updated figures for the series
since 2015, so even given a drop-off in sales (the books and films are no
longer dominating the cultural discourse as they were a decade ago), this
figure will likely be somewhat higher. <source>
[Dean Koontz (c. 200
million)]
Dean Koontz's official website claims sales of 450 million, which seem hard
to credit for an author with a big profile, but nowhere near that of King or
Rowling. Other figures suggest 200 million, which seems much more credible.
However, Koontz's eligibility for the list is questionable given that he has
written numerous non-SFF novels (though many of them still within the horror or
suspense thriller genres). Thus, his placement on the list is for those who
consider him to be a genre author. <source>
[Michael Crichton (c.
200 million)]
Michael Crichton published 27 novels during his lifetime, selling more than
200 million copies. Only eight of those novels are SF, but these include most
of his best-known novels (including
6) Rick Riordan (190
million+)
Rick Riordan is the author of the Percy Jackson
series, which has so far spawned two successful movie adaptations, a Disney+ TV
series and driven renewed sales of the books. Riordan is easily the biggest
jumpers on the list, with almost 100 million newly-reported sales since 2018 and a probable increase in sales imminent due to the TV adaptation of the books. <source>
[Star Wars (160
million)]
Del Rey and Bantam sold over 160 million Star Wars
novels, mostly from the "Expanded Universe," between 1991 and 2012. This figure does not
include those books published by Lucasfilm directly and Disney. <source>
7) Anne Rice (136
million)
Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles series was a huge phenomenon through
the 1980s and 1990s, bolstered by the Tom Cruise/Brad Pitt movie, and additional adaptations. <source>
8) CS Lewis (120 million+)
Lewis is best-known for his seven-volume Chronicles of Narnia
series, which has had multiple film, audio, stage and television adaptations
(with a new film and TV series incoming from Netflix). His other works include The
Space Trilogy. <source>
9) Sir Terry
Pratchett (100 million+)
Pratchett remains one of the biggest-selling SFF novelists in the world
and, because his Discworld books are mostly stand-alone novels, he may
actually have a lot more readers than several of the above. Despite his passing
in 2015 and only mixed success for various adaptations, Pratchett’s profile and sales seem to be accelerating as younger
generations of readers discover his accessible, prolific, thought-provoking and
funny fiction. <source>
10) Edgar Rice
Burroughs (100 million+)
Edgar Rice Burroughs was a hugely prolific author. He has sold more than
100 million copies of his novels, including the SF Barsoom, Pellucidar,
Venus, Caspak and Moon series and the non-SF Tarzan
series. <source>
11) Sir Arthur C. Clarke (100 million+)
Sir Arthur C. Clarke gains the distinction of being the only author on the
list to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and have an orbit named after
him. Clarke was already a well-known, big-selling SF author when the film 2001:
A Space Odyssey and his television coverage of the first moon landing
catapulted him into becoming a household name in both the United States and
United Kingdom. A steady stream of best-selling, high-profile and
critically-acclaimed SF novels continued into the 1980s, when his profile was
again boosted by his TV series, Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World. As
well as his SF novels he also published a large number of non-fiction books and
volumes of criticism on matters of science. <source>
12) Suzanne Collins
(100 million+)
Suzanne Collins's The
Hunger Games hadn't even been published when I created the very first list.
The trilogy has been published in full, sold over 100 million copies (over 65
million in the
13) Robert Jordan (100
million+)
Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time epic fantasy series
rapidly became the biggest post-Tolkien epic fantasy series after its launch in
1990, with enormous sales driving Tor Books to become the biggest name in
science fiction and fantasy publishing. Books 8 through 14 were each a New
York Times #1 bestseller, an unheard-of feat for epic fantasy. After Robert
Jordan passed away in 2007, the series was completed by Brandon Sanderson in
2013. Sales of the series have continued to grow since then, but got a sharp
boost from the launch of Amazon’s Wheel of Time television series in
2021, with more than 5 million additional sales in five years. <source>
14) Andre Norton (90 million+)
Andre Norton was one of science fiction and fantasy's most prolific
authors, penning around 300 books (either novels or story collections) in a
career stretching over decades. <source>
15) George R.R. Martin (91 million+)
A Song of Ice and Fire’s sales growth was initially
modest: from 1996 to 2005 the series sold around 5 million copies. Thanks to
Internet word of mouth, sales accelerated to reach around 12 million by the
time A Dance with Dragons launched in 2011. Propelled by the explosive
success of the HBO adaptation, Game of Thrones, the series reached over
90 million sales by 2016. Further sales figures have not been given since then,
but have been presumed not to have surpassed 100 million just yet (but, with the success of House of the Dragon, is likely very close).
Martin has also sold over 1 million copies of the first
trilogy in his Wild Cards superhero anthology series, and over a million
copies of companion volume The World of Ice and Fire by itself.<source>
[H. Rider Haggard (85
million+)]
H. Rider Haggard is an influential writer of the late 19th
Century, most famous for King Solomon's
Mines. His novel She: A Novel of
Adventure features significant supernatural influences (such as the main
villain being immortal and killed by a supernatural force), but most of his
work can be classified as adventure fiction rather than SFF. <source>
16) Sherrilyn Kenyon
(80 million+)
Sherrilyn Kenyon is a prolific urban fantasy author who also publishers
supernatural-tinged historical fantasy under the pen name Kinley MacGregor. She
has over 80 million books in print in over 100 countries. She is best-known for
her Dark-Hunter series. <source>
[John Saul (60
million+)]
John Saul has sold over 60 million copies of his horror novels. Most of
them fall into the psychological horror or thriller sub-categories, with only a
few involving supernatural forces. <source>
17) James Herbert (54 million+)
The late James Herbert has sold more than 54 million copies of his horror
novels, most of which had an SF or supernatural twist. His best-known work is The
Rats (1974). <source>
18) Terry Brooks (51.7
million+)
Terry Brooks has sold over 30 million copies in the
19) Richard Adams (50
million+)
Watership Down has
sold more than 50 million copies by itself, though its fantasy status is
debatable. I tend to count it as such, since aside from the talking rabbits
there's also the fact that ghosts and spirit guides play a role. Adams has also
sold not-inconsiderable numbers of his adult fantasy novels set in the Beklan
Empire, Shardik and Maia, not to mention further works
related to Watership Down. <source>
[Dennis Wheatley (50
million)]
Dennis Wheatley was the biggest-selling British author of the 1960s and
1970s, routinely selling more than a million copies a year for over a decade.
The majority of his books were crime, political or spy thrillers. However, he
also published novels featuring supernatural elements, resulting from his own
fascination with the occult. As a result, a small number of his books may be of
genre interest. <source>
20) Robert Heinlein
(50 million)
One of the grand masters of old-school SF and one of the "Big
Three" of late 20th Century SF alongside Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac
Asimov, Heinlein had sold 11.5 million books by the early 1980s and about 50
million in total to date. <source>
MANY, MANY MORE AFTER THE JUMP
Thursday 11 January 2024
BABYLON 5 reboot still in development, streaming services showing interest
Confirming what was rumoured last year, the Babylon 5 reboot project is officially dead at the CW. The CW has focused its attention away from drama towards cheaper television fare. As also expected, Warner Brothers has not junked the project entirely but, after regaining the rights, is now shopping the project to streaming services, with at least two apparently showing interest. Original Babylon 5 creator, showrunner and head writer J. Michael Straczynski remains attached to the project.
Which streaming services are interested is as yet unknown. The most logical option, HBO Max (recently retitled just Max), is seemingly out of the question because they have their own budget and development issues in the wake of their recent Discovery merger (one of the few shows to survive the merger process, Our Flag Means Death, was cancelled last week). HBO proper do not seem interested, despite the presence of self-confessed Babylon 5 fan George R.R. Martin in the development process there.
Warner Brothers has excellent relations with Netflix, and is currently producing the Sandman live-action show for them. Sandman showrunner-producer Neil Gaiman is a good friend of Straczynski's, and wrote an episode for the original Babylon 5 way back in 1998. One of Babylon 5's myriad alien races, the Gaim, is named for him. Straczynski himself has a relationship with Netflix, having co-produced the first two seasons of Sense8 for them almost a decade ago. Netflix also lacks a high-profile, ongoing, live-action space opera at the moment.
Amazon are also a possibility, as they currently lack a space opera show after the cancellation of The Expanse a couple of years ago.
Other streamers seem to be well set-up for space opera: Disney+ has multiple Star Wars shows in development and recently added The Orville to its streaming lineup, whilst Paramount+ is veritably drowning in Star Trek content, not to mention Halo. Apple TV+ has For All Mankind and Foundation as ongoing space-based shows.
An intriguing possibility is Tubi, an ad-supported streaming service which began operation in 2014 and has over 74 million users in the United States. Tubi is predominantly available in the United States and Central America, but GDPR issues have seen it unable to launch in the UK and European Union. Tubi has been airing Babylon 5 itself for the past few months.
Tubi mostly airs content from other supplies, but has aired some original programming, including the animated comedy Freak Brothers, a cooking show, the second season of The Nevers (after it was dropped by HBO). Tubi has voiced an ambition to create more original content for its service, and Babylon 5 might be an attractive franchise, especially if Straczynski can work his magic like it's 1993 all over again to produce the show on a competitive budget.
More news as it comes in.
Wednesday 10 January 2024
Marvel finally, officially canonises the Netflix Marvel-verse
- Daredevil: Season 1 (2015)
- Jessica Jones: Season 1 (2015)
- Daredevil: Season 2 (2016)
- Luke Cage: Season 1 (2016)
- Iron Fist: Season 1 (2017)
- The Defenders (2017)
- The Punisher: Season 1 (2017)
- Jessica Jones: Season 2 (2018)
- Luke Cage: Season 2 (2018)
- Iron Fist: Season 2 (2018)
- Daredevil: Season 3 (2018)
- The Punisher: Season 2 (2019)
- Jessica Jones: Season 3 (2019)
RIP Tracy Torme, STAR TREK writer and SLIDERS co-creator
Genre scriptwriter Tracy Tormé has sadly passed away at the age of 64.
Tormé was born in 1959 in Los Angeles, the son of singer Mel Tormé. He began his career in the 1970s as a writer on SCTV before moving to Saturday Night Live in 1982. He also wrote the 1988 film Spellbinder.
In 1986 he was hand-picked by Gene Roddenberry to work as a writer on Season 1 of Star Trek: The Next Generation, penning the episode The Big Goodbye, the only episode of the entire Star Trek franchise to win a Peabody Award. Roddenberry enjoyed his work so much he made Tormé the executive story editor for the entire last third of the season. He also wrote the less well-received episode Haven and the controversial script for Conspiracy. Tormé was given an in-universe role in Star Trek as the fictional author of the equally fictional novels featuring mid-20th Century detective Dixon Hill.
Tormé came into conflict with effective head writer Maurice Hurley, who was angry that Roddenberry had overridden his decision not to develop Conspiracy in Season 1. Tormé found his Season 2 scripts - The Schizoid Man, The Royale and Manhunt - being extensively rewritten by Hurley, to the point that he demanded his name be taken off them. Tormé was also moved sideways into the role of "Creative Consultant" on Season 2, in which he had less responsibility. Despite Hurley being fired at the end of Season 2 and Tormé being one of the few writers invited back for Season 3 by Rick Berman, Tormé declined.
Tormé worked on the 1992 TV movie Intruders and the 1993 film Fire in the Sky. His greatest success came in 1995 when he co-developed the TV series Sliders alongside Robert K. Weiss. Sliders ran for three seasons on Fox before being cancelled, but it was saved by the Sci-Fi Channel, who aired two further seasons. Sliders saw a group of characters moving from one parallel Earth to another, trying to get home.
Alongside and subsequent to Sliders, Tormé wrote for The Outer Limits, Odyssey 5 and Carnivàle, and was a script consultant for the 1997 film Contact. He also wrote the original treatment for Will Smith vehicle I Am Legend (2007).
Tormé passed away on 4 January from complications from diabetes. A keen SF screen writer, he will be missed.