Quick placeholder until I have more thoughts and more leisure to write a full article in response to this piece in Uncanny by Ada Palmer and Jo Walton, which talks about how it’s not always been the case that stories have a single protagonist; it’s just the current fashion. And can we maybe write more books where teams and multiple protagonists and people who don’t have arcs, but do have agency, are present? Given that this is the world we live in, and we’re more and more aware of the fact? And that there are (as I’ve noted myself) big issues with the single special protagonist?

Writing ensemble books is a thing I’ve been doing for a while. It’s difficult, and I’m choosing a particularly difficult approach: I’m currently working (slowly) on the final Auckland Allies book, and the approach of that series is to take the first-person narration convention of urban fantasy, but have multiple first-person narrators, a team, of whom none is more central than any of the others.

The Uncanny piece gives me some directions to potentially explore in, including what they call “tapestry” (lots of POV characters, who are not necessarily protagonists with arcs, but can still have agency); “braid” (lots of POV characters, who do mostly have protagonism and arcs); and the now-old-fashioned but maybe-due-for-revival out-and-out omniscient narrator.

I get the feeling that maybe I need to read some older fiction and get to grips with what these people were doing, and then think about how it could be updated and re-skinned.

Mike Reeves-McMillan

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Mike Reeves-McMillan lives in Auckland, New Zealand, the setting of his Auckland Allies contemporary urban fantasy series; and also in his head, where the weather is more reliable, and there are a lot more wizards. He also writes the Gryphon Clerks series (steampunk/magepunk), the Hand of the Trickster series (sword-and-sorcery heist capers), and short stories which have appeared in venues such as Compelling Science Fiction and Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores.