On the Phenomenon of the Back-Heavy Trilogy

[roadrunnertwice]

I'm just writing this up because I need a stable place to link to whenever I talk about This Thing, which is maybe slightly too often. Some of this will be plagiarized from my previous scattered writings about it down in the ^didread tag.

TRILOGIES: Everyone loves putting three book-shaped objects in a row, that's just fuckin math. But there are a few ways to do that:

• The One Continuous Scroll Trilogy. Books one and two end on cliffhangers, and the divisions between books feel like act breaks within a single production; some sub-plots resolve in each volume, but the superstructure dominates. Tried and true! You just had a long-ass story to tell, and either the realities of the market or the vagaries of numerology dictated that it be split up into a pleasing number of delivery units.
  • The Broken Earth (N.K. Jemisin)
  • The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien)
  • The Imperial Radch (Ann Leckie) (* on further thought, this is really halfway between continuous and books-shaped.)
  • Spiritwalker (Kate Elliot)
  • Touchstone (Andrea Höst)
  • The Fall of Ile-Rien (Martha Wells)
  • Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn (Tad Williams; suggested by valrus. Third book got published as two paperbacks because it was too huge, lol.)
• The Three Book-Shaped Books Trilogy. Each book begins and resolves its own story. Later volumes build on the earlier ones, and the accretion of context adds up to more than the sum of the parts, but the superstructure seems emergent instead of totalizing. (Sorry, it's too late in the day to say things elegantly, so I'm reverting to undergrad-ese.) If anything, this is even more tried and true! It's really just a stack of sequels that decided three was a good number to stop at. The later books don't need to be comprehensible without the earlier ones; this taxonomy is just about the pacing and dramatic structure, not about the dependency graph.
  • All of William Gibson's trilogies (Big Ant, Sprawl, Bridge, throwing out a guess here that he's gonna stop at three for the Jackpot books too)
  • The original three $OBJECT of Shannara books (Terry Brooks)
  • Small Change (Jo Walton)
  • Machineries of Empire (Yoon Ha Lee)
  • The first three Raksura books (Martha Wells) (Yeah, there was another [excellent] duology after that, but the first three function as a coherent unit.)
• The Back-Heavy Trilogy. Start with one standalone, book-shaped book, with tight plotting and characterization and some deep-but-restrained worldbuilding; follow it with a much larger and more sprawly sequel, split into two volumes (where book 2 ends on a cliffhanger).
  • Sabriel / Lirael-Abhorsen (Garth Nix)
  • Shades of Magic (V.E. Schwab)
  • The Matrix / Reloaded-Revolutions (the Wachowskis)
  • The first three Commonweal books (Graydon Saunders) (debatable, since the series kept going, but I think there's a good case for it.)
  • The California Bones series (Greg Van Eekhout)
  • The Hunger Games series (Suzanne Collins)
  • The Lumatere Chronicles (Melina Marchetta)

Here's my theory: The first two types are neutral, but the Back-Heavy Trilogy is inherently dangerous, offering most authors a tempting slope to wipe out and eat shit on.

There are exceptions! In my list above, I think Eekhout and Saunders somehow threaded the needle. I never got around to the later Hunger Games books (saw the second movie, which was sufficient for taxonomy but not for judging ultimate results), so maybe Collins did too; no opinion. But most of the time, that sprawly second story has major plot and pacing issues that can't be addressed without major story surgery.

The Matrix movies are probably the most iconic example of the back-heavy hazard, but I don't think they're the most instructive, largely because of how hard it is to trace agency and cause and effect in anything that happens in Hollywood. Personally, I think Sabriel / Lirael-Abhorsen is the case that makes the problem most clear:

• The first book is a model of restraint and concision, and it swings its limits like a sword. Every time there's not enough time or space to explain something, that absence of explanation gets redirected as artistic elision, a chunky wedge of negative space that makes the core silhouette fuckin' pop. The fundamental act of elegance is to CUT, and Sabriel cuts extravagantly.
• The second doublebook throws restraint and concision out the window. Without those time/space limits, there's nothing to force a reckoning/clarification/distillation, a revelation of what can't be cut. And without that clarity, the book flails.

It's easy to imagine commercial explanations for why authors and other creators get nudged into the back-heavy structure; who knows how a trilogy's going to do, and it's better to make sure the first book can stand alone just in case; if the numbers don't work for picking up the rest of the trilogy, maybe the one book can still find its audience from time to time on the backlist, in a much simpler fashion than an unfinished trilogy might.

It's less easy to figure out how to rebalance after that first border gets drawn, but I kind of want to blame numerology for that. Three is a magic number, right? But maybe there's only two excellent books worth of content in this story.

And I have absolutely no theory of why some rare instances of the back-heavy trilogy DO work.

Edit: Later, in my review of Pacific Fire/Dragon Coast, I think I started figuring some things out about what can make this structure work.

Anyway, I could use some help adding to those lists above. Anyone want to call out some examples?

Comments

[sporky_rat]

I think Sabriel, Lirael, and Abhorsen all work, but when you add Clariel and Goldenhand it gets so unwieldy.

Still love those three though. I suspect part of it is my love for Mogget and the Dog.

(And Hunger Games worked pretty well, the whole 'who does Katniss love' bull aside.)

[roadrunnertwice]

Sure, of all my back-heavy examples, probably only the Matrix movies are widely agreed to have failed; the Abhorsen books and the Shades are beloved for good reasons and their second stories DID accomplish some compelling stuff. (I loved Lirael’s unschooling plotline and the dog.) But I found the pacing problems really frustrating, and can’t help but imagine what a tighter version of that story could have achieved.

[conuly]

(And Hunger Games worked pretty well, the whole 'who does Katniss love' bull aside.)

Assuming you understand the story that the author was going for - a whole ton of people were pissed off at book 3 because it turns out that going through the Hunger Games not once, but twice, is traumatic and people suffering from PTSD on top of more PTSD are often unpleasant and act oddly. It's fine if all those other ancillary characters are traumatized, but oh gosh, not the protagonist.

At least, that's how I sum up their objections to Katniss' characterization and/or behavior.

Okay I apparently had a bit to say

[sporky_rat]

I couldn't understand why they were all over her about her romantic choices when honestly the best thing for her mental state was to hang out a bit with Johanna and heal some.

I understand that the people of the Districts (and a lot of people here in meatspace) don't get the trauma of PTSD, but good gravy, Batman, they were awful towards her.

Finnick was cool though, he got it. So did Johanna. I find it soothing that the people who got the trauma were people who'd done it before. Haymitch was okay with it too, once he got his head on again. (There are worse places for his head to have been, and all of those Victors had so much trauma, I am impressed by the not-Woody Harrelson actors.)