Where the Heart of Anti-Shurtugal Rises Again.

It's true! A few industry insiders have let me know that Paolini is shopping a new Fractalverse book. He's sent the unedited review copy to a few people prior to it being officially announced, and I managed to wheedle a digital copy from a friend of a friend who knows a guy.



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Howdy folks, sorry I've been a bit absent on the community lately, but things are getting real crazy around here. My city is in stage 4 lockdown, which means no leaving the house except for essential groceries, medical emergencies, and one hour of exercise per person per day. Masks are mandatory, and our hour of exercise must be within 5 kilometres (3 miles) from home.
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Paolini announced on twitter recently that To Sleep is the first book in a new series that he's calling the "fractalverse", that is based on the real world and will encompass the future, the present, and the past, with such broad topics as sci-fi alien encounters, and "all the people and issues that we currently grapple with."




Added per Epistler's request:




The problems I can foresee with this, in no particular order:

* Paolini writing about Black Lives Matter.  We've already seen from the Inheritance Cycle how he writes about people of colour, and I'm not confident he has undergone a period of significant personal growth on that matter.

* Paolini writing from the point of view of a person with a disability, or a person from a racial, cultural, religious, GRSM, etc. minority. One of the most consistent subtexts in the IC is that disabled, "ugly", mentally unwell, etc. are equated evil, sinful, dangerous, or otherwise lesser than an able-bodied person.

* Paolini writing a romance story. Just no.

* The fact that even when he had a clear storyline that was (allegedly) meticulously planned, he still took an average of 3 years to write each book of the Inheritance Cycle, and then took a further 9 years to write To Sleep (and a couple of hastily thrown together short stories that read like he wrote them in a weekend on a dare). Series announcements like this usually depend upon a solid consistent schedule of new content otherwise readers will lose interest and move on.

For example, just look at Ahn Do: He's one of Australia's most beloved writers for older children, but he doesn't rest on the success of his WeirDo and Hot Dog series, he's constantly pumping out new books not only for WeirDo and Hot Dog, but also in his new 'Ninja Kid', 'Mythix', and 'Wolf Girl' series, as well as stand-alone titles. He publishes a new title probably every 3-4 months or so.

If you promise a series, especially an open-ended series as broad as Fractalverse, you need to have the writing stamina and discipline to pump out books consistently, at least 1 per year, and keep up that momentum for more than just 2 or 3 books.

Paolini very likely only has To Sleep at the moment, he doesn't keep secrets well and hasn't said anything about working concurrently on a secnd separate story. Making a grand reveal like that should only happen if he's actually got some work to back it up, like more than one finished or partially finished drafts ready to go

* He hasn't even waited to see if To Sleep will be a commercial success yet, and he's already announcing that it's now suddenly (Ok, so he mentioned the idea in passing in an interview in 2017, but for the most part it's a sudden reveal) part of a massive new series or universe? That's an unwise amount of confidence in his relationship with his publisher and agent, and in his selling power in the adult sci fi market as "the author of Eragon".

* Whatever happened to Brom's prequel, Inheritance Book 5, and all the other material his fans are actually looking forward to? Is he shelving them in favour of working on this new series? Is the collective A_S prophecy, that Paolini is going to keep starting new projects and stringing fans along re. book 5 being "just after this next book" until it eventually becomes clear that he has no intention whatsoever of actualy writing it?

How are his fans going to react if he admits (or if they conclude) that he has no intention of writing Inheritance Book 5, and in fact has been lying to his fans about it for almost a decade? Does Paolini not understand the cost of broken promises?

* The scope of this series is supposed to range from distant future space fantasy, right down to slice-of-life urban drama. Fans of sci fi won't want to read about a day in the life of a 40s-something househusband whose young neighbor is making eyes at him while his wife is away on high-powered corporate meetings; and conversely fans of slice-of-life drama and such are not necessarily going to be interested in reading about deep-space laser-tag battles with Lovecraftian alien entities. He should stick to a particular theme, instead of trying to stretch himself (and his fans) in too many different directions.

 

What do you think about this announcement? Premature, over-confident in his ability to stick to a fast-paced writing schedule, too broad in scope?