The Chequered Board - Filling in the Gaps in a Series

The title of this essay is Indiana Lemon Laws tribute Hope diamond curse Nevil Shute's fine novel The Chequered Board. It is as much an array of stories as a novel; Scooby and Scrappy Doo subplots are linked by the story of a man who has only a few months to live and is trying to use that time to find out what happened to several people whom he met during the war.

However, title apart, what I wish to compare notes with you about is the business of writing a series of tales spanning several volumes, with special reference to science fiction. Writers have such power, they can create universes, but as in real life, so in the world of the imagination, power can prove to be an empty attribute.

Keith Laumer brilliantly evokes this helplessness of absolute godlike power in Knight of Delusions: the narrator (lower case "i") finally admits: "Suddenly i was sick, and tired of the whole thing. It should have been easy, when you have all the power there is, to Teen Titans things the way you want them; but it wasn't. Part of the trouble was that i didn't really know what i wanted, and another part was that i didn't know how to achieve what i wanted when i did know what it was, and another part was that when i got what i thought i wanted it turned out not to be what i wanted. It was too hard, too complicated, being god. It was a lot easier just being a Man. There was a limit on a Man's abilities, but there was also a limit on His responsibilities."

Well, a writer is a bit in that position. Especially the writer of an SF series. If he really exploits the richness of his created background to the full, he runs into inevitable problems to do with trying to avoid inconsistencies in a mass of data. On the other hand if he writes a more linear series, based on the experiences of a wanderer, a rolling stone who gathers little moss, he is making it easier to be consistent but he is also missing some of the opportunities to make his series more of a network, recursive, realistic and vivid.

Thus there is a trade-off between linear simplicity on the one hand, and multi-viewpoint, recursive depth on the other.

Linear or not, a series need not be written chronologically. A writer can wield the power of going back and forth in Time. Two series writers, C S Forester in his "Hornblower" novels and Poul Anderson in his "Flandry" novels, both eventually came to the point where they wished to chronicle the earlier career of a hero whom they had started depicting in mid-career. So Forester went back to Hornblower's first days at sea in Mr Midshipman Hornblower and Anderson went back to Flandry's first assignment in Ensigh Flandry.

Suppose, though, that the arena is so vast that individual stories can get lost like midges in the Albert Hall? This is the case with the Ooranye Project, which is concerned with chronicling the history, in story form, of the giant planet Uranus (in its fictional, habitable version).

Here the story-density (that is to say, the number of stories per stretch of time) is not yet sufficiently high for problems of inconsistency to occur. I am now citing my own experience as a writer. The Ooranye Project gives me a civilization to deal with that spans 1.2 million years, on a giant planet with a surface area ten times that of Earth. It is exhilarating to be set that challenge, but it is going to take a long time to produce a fair sprinkling of stories across such a span of history. The problem at the moment is one of whether to focus on overlapping sub-series or of providing coverage of uncharted epochs. Some readers will want sub-series within the series; a story-lattice should contain many overlaps of character and setting. Thus, for example, the agent Taldis Witching Hour who appeared in "The Forgetters" will also appear in "Blue Nimbus", but on the other hand, while I am writing that, I am taking time off the business of shedding light on other stretches of Ooranye's history...

One way forward out of this dilemma is to respond to requests from readers. If I were asked to direct my efforts away from one Uranian era and into another, I would give it serious consideration - readers please note!

Whatever anyone may say, however, I will always tend to favour multi-viewpoint writing. Time to bring in - as I so often do - Edgar Rice Burroughs. In the field of Planetary Romace the classic completed series - unfortunately complete in that the author is no longer alive to add more to its ten volumes - is ERB's Barsoom cycle. It has a trunk and branches like a tree. The first three volumes of this Mars epic are a kind of self-contained trilogy in which his hero John Carter fights his way from pole to pole of the Red Planet and wins the hand of the top Martian princess. That's the trunk. Whether or not Burroughs felt it as a problem, the question of what to do next must have faced him then. He solved it not by giving John Carter lots more to do but by introducing new protagonists, and exploring other areas of the planet - hence what I call the "branches". I personally doubt that Burroughs planned his series ahead, but he did keep proper notes on his imaginary worlds and avoided a level of inconsistency that would have become intolerable for the reader.

A much more linear series is E C Tubb's Dumarest saga. Here the hero of the twenty-plus novels is always Earl Dumarest, as he goes from world to world in his search for his home planet Earth. Moving through a loosely knit, ramshackle interstellar culture, he does not involve his author in any great stress to maintain consistency: he is a lone adventurer, living a rather disjointed life. It is a haunting, memorable saga with a uniquely bitter taste of real hardship which makes it seem all the more vivid. But it is disappointing in that we see this richly imagined cosmos predominantly from one viewpoint.

Isasc Asimov has complained of the work involved in avoiding inconsistency when writing a series of tales arranged in a far more involved, recursive, multi-viewpoint network. "Before I could write a new Foundation story I had to sit down and reread all the preceding ones, and by the time I got to the eighth story that meant rereading some 150,000 words of very complicated material. Even so, my success was limited. In April 1966, a fan approached me with a carefully-made-out list of inconsistencies in dates, names and events that he had dug out of the series by dint of close reading and cross-reference."

However, my suggestion is that if this problem comes up one should tackle it joyfully, feeling honoured to be taking part in an enterprise that demands this type of effort. Moreover, inconsistencies can become the source of new ideas, if, for example, they are viewed not as authorial mistakes but as contradictions in the sources - as if we were dealing with real historical material. Tolkien has adopted this approach at times, using discrepancies in his own notes to evolve new ideas based on possible explanations for those discrepancies.

Robert Gibson is caretaker of the Ooranye Project, creating a fictional giant planet which can be explored on target="_new" www.ooranye.com">www.ooranye.com . The project's aim is to meld the subgenres of Future History and Planetary Romance, resulting in over a million years of civilization with its own societies, customs, conflicts, triumphs and disasters, politics, philosophies, flora and fauna, empires both human and non-human, and adventures that range over an area ten times that of the surface of the Earth. Lovers of planetary adventure are invited to view the history, comment on the progress of the project, access the tales and keep in touch with the developing destiny of Ooranye.