More thoughts about tie-in fiction

[Albertosaurus Rex]

After finishing The Quest for Karn, I decided to write the creative team of MtG a letter:

Dear Mr. Beyer,

For the past ten years I have been playing MtG on and off, always enjoying it when I have the chance to play, but having few people around to play against. First discovering the game during the tail end of the Weatherlight saga, I became interested in the story and started following the novel line, starting with the excellent "The Brothers' War". However, I found my interest waning after the end of the Weatherlight saga and finally stopped reading in the middle of the Kamigawa cycle. I found that the new stories didn't interest me all that much, I missed the interconnectivity that used to exist between the stories and found that the stories began relying more and more on endless fighting. I still occasionally checked MagicTheGathering.com to check out what was going on, and have to say that I like the new worlds you keep coming up with.

What finally brought me back to the storyline was the "Scars of Mirrodin" block. I didn't much like Mirrodin the first time around ("The Darksteel Eye" is one of the worst novels I've ever read), but bringing back Karn and the Phyrexians? That sure had me interested. So I went out and bought my first MtG novel in years, "The Quest for Karn".

Coming finally to the point: I thought it was terrible. And I am not alone in my opinion. Check the various MtG forums, check the Amazon reviews: they are universally negative. We all expected to see the war between the Mirrans and the Phyrexians, so it was disappointing to find our three heroes arriving on a Mirrodin that has pretty much already lost. But hey, the titular search for Karn might still be interesting. What I found, however, was a very thin story padded out with a lot of running and fighting and no character development. In fact, I think a good alternate title for the book might be “Running in and out of rooms”. It is described in an unexciting way and almost nothing relevant happens. Characters like the Praetors and Thrun, who supposedly raised Melira, are not even mentioned.

Investigating who this Robert B. Wintermute fellow is, I found out that all he has ever written are this book and the Zendikar novel. Is it really wise to let untried authors write these books? MtG books are, as I understand it, under a lot of constraints, such as having to come out concurrently with a set and being written while the sets they’re tying into are still being designed. In the past, you had writers like Jeff Grubb, Lynn Abbey, J. Robert King and Paul B. Thompson write the books. They were established, if not terribly famous authors. They were known quantities. (I do note that the new Planeswalker novels ARE written by previously published authors.) With a newbie author, who knows what they might put out? Sometimes it works, like Scott McGough and Cory Herndon, whose books I enjoyed. But at other times, one ends up with authors like Vance Moore and Wintermute. What did Wintermute do to get commissioned to write this book?

I’m sorry if I keep going on and on, but the thing is that I’m a longtime storyline fan and that I’m not just disappointed, but bewildered. Did you read “The Quest for Karn”? What on Earth convinced anyone that it was a good idea to publish this? Then again, being written under such a strict deadline, I suppose that it was too late to commission another author.

I don’t want to sound rude, but please explain: what on Earth where you guys thinking?

I'm curious if I'll get a reply, and what it will be.