Mutterings and Musings

Series

PROMPT: Write about a movie franchise or book series that you love.

Wow. Oh wow. Where. To. Even. Start.

So Day 1 "30 Day Blogging Challenge; Day 1"  I got to sing the praises of one Brandon Sanderson. He has written several series that I enjoy, including The Stormlight Archive, that I mentioned in my entry.

So let's pick someone else today. There are so many novel and movie series that I love, that I could easily spend the next hour or so just spewing out lists of favourites. And does that include books (and movies for that matter) that exist in the same 'verse, but aren't necessarily the same series/franchise? I'm re-reading some of my old Georgette Heyer novels; she wrote something like 25 novels set in the Regency era (late 1700s - mid 1800s). Only three of them (to the best of my knowledge) have any real interlinking (Regency Buck, These Old Shades, and Devil's Cub), but the majority of them are set in the same twenty-thirty year span, in the same town or city (almost exclusively London, Bath, or London and Bath), and in the same levels of society (think Jane Austen, but much easier to digest).

Can they be counted as a series? In my head, absolutely they are. And I find it almost impossible to read just one of her books. They are ridiculously light and easy to read, so whenever I pick up one I inevitably read a whole batch of them back-to-back.

But what makes a series, a series?

We could be strict and stay a series in a continuation of a story-line (A happens to in Book 1, B happens in Book 2, C happens in Book 3, etc), or perhaps we are looking for 'the further adventures of' the same characters (how many times has James Bond got the girl, defeated the baddie, and blown up the entire film set?). Harry Potter is obviously a series; it follows the same core characters through a steady timeline (okay, apart from the time turner business) and each book progresses on from the last.

So what about Black Mirror on Netflix? Each episode is a stand alone (and didn't that just mess me up until I realised it, about three episodes in?!) - distinct and separate from the previous, with a different cast, world history, screen writer, plot line, filming style... you name it. It's a TV version of a short story anthology, it's kinda got a running thread (advanced tech that never ends well), but otherwise each episode is a blank slate.



I really like the idea of telling the same story from more than one point of view - the first time I came across this as an entire novel length view point change was Anne Rice's Interview With The Vampire which is told almost exclusively from Louis' point of view. Read the next book in the series, The Vampire Lestat, and half the book is Interview all over again, albeit from a totally different angle.

Peter V. Brett takes this idea in his Demon Cycle first two novels; The Painted Man (US title The Warded Man) follows Arlen Bales from childhood to his thirties. The Desert Spear follows Ahmann Jardir, again from childhood to his thirties. As young men, Arlen and Jardir meet and become friends (spoiler, that doesn't last), and The Desert Spear fills in a lot of gaps from The Painted Man, but the two books run on parallel timelines; you almost want to read a few chapters from each back and forth. The rest of the books take the more standard each-book-follows-the-next timeline, which is almost disappointing after watching the clever weaving of the first two.



So okay, I've kind of taken today's prompt and run with it a little - be thankful that I'm feeling rough and it's dinner time, this is the sort of prompt I could write an entire bloody essay on. But Best Beloved's home and I'm hungry.

Write On!