Interesting, more than one reason. I've
downloaded the first couple of books, will check them out.
Udhay
http://www.mayerbrenner.com/
This site is an experiment ...
From 1987 through 1992, DAW Books published my
four-book fantasy series, The Dance of Gods.
Sales were not spectacular and fell off with each
successive volume, and the books went out of
print. Along the way, though, they acquired a
small group of fairly intense fans, not all of
whom were either related to me or were close
personal friends. Frankly, although DAW did their
best, the books were a challenge to describe and
market, since they didn't fit with the style of
fantasy that was well-established at the time.
Times and styles change, though, and may have now
caught up to where The Dance of Gods has been
resting. At least, that's my hope. This site
presents an experiment that will let you,
fortuitous reader, help decide whether these
books really have an audience ... and if so, what happens next.
What about The Dance of Gods, then?
Why was The Dance of Gods such a hard sell when
it came out? Some possible reasons:
Too much plot and too many characters: the
books are built around a sprawling crowd of
raffish characters, too smart by half for their
own good and more than a little self-reflective,
in a series of overlapping and colliding
storylines. Some of the cast members who appear
in the first book in the series, Spell of
Catastrophe (originally published as Catastrophe's Spell), include:
Maximillian, the Vaguely Disreputable -
free-lance adventurer and nostalgic technologist
The Creeping Sword - hard-boiled nom-de-plume
Zalzyn Shaa - physician, occasional bureaucrat, and man with a curse
The Great Karlini - research thaumaturge
The former Lion of the Oolvaan Plain - retired barbarian
Jurtan Mont - youth with an unusually melodic seizure disorder
Haddo - animal wrangler and pilot
Assorted gods, revolutionaries, insurgents,
servitors, and cataclysms - the traditional cast of thousands
Insufficient reverence for traditional tropes:
for example, many of the characters are less than
impressed by the use of magic. Rather than
experiencing a sense of wonder, they're more
likely to respond to a spell casting with a
muttered "yeah, whatever," and try to bang you
over the head with a skillet while your invocation is still taking shape.
An approach to magic more suited to engineers
or programmers than mystics: more procedure-based
than object-oriented, perhaps, but communing with
nature is usually the last thing on these
practitioners' minds. For that matter, I'm not
sure the combination of magic-code hackers,
molecular nanotech, and network-mediated
consensual reality of the gods is something that
could ever be summarized on a back-of-the-book blurb.
No grand battles between good and evil: more
of a struggle between self-interest and unintended consequences.
Too funny to be serious and too serious to be
funny: it's the characters, really, not me! Not
my fault they approach their roles with a
jaundiced eye and a sarcastic streak...
The experiment begins ...
Starting with Spell of Catastrophe, I'm posting
the books on this site for free download under
Creative Commons license
(Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0). An
increasing number of authors have been similarly
making excerpts or entire books available online,
as discussed in Free Downloads vs. Sales: A
Publishing Case Study, but this has been in
support of the sales of current titles, not an
attempt to re-stimulate interest in books that
have but out-of-print for years.
What do I hope could happen? I'll be happy if
folks start reading these books again. If there's
enough interest, perhaps they can get back into
print. Beyond that, who can say?
The Dance of Gods project will take a while to
accomplish. The original digital files of the
first two books, at least, are in extinct and
unrecoverable formats, so I'm scanning and
re-inputting the text (and taking the opportunity
to tinker a bit, too), and jotting down some
notes on the books themselves (metadata!).
(Updated: the first two books are now completely
posted; the last two are on floppy, which I
should be able to read, so they may come along
more quickly.) You're invited to grab and read
what's posted already; if you like what you see,
stop in again for more, let me know what you
think, and please tell your friends!
Updated: 9-6-07
Thanks for coming by!
Mayer Brenner
--
((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
