Just in time for the launch of Firmament: Gestern, I have the book’s prologue up! What do I mean by prologue, you ask? Well, it’s a funny story…
When publishing the Firmament series, I very much wanted to bookend each book with pieces of a larger, connected saga. I wrote prologues and epilogues for the first couple of books, each detailing a little bit of the story of a man named Harry who is allegedly actually the one telling the stories. Who is Harry, and why is he so invested in this tale? Well, you’d have to read the prologues to find out.
The trouble was, readers grumbled at this. They really liked the prologues and liked the idea of them, but they didn’t like having something seemingly unrelated before each novel. They were torn. I was torn.
So instead of including them in the books, I put the prologues up online. And the epilogues? I put them up online, too, but there’s a catch. To read them, you have to enter a code from the book itself.
Do you have to read the prologues and epilogues to appreciate and understand the actual story? No, not at all. It just gives an added atmosphere of mystery and gives you hints of what happens long after the series is concluded. Also, each epilogue gives hints as to the setting of the next book. And (this is my favorite part) each code is also a reference to a huge part of what the next story will be about.
Now that that explanation is out of the way, you can get on over and read the book prologues to your heart’s content! Which of course includes the latest one. A prologue in which Harry talks to someone a little closer to home than he has yet in his search for truth and peace.