by Barbara Hambly
The concept of “happily ever after” has always fascinated me.
Just exactly what happens after, “happily ever after”?
The hero/heroine gets the person of his/her dreams, and rides off into the sunset with their loved one perched on the back of the horse hanging onto saddlebags stuffed with gold. (It’s a very strong horse.)
So what happens then? Where do they live? Who does the cooking?
This was one of the reasons I started writing The Further Adventures.
The other was that so many of the people who loved the various fantasy series that I wrote for Del Rey in the 1980s and ‘90s, really liked the characters. I liked those characters too, and I missed writing about them.
Thus, in 2009 I opened a corner of my website and started selling stories about what happened to these characters after the closing credits rolled on the last novel of each series.
The Darwath series centers on the Keep of Dare, where the survivors of humankind attempt to re-build their world in the face of an ice age winter, after the destruction of civilization by the Dark Ones. Ingold the Wizard is assisted by two stray Southern Californians, Gil Patterson - a historian who is now part of the Keep Guards - and Rudy Solis, in training to be a mage.
The Unschooled Wizard stories involve the former mighty-thewed barbarian mercenary Sun Wolf, who finds himself unexpectedly endowed with wizardly powers. Because the evil Wizard King sought out and killed every trained wizard a hundred years ago, Sun Wolf has no teacher to instruct him in his powers. With his former second-in-command, the warrior woman Starhawk, he must seek one - and hope whatever wizard he finds isn’t evil, too.
In the Winterlands tales, scholarly dragonslayer John Aversin and his mageborn partner Jenny Waynest do their best to protect the people of their remote villages from whatever threats come along: dragons, bandits, fae spirits, and occasionally the misguided forces of the distant King.
Antryg Windrose is the archmage of the Council of Wizards in his own dimension, exiled for misbehavior - meddling in the affairs of the non-mageborn - to Los Angeles in the 1980s (that’s when the novels were written). He lives with a young computer programmer, Joanna Sheraton, and keeps a wary eye on the Void between Universes, to defend this world from whatever might come through.
Though out of print, all four of these series are available digitally on-line.
To these have been added short stories about the characters from the Benjamin January historical mystery series, set in New Orleans before the Civil War. As a free man of color, Benjamin has to solve crimes while constantly watching his own back lest he be kidnapped and sold as a slave. New Orleans in the 1830s was that kind of town. In the novels he is assisted by his schoolmistress wife Rose, and his good-for-nothing white buddy Hannibal; two of the four Further Adventures concerning January are in fact about what Rose does while Benjamin is out of town.
I have always been an enthusiastic fan of the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle. Over the years I have been asked to contribute stories to various Sherlock Holmes anthologies, and when the character went into Public Domain, I added these four stories to my collection.
Quest For Glory is a stand-alone, a short piece I wrote for the program book at a science fiction convention at which I was Guest of Honor.
Sunrise on Running Water is tenuously connected to the Don Simon Ysidro vampire series, in that Don Simon makes a brief cameo appearance. After seeing the movie Titanic - and reflecting that the doomed ship departed from Ireland after sunset and sank just as dawn was breaking…and that vampires lose their powers over running water - I just had to write it. It’s the only story that’s more about the idea than about the characters.
The Further Adventures are follow-ons to the main novels of their respective series. They can be read on their own, but the Big Stuff got done in the novels: who these people are, how they met, what the major underlying problems are in their various worlds. I suppose they’re a tribute to the fact that for me - and, it seems, for a lot of fans - these characters are real, and I at least care about what happens to them, and what they do when they’re not saving the world. They’re smaller issues, not world-shakers: puzzle-stories and capers.
Life goes on.
Love goes on.
Everyone continues to have Further Adventures for the rest of their lives.
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Novels in the Darwath Series (out of print but commercially available digitally)
The Time of the Dark
The Walls of Air
The Armies of Daylight
Mother of Winter
Icefalcon’s Quest