New French editions of A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE

As related on Westeros.org, the French publishers J'ai Lu are reprinting the first four volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire. The books have hitherto only been available in French in three volumes apiece (four for A Storm of Swords), so this will be the first time they are available in one-volume editions.

Top row: A Game of Thrones (Castle Black), A Clash of Kings (Tyrion & King's Landing)

Bottom row: A Storm of Swords (a forest), A Feast for Crows (the Greyjoy castle, Pyke)

A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings will be published in January 2010, followed by A Storm of Swords in June and A Feast for Crows in September. The cover artist is Marc Simonetti. Higher-quality images can be found on his gallery. Images with the titles on can be seen here.

UFO movie will now be first in a trilogy

In a prior post I commented on plans to develop Gerry Anderson's classic 1970 TV series UFO as a movie. In a new interview, the director, Matthew Gratzner, has indicated their plans are now radically more ambitious for the project.

Skydiver, a possibly somewhat inefficient submarine-launched jet aircraft, but very modest by Anderson's normal standards of unnecessarily complicated vehicles.

The project is now envisaged as a trilogy. The first movie sounds like it will borrow heavily from a storyline in the series about pilot Paul Foster (Joshua Jackson, the only confirmed castmember so far) stumbling across the SHADO organisation and then joining it. The trilogy's storyline is under wraps but comments in the interview suggest it will broadly follow the series arc, in which SHADO gradually uncovers more information about the aliens and their technology and their goals, with a view to eventually defeating them (radical, I know).

Also encouraging is news that after relocating the action to the USA, the latest draft of the script has re-set it in the UK, with either Pinewood or Shepperton earmarked to stand in for SHADO's secret HQ underneath a film studio. The movie will also favour miniatures for the effects sequences, only going digital for sequences that would otherwise be impossible. After Moon recently doing something similar, could we be seeing the start of the long-prophesied CGI backlash? It sounds like important SHADO vehicles like Skydiver will still be used, but no word yet on the iconic Interceptors or the SHADO ground APCs.

No word on the casting of Commander Straker yet, although, as with the original series, he will still be an American. Gratzner states that he favours an international cast for the movie, and has resisted turning any of the male characters into women to increase the number of female roles in the story. However, several of the female characters, including Colonel Lake and Lt. Ellis, will likely have bigger roles than in the series. The director states that have favours Ali Larter (from Heroes) for the role Colonel Lake, which I must admit I'm not sold on. More amusingly, apparently there is an ongoing creative debate about whether the Moonbase technicians will keep their purple anti-static wigs. I suspect he might lose this one, but it's good to know they put up a fight.

And yes, Gerry Anderson will be involved as a consultant on the project. The first movie is expected to film next year to be a major 2011 release.

Terminal World by Alastair Reynolds

Spearpoint is a city unlike any other. A vast spire dozens of leagues in height, the city and the world around it are divided into zones of different energy states. Different technology and energy sources work in each zone, and any person who spends long periods in another zone may be doomed to death without periodic drug treatments.


Dr. Quillon is a pathologist, performing post-mortems for the city's law-enforcement agencies in the relatively high-tech zone of Neon Heights. But when Quillon's past catches up with him he has to flee the city. Aided by a young woman named Meroka, a specialist in smuggling packages where they need to go, he finds the world beyond the city to be a strange and alien place. When an unprecedented zonal shift threatens to destroy Spearpoint altogether, Quillon finds himself torn between flight and finding a way of helping ensure the survival of his home.

Terminal World is the ninth novel (and twelfth book overall) by Welsh SF author Alastair Reynolds, best-known for his Revelation Space universe and stand-alone novels such as Pushing Ice and Century Rain. Shortly after this book was handed in, Gollancz gave Reynolds a massive £1 million ($1.6 million at the time) contract for ten new books over ten years. Based on the impressive quality of Terminal World I'm not surprised by this.

Reynolds' normal setting is far-future space opera, usually slanted with elements of gothic horror and film noir. Terminal World sees him doing something different. The novel seems to be more inspired by the New Weird, with some of the atmosphere of China Mieville's novels seeping through (most notably, and interestingly as it came out after Reynolds completed this book, The City and the City, although the lovingly-rendered city also invites comparisons with Perdido Street Station). There is also a strong steampunk flavouring to the novel. Some of the noir elements are still present, particularly in the earlier sections detailing the flight from the city, but the horror elements are restricted to a few creatures and one of the antagonists.

The characters are excellent, well-rounded and convincing. Quillon and Meroka are solid protagonists, people from different backgrounds allied together by circumstances. The other characters they encountered in their travels, such as Fray and Captain Curtana, are likewise well-handled. In my review of FlashForward I attributed that novel's old-fashioned style to its expositionary characters who exist purely to serve the plot. Here the characters are fleshed-out and believable in their own right.

Reynolds also seems to have developed a hitherto unsuspected superb aptitude for writing great battle sequences, with heavy autocannon-armed airships blasting away at one another, the repelling of boarding actions and so on. It's only a small part of the book, but it's great stuff.

At the core of Terminal World lies a huge mystery. Interestingly, it's a mystery that the central characters, Quillon and Meroka, have no real interest in. One of the side-characters does and spends some time discussing it, but at the end of the day he backs off from pursuing it, leaving the reader to digest all the small pieces of evidence that have built up over the course of the novel. What is Spearpoint and what was its original purpose? Why is this the 'Terminal World'? What is the secret of the mysterious Bane and the zones? What is the Eye of God? Enough information is presented for the reader to come to several different conclusions, but the author leaves some of these answers pleasingly ambiguous. There is certainly plenty of scope for a sequel or further books in the same setting.

Terminal World (*****) is superbly well-written with great characters and a fiendishly intriguing mystery. It is a mixture of old-school planetary romance, hard SF, the New Weird and steampunk, all tied up in one rich and enjoyable package. Reynolds tries something new here and it pays off, delivering one of his very best novels to date. Terminal World will be published in the UK on 15 March 2010 and in the USA on 1 June 2010. The absolutely gorgeous UK cover art can be seen in its full glory here. Reynolds' next work will be the 11K Trilogy, which explores humanity's development over eleven thousand years of future history.

FlashForward by Robert J. Sawyer

A group of scientists conduct a cutting-edge experiment at the CERN facility on the French-Swiss border. At the precise moment the experiment begins, every single human being in the world blacks out. For two minutes they experience a lucid vision of the world as it will be in 2030, twenty-one years from now, before returning to the present. In those two minutes thousands of people were killed as planes crashed on take-off or landing, people fell down stairs and cars crashed.


For the scientists, other questions are raised. One saw himself with a woman other than his fiance, and becomes intrigued by her identity. Another saw only blackness and discovers through others' visions that he was murdered, and becomes obsessed with preventing this event. But can time be altered, and can - or should - the experiment be repeated?

FlashForward is a science fiction novel by the Nebula and Hugo Award-winning Canadian author Robert J. Sawyer, originally published in 1999. It's a high-concept book which the blurb terrifyingly likens to Michael Crichton, although thankfully baselessly. It also serves as the basis for the current new American TV show of the same name, the arrival of which was the catalyst for the book's recent re-release.

This is a very old-school SF novel where the author has come up with an excellent premise and sets about exploring it and setting up an interesting storyline based around the mystery, somewhat at the expense of characterisation, which is where I'm guessing the Crichton comparisons come into play. Luckily, the book actually features some interesting and sympathetic characters rather than just author-insertion heroes and strawmen opponents, but the characters are not developed very far, serving as they do more as a simple POV on the unusual scientific phenomena and its ramifications. This isn't an overt criticism - in-depth character-building is simply not the book's goal - but it does make the book feel a lot older than its ten years would indicate.


Putting that to one side, the book is a pretty good SF story, fast-paced with lots of intriguing ideas. One slight problem is that it was written in 1999 and set ten years in the future, so it's set this very year but a lot of the ideas in it (such as the holographic Windows 2009) haven't come to pass, dating the book before it's out of its first decade. However, some of the ideas discussed in the book, particularly at the end, can actually explain this, so it's not a huge issue.

The exploration of the premise is mostly well-handled, although it takes a while for the author to address some of the questions the reader may be asking immediately after the incident takes place (it takes quite a while before someone thinks about checking CCTV footage taken during the incident, for example), and in some areas actually goes into areas which the reader may not have immediately considered (for example, what happened to animals during the event?). The result is an interesting puzzle which the author provides some possible, but not necessarily definitive, answers for during the unexpectedly epic climax.

FlashForward (***½) is a readable and effective old-school SF novel which comes up with a great idea, explores it intelligently, and doesn't outstay its welcome. Those looking for in-depth characters or themes should probably look elsewhere, but for a decent and easy SF read, this book does its job well. It is available now in the UK and USA.

Tome of the Undergates by Sam Sykes

Lenk is a man who commands a company of adventurers. Well, 'commands' is perhaps the wrong word. His company consists of Gariath, a dragonman who has vowed to die in glorious battle and regards human as vermin; Katiara, a shictish archer who regards human as vermin; Denaos, a thief who regards himself as vermin and is quite happy about it; Dreadaeleon, a mage with an impressive ego; and Asper, a priestess and healer with confidence issues. They spend all of their time insulting and threatening to kill one another.


Lenk's team-management skills are put to their test when his band is hired to escort an important churchman on a long ocean voyager. Attacks by pirates and strange sea creatures lead to the revelation that their mission could determine the fate of the world, and when a powerful magical artefact is stolen and taken to a remote island, Lenk's team reluctantly (less reluctantly when the fee is mentioned) sets out to recover it.

Tome of the Undergates (not Tomb of the Undergarments as I initially misread the title) is the debut novel by American author Sam Sykes, and is one of Gollancz's big fantasy debuts for 2010. Having hit big previously with Scott Lynch and Joe Abercrombie, Gollancz have great form for their debut fantasy authors and if their more recent debuts (Stephen Deas and Robert Redick) have not been quite in the same league, they have remained highly readable and enjoyable.

Unfortunately, I don't think Tome will be generating the hoped-for reception either. This is a troubled novel with a number of big problems that made getting through it quite difficult. That said, it also has some excellent points that ultimately made the journey worthwhile.

The first problem is that whilst the individual characterisation is fine - these are memorable and vivid characters - their interrelationships are mind-bogglingly tedious. These guys hate one another. I don't mean in the "Not liking one another to start with but learning to get along and ultimately respecting each other," way of say Belgarion's companions in The Belgariad or Legolas and Gimli in Lord of the Rings, I mean that they want to kill one another and threaten to do so one every fricking page, at least through the first half or so of the book. Why these characters haven't all killed one another by the halfway point of the book is a total mystery, and the revelation that this band has been hanging out and working together for a year is totally implausible, especially since two of them are non-human creatures who hold that humans are all vermin and all of them deserve to die in agony. They threaten one another with physical violence and death on every single page they appear for over 300 pages (this is not even remotely an exaggeration), even whilst in mid-battle fending off hordes of enemies. It's quite funny, yes, but only because it's so silly. It reminded me of being a DM trying heard the campaign along whilst all the players want to do is sit around and make insinuations about one another's sexuality and their relationships with their mothers. It's funny for a bit but the joke wears thin after the first ten minutes or so.

Another major problem is the book's pacing, which is problematic. The book opens with a sequence at sea where there is a big fight and our 'heroes' learn about the plot from the Expositionary High Priest and are given their mission to go and retrieve the missing magical item. This sequence, mostly consisting of a shipboard battle, takes up a mind-boggling two hundred pages. I am honestly impressed at this, as not even R.A. Salvatore or Steven Erikson can keep up one single battle sequence going for two hundred pages, especially one where all of the 'good guys' spend every page threatening to kill one another in graphic detail whilst fending off the enemy hordes. The amount of carnage is genuinely impressive, but it has to be said gets rather old quite quickly.

Once this sequences is concluded, the book picks up. Things move somewhat more quickly as our team of protagonists have to explore an island and then a large temple for signs of the bad guys, and there is an impressive left-field curveball about three quarters of the way through the book when a hitherto unknown faction reveals itself. The characters start to gel and work together better, and drop off from threatening to kill one another every page to merely once every three or four pages. There's some much more impressive combat sequences (thankfully merely in a single-figure count of pages) and the backstory and worldbuilding elements start being built upon in a more intriguing manner. There's also some bigger character revelations in the second half that makes the protagonists more layered and interesting.

The book ends with more of a pause than a cliffhanger, and by this point I was rather surprised to learn that I was reluctant to see the back of our band of mentally unstable psychopaths with the story still incomplete, so it's fair to say that the book eventually overcomes it's huge character and pacing issues with aplomb and ends up being skirting against being compelling.

Although I am still trying to work out what Geralt, Andrzej Sapkowski's Witcher of Rivia, is doing taking a doggy-paddle on the front cover.

Tome of the Undergates (***) is, eventually, an interesting story with a lot of mysterious elements that leave the reader wanting some answers. Getting to that point is an exercise in pure frustration, however, and less patient readers may not last the course. The book will be published on 15 April 2010 in the UK in hardcover and tradeback.

Is Science Fiction dying?

Mark Charan Newton asks on his blog if SF is dying and if fantasy is the way forwards.

The answer? No.

The slightly longer answer: Nope. The death of SF has been proclaimed loudly and in great pitying cries for forty or more years. Lord of the Rings was supposed to have killed off the genre, then later it was Donaldson and Brooks' introduction of the mass-market fantasy category in the late 1970s. SF has also supposedly almost killed itself off as well a few times, whether by the over-reliance on cyberpunk in the 1980s or the slight prevalence of 'quantum' works in the 1990s that didn't really engage the general public's imagination. More recently it is horror and urban fantasy which have been to blame. And SF is still here.

The first point to make is that SF has never done as well sales-wise as the other subgenres of speculative fiction, namely fantasy and horror, certainly not since the rise of those two fields as distinctive sales categories in the 1970s. Dune is the biggest-selling single SF novel of all time, selling 10 million copies since its publication in 1965. Lord of the Rings, which didn't hit the bestseller lists until around the same time, has outsold it by something like twenty times. The number of SF writers capable of hitting the bestseller lists, even in the 'good old days', has always been vanishingly small, and vastly outnumbered by those in fantasy and horror. This has not changed at all. This is of course related to the other point: since the emergency of fantasy and horror as separate fields, the number of authors in those fields and the number of books they write has almost always outstripped those of SF massively. In any given year the number of SF titles published will be a fraction of fantasy and horror, particularly urban fantasy at this time.

SF cannot do much better than it is at the moment for the simple reason that more people aren't writing SF in the first place.

Secondly, the truth of the matter is that British SF is doing very well indeed at the moment. American SF is not doing great, with very few up-and-coming new authors and some of the old guard (most notably Brin and Benford) not publishing new works recently. The feeling with American SF is that it has been conquered by media tie-ins and old-hand authors pumping out - often decent - new works in old series (like Weber and Bujold) rather than writers doing something new. There are some signs of life, like David Louis Edelman's trilogy and John Scalzi keeping the space opera subgenre ticking over, but broadly speaking, American SF is in a worrying state.

British SF on the other hand is doing excellently. We have Alastair Reynolds' new £1 million ($1.6 million at the time) contract and the news his books have recently passed the 1 million sales mark. Dan Abnett, Iain M. Banks and Peter F. Hamilton are all doing even better. Neal Asher, Justina Robson, Stephen Baxter, Richard Morgan, Charlie Stross, M. John Harrison, Paul J. McAuley and Adam Roberts' careers all appear to be in rude health. We have fresh young blood like Jaine Fenn and Gary Gibson who seem to have gotten off to terrific starts. Even new non-British SF authors like Hannu Rajaniemi (whose debut novel is published in 2010) are being eagerly talked-up by their British publishers.

Science fiction is a small field and, frankly, always has been. It's easy to say it's 'dying' just because fantasy and horror are so more noticeably prevalent, but that has always been the case. I haven't seen any evidence that British SF's sales are dropping alarmingly, and British genre publishers seem to still be be picking up new SF works and promoting them, which I would guess would not be the case if it was in freefall. The US field could be in better shape, yes, but hopefully that will come in time once a US publisher takes a chance and starts pushing SF in the same way the likes of Gollancz, Orbit, Tor UK and Voyager have been in Britain (and Pyr and Orbit USA are already making some moves in that direction in the US), at which point I think we will see American SF picking up as well.

Of course, what would be really helpful is if say one of those massive-selling urban fantasy/horror writers were to pen a science fiction novel that did really well. Or if a Pulitzer Prize-winning author wrote, for argument's sake, an alternate history novel. Or if a new, much-lauded author (helped by him being, say, the son of a major thriller writer) wrote an SF novel which was publicised as non-SF and sold really well and then he bigged up the genre in interviews. And of course, that's not getting into those mainstream authors who have openly committed genre and then tried to pretend otherwise (Atwood, James, Winterson), fooling exactly no-one along the way whilst still keeping SF viable.

SF remains a going concern and I think it will be around for a very long time to come.

Harlan Ellison volunteers to write new STAR TREK movie

Legendary SF short story and scriptwriter Harlan Ellison has offered to pen the new Star Trek movie, production on which is expected to start late next year for release in 2012. Ellison has some impressive form, having previously penned The City on the Edge of Forever, sometimes cited as the best episode of Star Trek ever.

This news is surprising, as Ellison has long been unhappy with the way Gene Roddenberry altered his original script and only recently settled a lawsuit with Paramount over payment issues from the 42-year-old episode. Ellison is a huge fan of JJ Abrams, director of the latest Star Trek movie, and is apparently keen to work with him.

No word on a response from Abrams or Paramount. Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman are still slated to work on the second Star Trek, movie, despite recently bailing on the third Transformers film.

The Cimmerian refutes Epic Pooh

Many years ago Michael Moorcock wrote an essay called 'Epic Pooh', in which he attacked and blasted J.R.R. Tolkien's works at great length, often using terminology which suggested he hadn't actually read the books or, if he had, fundamentally misunderstood them. His suggestion that The Lord of the Rings ignores death is at odds with the very common reading that the book is about nothing but death, and his notion that Tolkien 'glorifies' war is bemusing, given Tolkien's horror at the thought of mass conflict (a result of serving on the Somme) and his musings on that in the book during the passage of the Dead Marshes, or the discussion on if the human soldiers in Sauron's armies were really evil or just swept along into the war without much choice and would rather have just stayed at home in peace.

The Cimmerian - a fine website dedicated to the works of fantasy in general and Robert E. Howard in particular - has published an article which is an interesting rebuttal of many of Moorcock's points, including his factually dubious ones. It is a very interesting read, although it's a shame one of the most interesting lines of enquiry - that Moorcock's dislike of Tolkien but lauding of Pullman can only be explained by his disagreement with the politics of the former and agreement with the politics of the latter - is curtailed and relegated to the footnotes. It's an interesting read that goes beyond the, "Oh yeah, and so is your mum!" responses I've seen the 'Epic Pooh' essay generate in other quarters over the years to tackle the substance of Moorcock's argument. Interesting fodder for debate there.

The Arc of Truth: Part 2

Part 1.

Back in the United States, the early 1980s saw a change in the attitude of TV networks towards serialised television. This had been heralded by the arrival in 1978 of the glossy prime-time drama Dallas on CBS. Although technically a recurring series (divided into seasons of approximately 25 episodes per year), Dallas employed storytelling techniques more commonly encountered in much cheaper soap operas, with complex character relationships and long-running storylines spanning many episodes. Dallas was so successful that ABC launched its own derivation, Dynasty, in 1981. Both shows went on to tremendous success.


Also in 1981, the storytelling techniques of these shows were applied to the genre of the cop show. Steve Bocho and Michael Kozoll, Hill Street Blues differed from previous cop shows in that it did not focus on a 'crime of the week' format with the investigation and resolution of a criminal act being neatly packaged in 45 minutes. Hill Street instead had a number of different storylines unfolding across its seasons, with some stories self-contained in a single episode, other plots taking several episodes to come to fruition and some larger plots unfolding across and between seasons. The series also heavily focused on more realistic issues and stories with less interest in the cliches of genre television, and significantly less emphasis on 'good guys' and 'bad guys'. Hill Street proved enormously influential, with many shows picking on its storytelling devices. Bocho's own subsequent project, LA Law, took many of Hill Street's storytelling ideas and applied them to the court drama genre with great success, whilst St. Elsewhere applied a similar story arc structure to a hospital drama format (culminating in the infamously surreal final episode of the series).

In 1982, although with far more limited popular success, Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker developed Police Squad!, a comedy series starring Leslie Nielsen as cop Frank Drebin (and, famously, Rex Hamilton as Abraham Lincoln). The series was designed to deliberately target the cliches of cop show television and indeed seemed to delight in annoying the syndication channels by including a reference in every episode to every previous criminal case Drebin had investigated (so at the end of the sixth episode he name-checks all five previous criminals arrested in the five previous episodes). However, it is fair to say that it was probably Hill Street Blues that had a bigger impact on the rise of the arc show that followed.


Still, whilst shows like Hill Street were a big success, the more traditional episodic model still remained the norm, although recurring storyline elements were now slightly more common. Whilst the hugely successful Miami Vice was a big hit with its mostly episodic structure, some subplots (such as romances or the progress of a lead character's divorce) did unfold over multiple weeks.

In 1987 Star Trek: The Next Generation commenced airing in first-run syndication. With the show being sold immediately into syndication, there was even greater pressure than normal not to include ongoing story elements, but nevertheless some crept into the show. The pilot episode established romantic tension between Commander Riker and Counsellor Troi, and between Captain Picard and Dr. Crusher, and the hint of a suggestion (later thankfully forgotten) that Picard was actually the father of Crusher's son Wesley. Other early character points established included Lt. Worf's difficulties with being the first and only Klingon in Starfleet, Lt. Yar's difficult and painful upbringing causing problems with her attitude and Data's wish to become human. For the most part these elements were kept firmly in the background and brought forward only when needed for a particular episode, although Picard's slowly growing acceptance of Wesley Crusher competence and the latter's development into a full crewmember did qualify as a story arc of sorts.


A more ambitious arc was set in motion halfway through Season 1. With the new 'main' enemy, the Ferengi, not working out as planned, the writers decided to introduce a considerably more dangerous threat, an insectoid alien race who would incorporate a hive-like intelligence and ferocious appetite for consuming technology. These aliens would be established late in Season 1 as a growing threat that would also reintroduce the Romulans to the Star Trek universe after a lengthy absence. The original plan was for Season 1 to end with these new insectoid aliens launching a failed attack on Starfleet HQ, followed up by the Romulans and Federation coming to the brink of war due to the alien machinations, with the aliens being 'outed' in the Season 2 opener and the Federation and Romulans joining forces to defeat them once and for all. However, the prohibitive cost of the planned alien effects and then a writer's strike between Seasons 1 and 2 that led to the crippling of most of the second season effectively ruined these plans. The first episode became an unrelated stand-alone called Conspiracy, the second (The Neutral Zone) relegated the alien threat to a remote and vague rumbling of problems on the horizon and the third was dropped altogether, replaced by The Child, an old script for the abandoned Star Trek: Phase II project from the 1970s which introduced Guinan, a new and highly enigmatic regular character played by Whoopi Goldberg.

However, this 'pipe-laying' for an abandoned storyline nevertheless proved to be beneficial later on in Season 2. With the aliens behind the attack on the Neutral Zone colonies still unknown and Guinan's background still a mystery, the writers re-introduced the alien threat in a different (and cheaper) guise, as a race of cybernetically-enhanced humanoids called the Borg. Guinan's race was revealed to have been almost destroyed by them. With the Borg now aware of the Federation's existence, it was made clear that they would now be coming to destroy and assimilate the Federation, and periodic references were made throughout Season 3 to the Federation preparing new weapons and defensive measures. These were put to the test at the end of Season 3 when the Borg invaded the Federation in full force, annihilating a Starfleet battle group in the Federation's greatest military defeat in its history and assimilating Picard.

18 June 1990. The day The Next Generation finally stepped out from its predecessor's shadow.

Star Trek: The Next Generation had successfully transitioned from a purely episodic show into one that, whilst still mostly consisting of stand-alone episodes, was no longer afraid to reference previous episodes and employ real character development. It's story arcs were still unplanned, but the writers were able to use the wealth of history and backstory to generate new storylines that gave rise to the feeling of a much more connected whole. The benefits to this form of long-form storytelling was made clear in the Season 3 cliffhanger ending, The Best of Both Worlds, still widely regarded as the finest episode of Star Trek in its history. The use of a cliffhanger ending to a whole season, with the audience left reeling and anxiously discussing the show and waiting for its return over a whole summer, was a major success and quickly became something The Next Generation and its spin-offs (and later their rivals) used every year.

The Next Generation's embrace of this story-telling technique also allowed writers to pen episodes that weren't necessarily fully resolved at the end, with elements left open to set up future 'sequel' episodes. An early fan of this technique was a young staff writer named Ronald D. Moore, whose fourth episode, Sins of the Father, saw Lt. Worf dishonoured in the eyes of the Klingon Empire and forced to bear the shame for a crime apparently committed by his father. Worf discovered that the crime was actually committed by another Klingon noble family, the Duras, but this fact emerging would tear the Empire apart in civil war, so he accepted the dishonour for the sake of peace. This was obviously an unsatisfactory arrangement, and in the Season 4 episode Reunion Worf became a blood-enemy of the Duras family, leading to his alliance with their rival for the Chancellorship of the Empire, Gowron, and to the outbreak of full-scale civil war, in which Worf finally regained his honour and name. Moore orchestrated most of this storyline, writing Sins of the Father, Reunion and the Redemption two-parter, forming a single coherent piece of drama and character development that unfolded over two years (and, four years later, would later be revisited in Deep Space Nine).

A scene from Twin Peaks unusually not dripping in deep symbolism and visual clues to the show's central mysteries. Also, note a surprising lack of cherry pie in this shot.

Star Trek: The Next Generation proved to be a vanguard of a new wave of arc-based shows that finally began moving the format to the norm in the early 1990s. Twin Peaks, developed by David Lynch, was a massive success, with the gradually unfolding mystery of who killed Laura Palmer enthralling millions of viewers each week across the world. The symbolism and surreal imagery of the show was debated in numerous magazine letters pages and on very early Internet message boards. The show also built up a notable 'mythology' of creatures, characters, entities and recurring storyline elements. The benefits of Twin Peaks' 'myth-arc', with its fiercely loyal, obsessive fanbase, became clear. However, a weakness of arc-based storytelling also became clear. The casual viewers, although fascinated by the Laura Palmer mystery, were less intrigued by the secondary storylines. Once the Laura Palmer mystery was resolved early in Season 2, audience figures plummeted and the show was cancelled, leaving the hardcore fans frustrated with the ending (that saw the main character apparently trapped in some weird other dimension).

Whilst Twin Peaks' fate proved one possible headache caused by arc-based storytelling, another was demonstrated by the CBS show Beauty and the Beast, which ran from 1987 to 1990. In an updated version of the fairytale, Linda Hamilton played a district attorney named Catherine who discovered the 'world below', a group of people ostracized from society living a secretive life in tunnels below New York, whilst Ron Perlman played Vincent, a large disfigured man who became Catherine's protector. The first season comprised stand-alone episodes with the development of Catherine and Vincent's relationship as an ongoing story element. This element came more to the fore in Season 2, as did the arrival of recurring villains. Beauty and the Beast's key weakness was exposed, however, at the start of Season 3 when Linda Hamilton elected to leave the show. Catherine's violent murder and Vincent's quest for bloody vengeance proved a development more than the show could sustain, with a drop in audience numbers and cancellation swiftly following. Interestingly, one scriptwriter and producer on the show who was credited/blamed for the shocking death of a key character was a guy named George R.R. Martin, whose frustrations with the creative limitations of television led to him starting to write a novel a few months after the show's axing, a novel in which the key character is also unexpectedly and abruptly killed halfway through...

"So, is our show going to have a happy ending?"
"George R.R. Martin is one of our writers. What do you think?"
"Oh yeah."

Despite the relative failures of Beauty and the Beast and Twin Peaks, arc-based storytelling became more and more popular. NYPD Blue, a successor of sorts to Hill Street Blues, began airing in 1993 and also featured a reuse of the earlier show's use of short, medium and long-running storylines. Another cop show airing on NBC, Homicide: Life on the Street (based on a book written by a Baltimore reporter named David Simon), also featured similar storytelling devices in its attempt to depict crime and police work in a much more realistic manner than previously attempted.

1993 also proved to be the year that the story arc in science fiction television really kicked into overdrive with the arrival of The X-Files, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and apparently the first TV show, SF or otherwise, which had its story arc developed and pre-planned in full beforehand. This show was called Babylon 5, and we'll pick up on that next time.

Some great MALAZAN news

Ian Cameron Esslemont has handed in the manuscript for his third Malazan novel, Stonewielder. The book is currently planned for publication in late 2010.

The third novel takes place shortly after the events of Return of the Crimson Guard and will be set on the oft-mentioned, rarely-seen continent of Korel to the south of Malaz Island, and will partially involve the enigmatic Stormriders. Malazanempire.com will host an extract of the novel closer to the time.

2010 will also hopefully see the publication of Steven Erikson's tenth and final-in-this-story-arc Malazan novel, The Crippled God, although he is still writing it at the moment.