Which book is whatch?

The diatribe that follows here is one that we will keep as a separate feature page within the website, accessible to everyone, because it deals with what is possibly the most infuriating, incessantly-repeated question I encounter . . . the one dealing with the correct sequence of the titles of my books. I’ve read and re-read what follows, and I think it does what it’s supposed to do in explaining the various episodes and developments in the fiasco of incompetence and misrepresentation surrounding the confusing issue of the American editions—for the confusion is all confined to the American books.

The beginnings of the schism and confusion occurred when the books were first sold into the United States and fell into the clutches of so-called “Marketing Experts,” who cocked things up in the first place . . . and, like Dave Barry, I am not making this up . . . by deciding that the Canadian title of the Series, A Dream Of Eagles, was too highbrow and sophisticated for American readers.

And so, in their benighted wisdom—and I use the word wisdom reluctantly, having had nine years now to think about it— they decided to adopt the two-by-four psychology of nailing their readers between the eyes to get their attention, and they called the series The Camulod Chronicles.

Ever since that moment, of course, we have been dealing with new and excited readers who assume, naturally enough, that there are two different series of books out there, one published in Canada and the other in the USA.

Even Amazon.com has been sucked into that misapprehension, offering, not too long ago, a “two for one” deal on Clothar the Frank and The Lance Thrower, not realizing that these are the American and the Canadian versions of the same book… Hey, they’re only Amazon.com. Why should anyone tell them? But that’s yet another example of American Marketing Expertise, wherein—and one more time, I swear I’m not making this up—the marketers decided yet again that American readers are not ready for anything as esoteric or arcane as a book about a Frank called Clothar . . . I can only assume that they were worried about confusion with a Frank called Sinatra or some such; or maybe it was just because they all know (deep down underneath) that a frank is a sausage and who’s gonna buy a book about a sausage?

Anyway, this book is about a man who, among many other things, throws lances really well from horseback, so they called it The Lance Thrower.

Now, I have to state here that I am not unhappy with the book per se, because it reads well—it’s slightly different in places from the earlier, Canadian version, and it has a really nice cover—but I despair of the communications end of the equation. Usually marketing and communications go hand in hand… But obviously not always and in this case, not even often.

You might be noticing about this time that I am no great fan of the faceless denizens of my US publisher’s marketing department.

There was one other, major deviance from the norm that is worthy of note: the fifth novel in the series, The Sorcerer, is a big book—1100 pages—and so it was produced in two volumes: The Sorcerer, Volume One, subtitled The Fort At River’s Bend, and The Sorcerer, Volume Two, subtitled Metamorphosis. That was a decision with which I was not too happy, but I accepted the reasoning presented at the time, and the need for splitting the work, and everyone agreed that the division would be clearly indicated, and both volumes would appear within three months of each other. Well, they did, but the first US hardcover, Volume One, appeared simply as “The Fort At River’s Bend”—no mention of “The Sorcerer” in evidence, and no indication that this was only the first half (Volume One) of a larger work. In consequence, a large number of people read the book under the impression that it was a complete novel, and they were understandably ticked off and upset when the book "ended" without any resolution. They had no clue that they had read only half of the story, and that the text would continue uninterrupted in the second half of the book, which, like most novels’ second halves, would contain the resolution of the entire story/plot. And so they felt cheated. The proof of that is clearly evidenced in the sales figure for the two volumes. Sales of Volume Two did not even begin to approach the level of sales of Volume One, because people just walked away in disgust. That’s the power of Marketing, misused.

So, let’s come back and try to make some sense of this entire sequence thing, because it really isn’t difficult to understand . . . I only wish my American publisher’s marketing people could understand it.

There are five novels in the original series, ending with The Sorcerer, which appeared as two volumes, thereby making it appear that there were six books. Thus, the sequence is:

The Skystone
; The Singing Sword
; The Eagles’ Brood
; The Saxon Shore
; The Sorcerer, Volume One:
  The Fort at River’s Bend
; and The Sorcerer, Volume Two:
 Metamorphosis.

Those are the novels of the original series, which was published in Canada as A Dream of Eagles, and in the USA as The Camulod Chronicles… Same series, same books, different series titles.

My original intent was to end my story with the drawing of the sword from the stone, thereby solving a mystery that had been unresolved for more than fifteen hundred years. I had no interest, at the outset, in becoming caught up in the story of Camelot and the Arthur, Lancelot, Guinevere triangle. Everyone else had already written about that. I only wanted to clean up the mystery of how the sword got into the stone and how the boy Arthur pulled it out, without magic, mysticism or supernatural influences being involved, and so, from that viewpoint, my novels were pre-Arthurian.

In the writing of the tale, however, my own thoughts had grown and developed substantially, and so it wasn’t such a great leap to the next stage of the saga, although in the meantime, I had to write Uther in order to clarify a number of details, all of them relevant and germane to the story of Arthur, that had been left unsettled in The Eagles’ Brood.

Thus Uther is a stand-alone novel, a companion piece to the original series, written in a different voice because Uther himself was killed before he could tell his own story. It is not really, strictly speaking, a part of the sequence.

Now, however, we come to the story of Lancelot and Arthur, or, as I see it, the story of Clothar and Arthur, and incidentally, of Arthur’s wife, whom I call Gwinnifer, and this is where it gets really complicated… You see, by this time, the Marketing Experts in New York have forgotten that they ever created six books out of five, and they have completely overlooked the fact that in Canada, Clothar the Frank, which was published a year earlier, has been clearly identified as the first half of a two-book mini-series called The Golden Eagle… And bear with me here, please, because the logic, such as it is, gets a bit tenuous… So, as Marketers and Experts, they reverted to what the Author had told them in the first place: that there are five books in the original series, instead of the six that they had so unambiguously demonstrated, and they ignored the existence of Uther completely, since it’s a twice-told-tale, and then they also ignored any reference to The Golden Eagle as being a self-contained, two-novel diptych, and voilà, you have The Lance Thrower, the SIXTH novel in The Camulod Chronicles… It’s pretty sad.

So here is the reality, as simply as I can distill it.

There are eight novels altogether, making up an Arthurian cycle that consists of a five-novel series, along with a parallel, stand-alone companion novel called Uther, and a two-novel diptych known in Canada as The Golden Eagle, the first novel of which is Clothar the Frank, and the second is The Eagle.

The Canadian series, A Dream of Eagles, was published originally in a Trade Paperback edition—there were no Canadian hardcover editions of that series. The Canadian version features:

The Skystone
; The Singing Sword
; The Eagles’ Brood
; The Saxon Shore
; The Sorcerer, Volume One:
  The Fort at River’s Bend
; The Sorcerer, Volume Two:
  Metamorphosis.

The American series, The Camulod Chronicles, appeared first in hardcover from Forge Books, and then in mass market paperback and trade paperback versions from Tor Books. The titles are:

The Skystone
; The Singing Sword
; The Eagles’ Brood
; The Saxon Shore
; The Fort at River’s Bend
; The Sorcerer, Metamorphosis.

The stand-alone novel “Uther” is the same in both countries, albeit with different artwork, but published in both hardcover and mass market. Viking Canada also issued a trade paperback edition for collectors of the series.

The two novels of “The Golden Eagle”, Clothar the Frank and The Eagle, are available in both Viking hardcover and Penguin mass-market paperback within Canada. The American version of Clothar the Frank is called The Lance Thrower and both it and The Eagle were released as Tor paperbacks in 2005 and 2006.

I’ll add updated information on more recent books in a separate posting here.