The Change - Tales of Downfall and Rebirth

Zusatztext Praise for S.M. Stirling and his Novels of the Change “Absorbing.”— San Diego Union-Tribune “[A] richly realized story of swordplay and intrigue.”— Entertainment Weekly “Nobody wrecks a world better than S. M. Stirling! and nobody does a better job of showing that people remain people! with all their high points and low! in the wreckage.”—Harry Turtledove! New York Times bestselling author of Supervolcano: Things Fall Apart “Vivid…Stirling eloquently describes a devastated! mystical world that will appeal to fans of traditional fantasy as well as post-apocalyptic SF.”— Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Stirling is a perfect master of keep-them-up-all-night pacing! possibly the best in American SF! quite capable of sweeping readers all the way to the end.”— Booklist (starred review) Informationen zum Autor S. M. Stirling is the New York Times bestselling author of many science fiction and fantasy novels including the most recent novels of Emberverse  The Golden Princess ! The Given Sacrifice ! A Meeting at Corvallis ! The Protector´s War ! and Dies the Fire . A former lawyer and an amateur historian! he lives in the Southwest with his wife! Jan. INTRODUCTION The Change as Setting and Secondary World There are a number of perils you can encounter when building a fictional world, particularly if you intend to set a number of stories in it. Running out of story you really want to tell, which induces boredom, is one—Arthur Conan Doyle eventually desperately tried to kill off Sherlock Holmes, whose fame was obscuring the historical novels that he felt (with some justification, they’re very good) were his best work. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ reputation would probably be much higher if he’d written only the first three or four books in his Tarzan and John Carter of Mars series, though more with the former than the latter. Africa was wall-to-wall Lost Races and Lost Cities by the 1940s, and you’d think some would show up from the cabins of the Imperial Airways planes flying over it by then. Which brings up another potential problem: simply running out of space , even if you want to continue and have stories to tell. Patrick O’Brian ran into this problem with his wonderful Aubrey-Maturin series, set during the Napoleonic Wars; eventually he was reduced to unofficially splitting the year 1813 into, as it were, 1813a and 1813b—sort of alternate history versions of the penultimate year! The wars against Napoleon spanned more than a decade; if you throw in the beginning of the struggle against Revolutionary France it covers a full generation—around twenty-five years, with one short truce. Men like Stephen Maturin and “Lucky” Jack Aubrey would have spent their entire adult careers in the period between the fall of the Bastille and Napoleon’s exile to Saint Helena, and by the end of it most of their subordinates would have been born into the wars. That’s more than enough for a series of books! What tripped O’Brian up was simply that he didn’t anticipate how many books he would be writing with this (quite large) cast of characters, and so passed over a good many years as he skipped between the time periods of the earlier books. I took this lesson to heart when starting the novels of the Change, what some call the Emberverse. It tied into another desire, that of making a world that felt ample . Even if you’re worldbuilding for a single novella, it should feel “big,” not fading into nothingness beyond the tight frame, not “thin.” The characters should be aware of an entire universe around them, full of people and things going about their own business. Look at our own world, even in this age of globalization when there’s scarcely a city on the planet where you can’t ask directions or order lunch in English. How...

Product details

• Authors: S. M. Stirling, S. M. (EDT) Stirling
• Publisher: Penguin Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Release: 02.06.2015, delayed
• EAN: 9780451467560
• ISBN: 978-0-451-46756-0
• No. of pages: 656
• Series: Change Series; Change Series
• Subject: Fiction > Science fiction, fantasy