Prequels and the New Year
Happy 2014 to you all, with a special nod to my Thursday Tangents collaborator, Alan Robson, and his wife Robin, who did me the kindness of reassuring me that the 2014 would indeed arrive, since it already had in New Zealand.
The New Year is both a time for thinking forward and – as that perennial favorite “Auld Lang Syne” reminds us – to look back. That, combined with the novel I finished reading just a few days ago, started me thinking about prequels.
A Couple Prequels
I’m not certain when the word first appeared. “Prequel” isn’t in that standard reference Webster’s 3rd International Dictionary, but, then again, my copy has a copyright date of 1971. Nonetheless, as recently as forty years ago, the term “prequel” was not in common use. “Sequel,” by contrast, has roots going back to Middle English.
A prequel is different from a flashback in that a flashback is set within what, in the context of the work, is the “present.” Flashbacks provide information to help the reader (or viewer) understand present action. This is true even if they make up the majority of the work. A great example of this is Roger Zelazny’s novel Lord of Light, which is, effectively, a series of flashbacks. These both provide a context for present action and serve to create a considerable amount of suspense since, despite his many attempts, the main character’s carefully crafted rebellions have always ended in failure. Dare the reader hope that the present attempt has any better chance?
By contrast, a prequel is a work that is set in the past of already available works. The prequel I just finished reading is Starhawk by Jack McDevitt. Starhawk is set when Jack’s recurring character, Priscilla “Hutch” Hutchins, is a newly minted interstellar spaceship pilot. It’s a good read. McDevitt cannot be accused of overwriting. Indeed, sometimes his prose is so spare I want more. Despite this, he does a great job of creating a living, breathing universe. Most chapters end with something that fills out the larger picture. News headlines are popular, but sometimes the reader gets to eavesdrop on chatroom conversations. Also included are excerpts from Hutch’s personal journal. Starhawk is a successful prequel because it works for people like me who have read all the other “Hutch” books, yet could also be a good introduction to the series for those who haven’t yet had the pleasure.
Prequels aren’t easy to write because the writer must be careful not to violate what has gone before. Starhawk works because by the time in her life when McDevitt introduced Hutch, she was already a skilled pilot with many flights behind her. It’s reasonable that she isn’t obsessed with these events, dramatic as they are. They’re part of the larger context of her life.
The Stephanie Harrington novels that I’ve written with David Weber (Fire Season and Treecat Wars) are a different sort of prequel. They aren’t prequels to Stephanie’s life – indeed A Beautiful Friendship starts when Stephanie is only eleven. We couldn’t go much further back without writing books like “Stephie Learns to Read” or “Stephie Gets Her First Pet.”
Nonetheless, the Stephanie Harrington books are prequels to the events in the mainline Honorverse novels. (Stephanie is Honor’s ancestor, a several times great-grandmother.) One of the biggest challenges we faced was keeping both technology and human/treecat elements in line with what had been presented in Weber’s other works. Sometimes this was easy. Other times we had to put in a lot of thought as to why some development or another wouldn’t have been discovered in Stephanie’s time, but had to wait for Honor’s time. Given that there are several hundred years between, we had quite a challenge in front of us. Still, I think the stories worked pretty well.
Another challenge was that Weber had already mentioned certain events in Stephanie’s life in the Honor novels. An aficionado of the Honorverse will already have a sense of some of the major events coming up in Stephanie’s life. However, when we wrote about her, we had to “forget” what we knew and have Stephanie pursue her various goals with no idea that she would be someone remembered and respected in the far future.
Sometimes a work that wasn’t created as a prequel can be presented as such. That’s what has happened with Peter Jackson’s movies built around the events of J.R.R. Tolkien’s novel, The Hobbit. The Hobbit was actually written before the Lord of the Rings trilogy. However, the movies, with their inclusion of all the extra material taken from other of Tolkien’s works, transform the slender novel into a massive prequel to the grand events that will come. Is this a good idea? I haven’t seen the movies, so I can’t say. However, I will admit that I probably would have seen the movie if it had just been one movie telling the relatively compact story of when a certain hobbit went “there and back again.”
Writers of prequels face stumbling blocks that writers of sequels do not. For one, the reader knows the main character is not at risk of life or limb. Another is the danger of including too many “cute” moments explaining various quirks in the characters’ personalities. In Starhawk, McDevitt lets us know how Priscilla Hutchins came to be known as “Hutch.” While this never really concerned me (after all, who wouldn’t prefer “Hutch” as a nickname over, say, “Prissy”), it was sort of fun. However, I felt that the Indiana Jones prequel/flashbacks that explained how Indie got his nickname, his hat, and his fear of snakes turned the character into a joke, rather than what he had seemed – a well-developed person with likes and dislikes.
On the other hand, a good prequel can fill in things a reader has longed to know about a character or setting that could not be put into the original novel or film without creating a dull info-dump. For example, the Star Wars franchise has successfully produced material about the Clone Wars and other past events that has nicely fleshed out the universe. A good prequel can even mend problems in the original story. One of my favorite anime series, SaiYuki, had a distinctly weak ending. This past year, three episodes titled SaiYuki Gaiden filled in the missing parts. I have to admit, I was very pleased to have some of my guesses confirmed and to finally feel that particular story arc had been given a solid ending – this despite the fact that I knew from later events that the ending could not be a happy one.
So, how do you feel about prequels? What are the good ones? Which are the terrible? Are there any that you feel are the best place to start the series, rather than the original novel or film?
