I like to think that I'm a pretty easy person to birthday shop for: Get me a book in something I'm interested in and that goes down well. Still, my family prefers to do things a bit more specific, so I try to keep my Amazon wishlist updated. This birthday, with it being in quaran-times and without the ability to do the annual tradition of going to a movie to celebrate my ageing up, I spent a quiet evening at home with the family, doing essentially the same thing that I've done with them for over two months. Though the party wasn't particularly memorable, the situation was, and I'm grateful that my family and I can have moments like that despite the strangeness of life in the spring of 2020.
One of the things that I put on my wishlist was a Magic: The Gathering book called War of the Spark: Ravnica. My son bought it for me, and I finished reading it yesterday. It is…good? And bad? It's complicated… What Worked As a teenager, my friend, Mark Wyman, was big into the Rifts TTRPG. He had a novel set in that world which he liked. I asked him if I could read it, but he didn't recommend it. After all, I wouldn't know what they were talking about. I figured that I'd be fine--it's a science fiction world, and I'd read quite a bit of science-fiction with weird worlds and weird things. I tried reading it anyway, and returned it to him after about twenty or so pages. It was just too hard to deal with how much was assumed of me as a reader. When it comes to these types of spin-off sff novels, there's always a bit of a problem with lore. How much backstory for characters, events, or locations should be provided? How much can the author expect of her readers in terms of preexisting knowledge? What kinds of details are necessary, especially if it's an art-heavy kind of IP? In the case of War of the Spark, Greg Weisman has a lot of ground to cover, as the story's premise is, for lack of a better comparison, the entirety of Endgame. I mean, Endgame doesn't really work that well as a movie qua movie, does it? (I haven't seen it since it came out, so I may be wrong about this.) That is, the emotional stakes, the personal desires, the consequences of the Snappening…all of that is foreground that other movies established. So Endgame has a really strong foundation that assumes a great deal of investment from the audience. (For the record, I think it really did pay off.) So how does this connect to Weisman's book? Well, there was an intricate plan to stop the Big Bad (an Elder Dragon named Nicol Bolas) from attaining god-like power. The book begins with the aftermath of that plan's failure. (See? Kind of a lot like Endgame.) The events of the next day as the heroes of the Magic: The Gathering universe (called Planeswalkers) scramble to fix the situation fills the rest of the novel. As far as it goes, this worked well…but only because I'm an ardent enough fan to know the mythos, lore, locations, and even abilities of a great many of the characters. (Weisman head-hops from Planeswalker to Planeswalker, going through at least a dozen different ones in the course of the story.) I knew what Jace Beleren was capable of doing, I knew he had a relationship with Lillianna Vess (I didn't know about his fling with Vraska, which was a surprise), and I knew his commitment to protecting the Multiverse from destruction. The card game from which the book is based has a rich and complicated lore that comes through all sorts of different avenues, including art books (of which I own five), novels, and articles, and more. So there's a lot of information that a reader has to absorb before this story can make sense. And, in a lot of ways, that makes this book an excellent piece of fan-service. Everyone gets a bit of the spotlight, with the ten different guilds of Ravnica participating in one form or another. Planeswalkers galore fill out the ranks, and the stakes are tangible. The action is persistent, but there are still moments of connection and emotional empathy--provided, of course, one already has an understanding of these characters. What Didn't Work I have to admit, I felt like I was reading the second book in the series, though: The web of intrigue and feelings that connected the Planeswalkers was already so advanced that I checked online a couple of different times to make sure that I hadn't picked up the wrong book. (There is a sequel, which I will likely buy at some point.) This sense of not-quite-knowing but being able to pick up enough of the pieces is a testament to Weisman's skill as a storyteller. Unfortunately, though I was able to figure out what happened before the book began as I read along, it meant that the reasons for people's behavior throughout much of the story I had to take for granted. I didn't know their specifics well enough to understand why everyone felt the way they did about, say, the betrayal of Vraska. By the end, yes, I got it. The result of storytelling this way, though, is that I watched the consequences of choices that I didn't understand until much later. That made the story feel out of order, and the ramifications of the pre-story actions weren't as strongly felt. Additionally, though I think Weisman tells the story well, his sentence-level writing is perfunctory and sometimes even bad. His pacing is cinematic--there are page-long chapters, as well as chapters that sprawl for a dozen pages--and that works well, but his descriptions are consistently inconsistent. This, of course, is part of the problem of adaptations: How much should one describe a character whose face is plastered on a thousands of copies of cards? Usually, Weisman will throw a single sentence--maybe two--about what a character looks like, focusing on the important details. Ajani is a leonin, so his head looks like a lion's. For players of the game, that's all that's needed. So it came as a surprise to see the loving and lengthy descriptions of the Cult of Rakdos. Multiple paragraphs were spent describing the dark, bloody atmosphere as some of the Planeswalkers made their way through it. The criticism isn't that the details of the Cult of Rakdos were expansive; it's that the rest were not. The inconsistency stood out to me. Going along with that, the various problems that the Planeswalkers needed to solve were done quickly, often within their short chapter. I understand the impulse: There's a lot of story here, so a focus on moving the plot forward was probably a good one. Unfortunately, that choice led to the book feeling skimpy. There were chapters that should've been an entire third of the novel. Trying to pack into 360 pages such an immense and complicated story with a dozen POV characters in a fantasy world (which are notorious for being longer, as there's more explanations needed for how the fantasy world works) is a task that might very well be impossible. Should You Read It? Weisman did his best--and it's an enjoyable romp that I'd recommend to Magic: The Gathering players--but that isn't enough to make it a good book. It's good at what it's trying to do, but I think there are enough dings and flaws in it to make it a book for Magic-lovers, rather than someone who's curious what a Magic: The Gathering book is like. (If you want one that doesn't require a lot of knowledge about the game, check out Arena. It's the first novel set in the game's universes, and though it takes some shortcuts, I found it an enjoyable read.) As far as a flat out recommendation, I'd say your mileage will absolutely vary. My younger brother will probably like it quite a bit (though I'm sure he already knows all the events that the book depicts anyway). I think my middle son will want to read it once he's done a bit more reading of the art books I own and played the game a little longer. But I don't think my mom's going to be interested in this one. This is not a review of the book, Brave New World. As I may be teaching that next school year, I'll save that effort for another day.
No, instead I'm talking about a new world that I've been working on. Since my birthday, I've been stewing on what I love about both Innistrad in the Magic: The Gathering world and Overwatch. A Venn diagram of the two doesn't have a lot of overlap: one is a dark, grim, vicious world filled with vampires, demons, devils, zombies, ghouls, werewolves, angels, and much more. The other is a video game with vibrant, bright, charismatic characters set in a near-future world and tells a story through subtle, in-world nods and extra-medial storytelling (comics and web-videos, for the most part). Tonally, they're hardly anything alike. And, with that in mind, why would I be so interested in such disparate things? As far as the tone is concerned, I think it's a matter of variety. I am an open anglophile and much of Europe continues to fascinate me. As far back as I can see, my family's roots are European (nearly 50% English, too), which connects me to the past in a personal way. Additionally, I've always been a werewolf fan to a certain extent--ever since I saw Michael Jackson's Thriller music video (and was convinced that dragging the garbage can out to the curb at night was how I would die, because the Michael Jackson werewolf was awaiting me in the darkness between my childhood home and the white picket fence). Zombies have been my bae since Resident Evil 2, and though vampires are kinda meh to me, the paradigm of angels versus demons, while maybe overdone in pop culture (according to agents' wish lists I've seen), are descendants to Paradise Lost. Toss in Innistrad's distinctive look of soaring cathedrals and Tudor-style houses and you've a perfect mix for my interests. Overwatch, on the other hand, is polar opposite: Bright and energetic, with an optimism that permeates the diverse crew, Overwatch is an addictive experience. The sets are reminiscent of Disneyland, and the carefully constructed yet thoughtful presentation makes the game immensely enjoying. Not only that, but the variety of the characters lends itself to continual exploration (even if I do main Ashe and Hanzo), and the diversity of races, languages, orientations, genders, and play styles are all exceptional. I've gushed about Overwatch before, so I'll let you follow the link if you want to know more. The point is, there's a lot to recommend Overwatch, not the least of which is the type of subtle storytelling that, I've come to learn, is something that I appreciate. I've found, in looking over my own fiction over the years, that I like to have small things matter in big ways later on. A letter that shows up early on in a novel will have an impact on how the story ends. What seems like a random detail of a pager at a restaurant is actually a deliberate action from one of the bad guys. Both Magic and Overwatch are games that focus on story happening outside of the main purpose of the hobby, giving them rich lore that is often elliptically or obliquely understood. The more that one dives into the extracurricular (as it were) lore, the more rewarding the game becomes. Since I write novels, I don't think I could easily pull off what happens in these games. Brandon Sanderson has his Cosmere and tons of tiny details that loyal fans will be able to see and obsess over, but those are almost all in-text. And, frankly, there's a lot of Sandersonian text to work through. While I like to pretend that I have the creative wherewithal to do something likewise, I probably don't--at least, not when I have a full-time job that taps a lot of my creativity and mental energy. So, I thought it might be interesting to pull some of my favorite things about Overwatch and Magic and turn it into an experiment of storytelling. I'm currently building a new world, one that has the danger and grimness of Innistrad, with the heroic, "gotta save the world" attitude of Overwatch in the hopes of getting to an enjoyable ending. However, to get to that ending (which could be inspired by Endgame, if I'm being honest), I want to get readers attached to characters quickly. So, I'm thinking of having five or six novelettes, which could be read in any order, all building toward a novella at the end that ties the stories all together and gives the big-arc story its conclusion. That way, rather than spending multiple years with a group of characters to build toward an ending, it can be the entire experience in a single volume. There are a lot of potential problems with this, not the least of which is that I'm a verbose writer and I need to establish a world in five different stories without any of them feeling too boring/familiar. (I think back to my Animorphs readings and how I would always skip over the descriptions of transformation, as they were tedious and added nothing to the story; I want to avoid that.) I need to create a new world that is diverse enough and strange enough and yet understandable enough that I can play in that world with ease and enjoyment. I have to fuse the familiar magic tropes with enough newness that it doesn't feel tired, and yet at the same time, I have to take all the shortcuts I can because there's so much ground to cover. I've tried writing differently before. It ended up not really working, with me stopping the story after getting only about one fifth of the way through. So it's likely that this isn't actually something that will work. Add to that the fact that I'm still working through my Shakespeare MacGuffin chase story (though I may be winding down on that) and suddenly I'm rather busy with potential stories. And while I'm excited about that--it's a nice change from the drought I've been driving through lately--it also makes me a bit leery. I'm out of practice and often out of patience. How am I supposed to make this worthwhile? How am I supposed to make this work the right way? I don't know. I'll have to jump in and try in order to find out. |
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