Breaking News: That Magic Board Game
So far we have one teaser slide and no real details except that details will be forthcoming the day after my
usual Wednesday slot. Oh yes, and a whole lot of speculation on Reddit, if
that’s your thing. The “Strategy Board Game” line and the debut at Essen SPIEL suggest a more
hardcore or “Euro” board game experience than the fluffy family fun of Hasbro’s main board game lines, in turn suggesting that this is not particularly
well-connected to any future Magic movie. This is an interesting announcement nonetheless, and it looks like the trend of Magic merchandising continues
apace. I’m sure I’ll get sick of it at some point, but after years of comparative neglect where Magic novels were about the only outlet, I’m enjoying this
ride.
Word Counts
In my previous article, I commented on the wide range of media
Magic has used to tell stories, inspired by the initial announcement that there would be no e-book for Khans of Tarkir and that the story would be told
through the official Magic: The Gathering Web site instead, specifically Uncharted Realms. In my article, I wrote:
” The Creative team is morphing and growing to adapt to two
worlds per year. Marginal items like Magic e-books — and yes, Vorthoses, we must have been marginal to lose them — get lost in such turbulent times.”
Last week Doug Beyer announced more
details and went into some depth about the decision to pull the plug on the e-books. The thinking behind the decision was mostly as I called it, including
marginal sales and the stress the e-books were putting on the creative team. Mr. Beyer also laid out a vision of a more focused Uncharted Realms that used
a great deal of its time to tell the plane’s big story.
Out of curiosity (and because I wanted to get a feel for how Khans of Tarkir’s main story might be told), I took word counts of the last few Uncharted Realms tales.
“Way of the Mantis” – 1,715 words.
“Taigam’s Scheming” – 1,867 words.
“Sorin’s Revelation” – 2,577 words.
“Awakening the Bear” – 1,835 words.
“The Madness of Sarkhan” – 2,121 words.
Those word counts are right in line with the lengths of most articles in the Magic strategy-and-other universe, mine included. The only time I go beyond
the length of “Sorin’s Revelation” is when I’m doing a set review, like my recent take on Khans of Tarkir’s flavor. Uncharted
Realms has its own belly-buster columns; ”
Planeswalker’s Guide to Khans of Tarkir, Part 1
” clocks in at over 7,000 words!
Let’s assume a nice, round 2,000 words per unit of Uncharted Realms Khans of Tarkir Main Plotline (that’s URKoTMP for short…actually, let’s just go with
Main Plotline). There are 52 weeks in a year, but the two weeks at the end are Wizards of the Coast holiday time, so they won’t count. A quarter of the
“Khans” storytelling year will be dedicated to the 2016 Core Set, lopping off another twelve or thirteen possibilities. Take out another five weeks for the
Planeswalker’s Guides to Fate Reforged and whatever Dewey might end up being called, and that leaves 33 or 34 weeks of actual story time that could, in
theory, be dedicated to Tarkir alone.
There will be small stories as well as big though. “Way of the Mantis,” “Taigam’s Scheming,” and “Awakening the Bear” don’t directly touch on the main
thread the way “Sorin’s Revelation” and “The Madness of Sarkhan” do; they’re akin to the “Somewhere in America” sections of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, vignettes at some remove from the main plotline.
Let us suppose that twenty Uncharted Realms units go to the main plotline, including the Sorin and Sarkhan pieces. Twenty units times 2,000 words per unit
yields 40,000 words. That doesn’t sound like much, does it?
Actually, it meets the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America criterion for novel length,at least as far as the Nebula Awards go. Doug Beyer describes his e-bookThe Secretist as a ” three-part novella,” but I’m content to
call it a short novel. (I share Katherine Anne Porter‘s distaste forthe word “novella” and prefer “short novel,” as she called the three works collected in Pale Horse, Pale Rider. “Novella” is entrenched enough though,
that for clarity’s sake I will continue to use it in this article.)
The Uncharted Realms move has limited precedent within Magic’s universe, but there are real-world publishing models to look to in the past and present.
I’ll take specific looks at the treatment of novellas and the legacy of serialization to see how they could impact the way Khans of Tarkir’s story is told.
You Can Stand Under My Nove-ella…
In the 20th century novellas were wickedly difficult to sell in U.S. markets, whether authors selling to publishers or publishers selling to readers.
Stephen King, who had his own tangles getting four of his novellas published as Different Seasons, described the form as ”
an anarchy-ridden literary banana republic
,” too short to sell on their own and too long to publish in short-fiction magazines. (You might have heard of a few of the stories inDifferent Seasons. The first one was filmed as The Shawshank Redemption.)
There are plenty of workarounds for this trouble, of course, if one is willing to look hard enough. Perhaps the most common these days is using a novella
to anchor a collection of short stories. It’s the pattern James Joyce used for his collectionDubliners with ” The Dead,” a short novella of just under 16,000 words, as the
finale-centerpiece. Magic: The Gathering used this approach with the Shadowmoor anthology, in which “Ode to Mistmeadow Jack” is the
anchor story among a series of shorts set in the plane of Shadowmoor.
The multiple-novella route is proven, if sometimes awkward, as seen with the King and Porter collections. An unusual case of “multiple novellas” is Ayn
Rand’s Anthem, nowadays usually paired with its original British
version in galley proofs with Rand’s handwritten corrections.*
*(My suggestion for enjoying Anthem if you’re beyond secondary school? Read the British version through the corrections. It’s a far better work,
more detailed and expressive. In the American version, protagonist Equality 7-2521 is a flat “six feet” tall, whereas in the British version he is “six
feet one inch.” In a world where Equality 7-2521 is considered sinful because he has outgrown his fellows, that one inch makes all the difference! It’s
also striking to see how Ayn Rand could write in the 1930s, prior to the hard turn she made for her more didactic doorstopper novelsThe Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.)
Anthem
was published on its own in its initial go-round in the United Kingdom, and authors in Europe have had less trouble, historically, publishing novellas than
their stateside counterparts. Famous German-language novellas include Heinrich von Kleist’sMichael Kohlhaas, Thomas Mann’sDeath in Venice, and Franz Kafka’sThe Metamorphosis. George Orwell’s Animal Farm, a secondary-school favorite in British and World Literature
courses, clocks in at just under 30,000 words. Anyone who’s tackled The Stranger by French-language author Albert Camus knows it isn’t a
long work.
(Amusingly, Wikipedia terms The Stranger a “novel” despite a word count of just 31,000 words, while Joseph Conrad’sHeart of Darkness, at 45,000 words, gets the “short novel” and “novella” treatment in its opener. It’s one more piece of proof that folks can’t agree on what “novella” really means!)
Heart of Darkness
itself first was published in three chunks, so-called “serial” publication. In Ye
Olden Days, this was the way many now-acknowledged classics of literature were published first, including William Makepeace Thackeray’sVanity Fair, Gustave Flaubert’sMadame Bovary, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Serialized novellas and short novels
also were (and are) a staple of fantasy and science fiction magazines; Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, for instance, first saw print as a magazine serial
under a different title.
The Magic e-books The Secretist and Godsend both went the serial publication route, but with the digital-publication twist. As online
publications are not bound by the same length constraints as paper publishing — e-readers and computers do not magically grow huge if one downloads War and Peace — the novella has found electronic media friendly ground. It’s the combined flexibility of digital and serial
publication that opened the possibility for Magic e-books…and now offers the chance to tell Magic’s story through Uncharted Realms.
Words Count
What do the factors of “digital + serialization” (not to mention other specific factors such as “weekly installments” and ” shared universe“) suggest about the eventual shape of Khans of Tarkir’s story?
First, I’d like to point out that all of my talk about word counts notwithstanding, length has no correlation to how good or valuable a work is. A six-word
story may be over in three shakes of a Pomeranian puppy’s tail while still packing a
punch. (The ur-example, apocryphal but sometimes credited to Ernest Hemingway: ” For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”) Other works may span half a million
words or more, as with David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest or Ayn Rand’sAtlas Shrugged, to say nothing of the obsessively written chronicles of Henry Darger. What matters is whether it’s time well spent.
With that out of the way, let’s dig into the possible characteristics.
Brevity.
Not necessarily in the way you’d think, either, though certainly a work of 40,000 words can’t afford to waste time. One of the reasons Great Expectations by Charles Dickens is so praised, in a Wikipedia line
citing Charles Dickens A to Z by Paul
B. Davis, is that the short weekly chapters imposed a discipline on each unit of story, allowing little time to wander. This meshes with my personal
experience of the novel; it may have a wide overall scope, but it doesn’t waste time with digressions and each chapter does what it should and nothing
more.
Similarly, the units of Uncharted Realms story can’t waste time. If one treats a work such as “Sorin’s Revelation” as a chapter rather than an individual
story, it’s a focused chapter to be sure, beginning with Sorin’s arrival on Tarkir and following him until the titular revelation. “The Madness of Sarkhan”
takes a far different form, the first-person narrative of a man who hears a dragon’s voice inside his head, but again the focus is fairly tight.
Many facets.
Unlike a novella or short novel, which typically will commit itself to a single point of view, the small amount of core Khans of Tarkir story we’ve already
seen shows a willingness to express itself in different ways. The author Adam Lee is not the author Jennifer Clarke Wilkes; a third-person narrative (Sorin
is “he”) is not a first-person narrative (Sarkhan is “I”).
This indicates both a shared universe with multiple authors working in the same world, as
opposed to the single-author e-books of Doug Beyer and Jenna Helland, and a composite novel or “short story cycle” approach, wherein a number of short
stories accumulate to form a (short, in this case) novel. One famous cycle from collegiate and advanced secondary-school courses in U.S. literature is
Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.
Revisions in the future?
I suspect, though I have no way of proving, that the story of Khans of Tarkir eventually will be compiled and published as an e-book, either given away for
free or sold for a nominal sum. (Who wants to do all that searching and clicking to get the full story?) If this happens, likely there will be a revision
stage before the e-book publication.
I don’t believe there will be any new stories added, because that would go against Doug Beyer’s all-there-in-Uncharted-Realms statement, but on the other
hand, when stories are told serially and under tight deadlines, slips and mistakes happen. (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle couldn’t keep his Sherlock Holmes canon
straight, leading to the Sherlockian Game.) It was common practice in the Victorian era to edit a serially published work before it went on
sale in bound volumes, and such a check-over wouldn’t surprise me in the case of an eventual, theoretical Khans of Tarkir e-book.
Whether such an e-book bundle happens in the future or not though, the fact remains that Vorthos readers will have a Khans of Tarkir story in the end, and
after the loss of the potential Innistrad novel, that’s reason enough to celebrate. Bring it on, Uncharted Realms!