SW10/REVIEW: Catalog of Earths, 2013 Update #4: Legacy Universes

[Tom Russell]

On Monday, December 30, 2013 7:15:26 PM UTC-5, Scott Eiler wrote:

> UNIVERSE:  Eightfold / Jolt City / Journey Into / Orphans of Mars
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> - Type:  Superhuman
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> - Chroniclers:  Tom and Mary Russell

Don't forget Saxon Brenton, who has four Eightfold stories to his name *before* the launch of next month's MIGHTY MEDLEY. That series will also see the welcoming of Andrew Perron into the Eightfold... uh, fold. And of course back in the day Joltin' Jamie Rosen wrote some great stuff.

> - Threat Analysis:  Standard superhuman.  "Jolt City" has modern history 
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> of such.  "Orphans of Mars" has female alien invaders in ancient time, 
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> who killed their planet and might kill the dinosaurs, but they're 
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> unlikely to time-travel forward.

*Very* unlikely. There's some certain peculiar features about time and time travel in Eightfold that I'm looking forward to delving into, probably with JOLT CITY # 22. Which should come out, I dunno, sometime in 2016? :-/

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> - Critique:  All good stuff, for those with sufficient attention span. 
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> "Jolt City" might be a challenge for shorter attentions.  But "Orphans 
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> of Mars" gives Fact File recaps!

Ha! I've tried twice before to reign JOLT CITY in by dividing a larger story into smaller installments. I wasn't happy with the result of The Trapper Story (JOLT CITY # 5-7) and ended up making it one single long chapter in the novel. I was more pleased with "The Sensational Character-Find of 2007!" (JOLT CITY # 12-17), but what I gravitated back to by the time JOLT CITY # 18 was released into the wild was that I wanted each issue to tell a complete story, beginning-to-end. Really, that's what I want to do with every series. But because of the particular stories that I want to tell with this series, the stories naturally end up being quite a bit longer than those in ORPHANS OF MARS.

I've somewhat rationalized myself to this, as it's become pretty apparent that it's likely to be a year or more between installments. And I figure that if someone has to wait *that* long to read the next one, I had better pull out all the stops with that next one and really make it worth the wait. :-D

I'm hoping that the footnote document I introduced with #20, and intend to keep using, will help re-orient readers as to who's-who and what's what. I'm also trying to work on a fact file/series recap like I did with ORPHANS, but I'm finding that difficult so far for the same reasons that the stories are longer.