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It worked for us in the Belgariad, so it was probably going to work
just as well in the Malloreon, (If it ain't busted; don't fix it), and it
worked again. Then we substituted The Mallorean Gospels for The
Holy Books in the Belgariad Preliminaries. The intent was the same.
our overall thesis was that there are two worlds running side by
side - the ordinary' mundane world, and the theological magic
world. When they start to overlap, all hell breaks loose, and you've
got story. You're neck-deep in story. Did you want to summarize the
twentieth century? Try that as a starting point.
To get 'story', we were obliged to become Manichees, mainta'm'mg
that good and evil are evenly matched. If God is all-powerful, why
are we so worried about the Devil? When the medieval Church
declared Manicheism to be a heresy, she squirmed a lot, but never
did answer that specific question. I won't either.
We also added a note of Existentialism by forcing Cyradis, acting
for all of mankind, to make the final choice between good and evil. It
makes a good story but it probably shouldn't be accepted as the
basis for a system of personal belief, since it might get you into a lot
of trouble. If the Pope doesn't get on your case, the Archbishop of
Canterbury probably will.
The Malloreon Preliminaries conclude with King Anheg's
personal diary, which sort of followed our outline for Book One of
the Malloreon. It gives us a condensed chronology, and that's always
useful.
As with the Preliminaries to the Belgariad, these Malloreon
Prelims had quite a few dead-ends which we discarded during the
actual writing. One of the dangers of epic fantasy lies in its
proclivity to wander off into the bushes. We have what appears to be the
gabbiest of all possible fiction forms, but it requires iron discipline.
The writer absolutely must stick to the story-line and deviate only
when an idea or character will improve the overall product. I can't
verify this, but I have heard that there was a medieval romance that
was twenty-five thousand pages long!! That's an entire library all by
itself. I suspect that if you were to give a contemporary fantasist free
rein, he might take a shot at that just to get his name in the Guinness
Book of Records.
All right, push bravely on. We'll talk again later.
A CURSORY HISTORY OF THE
ANCARAK KINGDOMS
Prepared by the History Department
of the University of Melcene
Tradition, though not always reliable, places the ancestral home
of the Angaraks in the southern latitudes somewhere off the south
coast of present-day Dalasia. In that prehistoric era, when Angarak
and Alorn lived in peace, the favored races of mankind inhabited
contiguous areas in a pleasant, fertile basin which was forever
submerged by the cataclysmic event known as 'The Cracking of the
World'. It is not the purpose of this work to dwell upon the
theological implications of that event, but rather to examine the course of
the history of the Angaraks in the centuries which followed.
The so-called 'Cracking of the World' appears in fact to have been
a splitting of the crust of the primeval proto-continent, and its effects