Numair trilogy?

[osprey_archer]

I've just learned that Tamora Pierce is writing a Numair trilogy. I have... mixed to negative feelings about this.

Unlike the author of the article I never much liked Daine/Numair, so there's nothing for the new trilogy to spoil in that regard. (And I for one would be very interested to see more development of Varice Kingsford!)

But I did like Numair himself a lot, and as I feel that part of what makes him appealing as a character is his mysterious past, I do worry what ripping away all the mystery will do to my feelings about him. And the same with Emperor Mage, which is one of my favorite Tortall books: how is knowing the official version of Numair's past going to shift my understanding of that book?

I tend to read Ozorne's temper tantrum about Numair in Emperor Mage as the reaction of a spurned lover (or would-be lover whose love was unrequited; Numair's feelings about Ozorne never seem as strong as the other way around), and I don't think Pierce is going to go there.

On the other hand, I loooooooved the Carthaki university segments in Emperor Mage, and it looks like the whole first book of the trilogy is going to be devoted to laying that out in loving detail. So that will be great, or at least it could be great - Pierce is not always as good at executing her concepts as coming up with them - and really my biggest oncern about it is that the second and third books in the trilogy might have a hard time living up to it. Do we really need to read all about Numair's years as a street magician?

Also, it will delay the publication of Pierce's other planned magical university book: Tris's studies at Lightbridge. I was looking forward to that, too.

Comments

[littlerhymes]

HMMM. This... doesn't seem like a really great idea to me either.

Maybe it would've been better if she'd written about another character contemporaneous with Numair in his younger days to explore the Carthaki university etc and just have him, you know, hanging around in the background. Ah well.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I know she's been planning a Numair book for a long time, and I think one Numair book - about his days at the university, ending with his exile, because that is clearly the dramatic high point of his life pre-Daine - could have been good, although it would have still had the Ozorne issue.

But because Pierce has been planning the book for so long, I guess it's grown out of control. Hence the trilogy.

[morbane.livejournal.com]

I feel similarly dubious! A trilogy implies either a character arc that I am not particularly interested in - it would feel like waiting for the books to catch up to the Numair we know - or, of course, very little character development, which isn't good in three books either.

I don't mind less mystery for Numair, but one of the things I like about him is that we meet him as an adult and get the sense of his relationship with his own past as an adult. I don't want Numair's story given the YA hero journey treatment.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I'm also concerned by the fact that the first Numair book is apparently 500 pages long. If the others are the same, that's 1500 pages of Numair, and as much as I love Numair, I'm not sure he has that much story in him.

[morbane.livejournal.com]

Gosh.

I guess we'll find out.

[lycoris.livejournal.com]

I knew there was supposed to be a Numair book years ago (back in the days before even the Beka Cooper Trilogy happened, Tamora Pierce's website had the list of books she was working on and it was on there. Said list vanished as life became complicated and everything got pushed out, I seem to recall the original hoped for publication date was 2014!) and I was really, really looking forward to it at that point. Some of that residual excitement still remains, I do like Numair, I think there's potential for a really different story to be told with his story and that should be a lot of fun.

Buuuuuuuuut ...

I generally distrust prequels/fill-ins because they nearly always get details wrong unless they involve none of the original chracters at all. Tamora Pierce proved this herself, the events in Battle Magic do not match what we're told in The Will of the Empress (or even Melting Stones) And those books were written really close together. It's been years since The Immortals and I just find tihngs like that really, really irksome (probably unreasonably so)

So yeah. I'm still kind of excited but a bit doubtful now. We shall see.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Yes, I've noticed the same problem with prequels. It's so odd - it feels like it shouldn't be that hard to go back and check the details, write them all down so the story in the prequel matches the hints that are dropped later. But no one seems to do it.

Or maybe they start writing and the story gets away from them? Who knows. I find that prequels are much chancier than sequels, and sequels can be pretty chancy themselves.