Australian fantasy author Karen Miller has finished The Reluctant Mage, the next book in her Fisherman’s Children series, which is the continuation of her Kingmaker, Kingbreaker series commenced with The Innocent Mage.

“Shit. I did it. I can’t believe it,” wrote Miller on her LiveJournal page this week. “Well, you know, not done done. It’s up for a rewrite next, after I’ve rewritten Siege. But it’s done, it’s a book, it’s a lot of words with more to come. It’ll end up about the same length or a smidgin longer than Prodigal Mage. But that story is told now. And I think I’m reasonably happy.”

Miller said she had written five novels this year. She noted there were times she had “seriously doubted” she could do it. And she has another two to rewrite before 2010 kicks off. “That’s not a problem. Rewriting is playtime. Rewriting is the reward for the utter agony that is the first draft,” she said.

The Reluctant Mage clocked in at 131,909 words. The book is slated to be published in 2010.

The achievement was celebrated by fans on her site. “Congratulations on reaching the end!” wrote one. “Your determination and output are utterly inspiring (and quite scary at the same time). Hope you manage to get a decent rest now before starting on those rewrites.”

Commentary
Keeping the Door handed Miller a fairly negative review of her last book, The Prodigal Mage. At the time, we wrote:

“The book is a monument to one of the most tempting traps that an author can fall into: to focus so heavily on developing their characters and their interactions that they neglect to situate those characters in an interesting and complex world and with a plot that gradually reveals its twists and turns.”

There are arguments on both sides about Miller’s work. After posting the review, we received several comments from readers that expressed how much they loved The Prodigal Mage. “I loved the Prodigal Mage and while there isn’t as much action in this book as in the others to me it is a taster of things to come,” wrote one.

Other reviewers, such as The Mad Hatter, have described the book as a “fantastic read overall”.

But I have been following Miller’s LiveJournal posts updating fans with her progress on The Reluctant Mage over the past couple of months, and I feel they have given me some insight into what one of the problems might be with Miller’s style.

That problem seems to be that she writes so goddamn fast!

It was only on November 12 (4 days ago) that Miller still had some 30,000 words to write on The Reluctant Mage. Three days later, she had finished the book.

Something about that just strikes me as wrong. 30,000 words … in three days? That’s 10,000 words a day! Even assuming that Miller had done all the planning in the world before the commencement of writing The Reluctant Mage, that is still a phenomenal amount per day.

The reason I know this, is that as a professional journalist I have often been called upon to write a lot of copy per day. But even on my most hectic, insane, 10 hour days, I couldn’t write more than about 4,000 words per day. Nobody in our office could. The fact that Miller is doing so makes me really wonder if it is truly quality writing that she is putting out, or whether she is racing through the writing process too fast, without stopping to consider it all.

Article by Renai LeMay

If you were to sum up Karen Miller’s new book The Prodigal Mage in two words, those words would be: “Nothing happens”.

The book is a monument to one of the most tempting traps that an author can fall into: to focus so heavily on developing their characters and their interactions that they neglect to situate those characters in an interesting and complex world and with a plot that gradually reveals its twists and turns.

I don’t know exactly where Miller went wrong in the construction of The Prodigal Mage, but it’s disappointing to see the Australian author, who is well-known for her 2005 book The Innocent Mage, go so far off course in her latest effort. This is one of those books for the hardcore fans of Miller’s previous books only.

The events in The Prodigal Mage kick off after the end of Miller’s previous Kingmaker, Kingbreaker series, consisting of The Innocent Mage and Innocence Lost (which was published as The Awakened Mage in several countries).

As the book’s back cover notes:

“Years ago, at the cost of many lives, Asher defeated the dark sorceror, Morg, and brought peace to Lur. But now, happily raising a family, Asher realises that peace and safety are an illusion. Something has woken in Lur’s earth, creating weather that threatens to tear their world apart.”

Where the Kingmaker, Kingbreaker series primarily focused on Asher, the so-called Innocent Mage, The Prodigal Mage also focuses on his family, particularly his son Rafel, who has inherited much of his magic and temper.

As the book unfurls, so does the relationship between Asher and his family. Rafel will grow into his powers and young adulthood, with all the troubles that a normal teenager has and more. His sister Deenie will grow into a mature but troubled young woman. And Asher, still deeply in love with his wife Dathne, will grow older, and like to many of the old, think he knows what’s best for anyone younger than him.

The book focuses heavily on the troubled relationship between Asher and Rafel. Asher becomes more and more the stereotypical overbearing father, who doesn’t respect his son enough to tell him the truth about his own powers and the world around them, even when it’s dangerous for him to remain ignorant. Rafel, consequently, becomes ever more rebellious as the book goes on.

The relationship develops under pressure as it becomes apparent that not all of the powerfully destructive magic that was quelled in the previous books has been fully laid to rest. Left to themselves, perhaps Asher and Rafel would easily have worked out their differences. But when the fate of their entire world is at stake, things aren’t so easy.

Throw a few meddling mages into the mix, and things can get a bit wild.

As mentioned above, the central problem with The Prodigal Mage for readers is that there is virtually no plot. The reader is forced through endless internal debates in the characters’ minds and tense discussions between them, yet at very few points in the book do any concrete events occur to fuel those debates.

When events do move to a faster pace in The Prodigal Mage, they are over quickly and they don’t satisfy the reader’s curiousity about the world in which they are taking place.

A further problem is that Karen Miller, unlike contemporaries such as Brandon Sanderson, seems completely unable to really articulate the magic system in The Prodigal Mage. It boils the blood of Asher and Rafel continuously, and you have to “learn” different spells and so on … but how does it really work? They just seems to click their fingers and hey presto, things happen.

I would have really liked to see some more explanation of just what it is that the mages in The Prodigal Mage are dealing with. For example, the difference between Olken and Doranen magic could have been better articulated, not to mention the mysterious magic of Morg, which seems to be immensely powerful and alive even after his death.

Karen Miller

In The Prodigal Mage, Karen Miller has created a cardboard cut-out world, with a cardboard cut-out magic system and a card-board cut-out class structure. The plot is virtually non-existent.

Perhaps the saving grace of the book, then, is its characterisation.

Miller is at pains to flesh out her characters and their interactions. Despite the book’s other troubles, you will likely end it sympathising with Rafel particularly, and feeling some level of compassion for Asher as he grows older. You will probably end the book feeling fond of some of the minor characters as well.

There is no doubt that many of the lengthy internal monologues and external conversations portrayed in The Prodigal Mage are very realistic. And you’ll enjoy reading them, and feeling the emotions that the characters are wrenched through as they make their tough choices in life.

The art of a fantasy writer like Guy Gavriel Kay is that his prose is so sparse that you can read deep characterisation between the lines of his constantly moving plot. Karen Miller is perhaps the opposite kind of writer; she provides all the fleshy details of her character’s thoughts. If you’re the kind of reader who likes your characters spelled out, you’ve come to the right place.

But ultimately this kind of deep character exploration is not enough to carry The Prodigal Mage. Characters can only develop properly in response to the events that surround them and the author’s shaping hand. Left to their own devices, they will swirl endlessly around in a static quagmire of their own inanity. Such is the fate of the Innocent Mage and his family.

Keeping the Door’s copy of The Prodigal Mage was provided for review purposes by the book’s Australian publisher, Harper Collins.

Writers in general are just not sane, according to Karen Miller, Australian author of the 2005 novel The Innocent Mage and a whole host of other science fiction and fantasy works.

Writing as a guest blogger on the Babel Clash, the science fiction blog of book retailer Borders to coincide with the launch of her new book The Prodigal Mage, Miller says writers simply have a kink in the brain:

“It’s a kink that means we are at the same time deeply and intimately involved in the process of being human while standing outside that process watching it happen. It means that we can never truly be at one with our own lives because we can’t ever totally lose ourselves in the unconscious moment. A part of us is always conscious, always watching, analysing, pulling the moment apart so we can put it back together again as fiction.”

To illustrate her point, Miller says her first thought during a car accident during her university years wasn’t of whether she could die or what was going to happen next. Instead, her brain went straight to Star Wars. “Wow,” she thought. “This is what it was like when Luke crashed on Dagobah.”

“In what could’ve been my last moments of life, I was thinking about Star Wars,” Miller added. “And by the way, if that doesn’t make me a fan then I don’t know what would.”

Commentary
Setting aside Miller’s more general argument about writers and going onto a slightly tangential track, the idea that science fiction and fantasy writers in particular may be a few bottles short of a six pack in places is one that has probably been bandied about for as long as the genres have existed.

It likely has its basis in the fact that sci-fi/fantasy writers’ work is, of course, rooted in speculative worlds, be they worlds based on our own or completely different realities where concepts like magic exist. The idea goes that the creators of such worlds must be slightly nuts to be able to imagine them, and all their rules of physics and so on that don’t exist in our own world.

I can’t keep track of the number of people that have told me in my life that they couldn’t be bothered reading science fiction or fantasy books because they had “nothing to do with the real world” and were thus irrelevant and boring.

However, personally, I disagree with Miller. I feel that in writers in general are in fact the sanest people in human society. And furthermore, I believe science fiction and fantasy writers are among the best examples to prove that theory.

My reason for stating this is that the observing ability that Miller comments on means that writers are often the first people in society to notice and start to critique the reality that underpins what is often the deceitful surface of human society. When it comes to sci-fi/fantasy writers, I feel their ability to envision speculative worlds heightens their ability to impartially observe their own reality.

A prime example of this observation would be the famous science fiction author Robert Heinlein, who passed away in 1988 at the age of 80, after writing a series of enlightening books that also happened to shed light on and critique American and world society of the day.

Robert Heinlein

In Stranger in a Strange Land, perhaps Heinlein’s most famous work, he pre-empted or perhaps even caused much of the sexual enfranchisement of the 1960′s and 1970′s through depicting the revolutionary sexual mores of Valentine Michael Smith, a human raised on Mars by Martians.

In the 1959 book, Starship Troopers, Heinlein arguably makes a case for individual responsibility and sacrifice for society’s common good; the book has been seen as anti-communist and also as a lightning rod for those who wish to debate the role of the military in society; both positive and negative sides.

And of course, who could forget I Will Fear No Evil, the gender-bending novel which explores human sexuality (from both sides at once and everything in between) and its connection with emotional love, spirituality and more.

Was Heinlein insane? Many people in the late 1950′s society in which he first achieved recognition for his works would certainly have thought so after reading his books. How could any rational person come up with so many crazy ideas at once? There are sections in all of these three books which will make even very open-minded readers a little uncomfortable as they readjust their worldviews.

But in hindsight, and of course many people realised this at the time Heinlein’s books were published, his work also constituted an intense and powerful critique of current human behaviour and societal structures … in a way that revealed Heinlein had a phenomenal understanding of them. Ultimately, Heinlein was probably more sane and clear in his knowledge of the world than most of those around him.

What’s your opinion? Are writers in general sane, or insane?