C.S. Lewis hadn’t intended to write a sequel to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe—but a friend wanted to know why that mysterious lamp-post had been sitting in the forest. So Lewis wrote a prequel, starring a younger version of Professor Kirke…
Or he began to.
The Magician’s Nephew was the hardest book to write in the Narnia series. It took C.S. Lewis five years, one significant redraft, and completing every other book in the Narnia series before he’d finally beaten The Magician’s Nephew into an acceptable shape.
Which is funny—because if even C.S. Lewis struggles with writing a prequel, why do so many screenwriters and novelists think they can toss off a prequel that’s genuinely satisfying? The pop culture landscape is rife with prequels that either bombed entirely or quietly faded from fandom memory—Solo, Hannibal Rising, Prometheus, Monsters University, and for our purposes, we’re all just going to forget that Young Sheldon is technically a ratings smash.
Why are prequels so hard to pull off?
It’s to Lewis’ credit that he dodged all the bad ideas that have suffused the multitudes of other, lesser prequels since then. And I think it’s worth studying why The Magician’s Nephew stands toe-to-toe with the other books in the Narnia canon—and I’d argue that the first reason is that Magician’s Nephew didn’t have much continuity that it needed to be shackled to.
The characters in the Narnia books have always been broadly drawn—Lucy is sweet and honest, Susan is girlish and stuck-up, and Eustace Clarence Scrubb nearly deserves that name. But even by those standards, Professor Digory Kirke is more of a sketch than a person in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; he has no personality aside from “mysterious” and “kind,” serving as a plot device to: (a) get the kids out to this weird estate, and (b) to back Lucy up when her siblings literally have no other reason to believe in mystical explanations.
So thankfully, because of both the Professor’s age and his comparatively blank slate, Lewis is free to model Digory after his own history—making Digory a sympathetic kid with a sick mom, prone to both arrogance and jerkishness. Then again, Narnia runs on kids being jerks to each other, so that works in Nephew’s favor.
It would have been easy for Lewis to fall into the classic prequel mistake of assuming that the person we saw in the original book was always that way, importing their old habits wholesale—leaving Digory a sixty-year-old bookish recluse in a schoolboy outfit, mysteriously grumping his way through his origin story.
I mean, I enjoy Muppet Babies as much as anyone else, but isn’t it kinda depressing to think that someone’s core personality traits are set in stone in kindergarten? And that the friends you had in grade school are now your immutable social circle, a cheerful prison of the same characters you’ll be working with until you die?
Yet this is something the more successful modern prequels get correct—if Better Call Saul had been a sitcom about Breaking Bad’s endearingly shady shyster lawyer mentoring his first group of crooks, it’d have probably been canceled after its second season. But what makes Better Call Saul vibrant is that Saul is not the character we know from the prior story—he’s Slippin’ Jimmy, a man with a good heart, a desperate desire to do right, and a need to impress his overly-strict and massively more successful brother.
By allowing the character to be not the person we already know, there’s room for both change and surprise.
More importantly: It’s difficult to discover anything new about someone who’s presented in the exact same way they were the first time we met them. Lewis isn’t asking, “Remember what you knew about the Professor in the last book?” and then sticking to some hoary blueprint; rather he asks, “Remember what you liked about the kids in this series?”
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Which is the question that actually permeates the book—Lewis consistently prioritizes “Remember what you enjoyed?” over “Remember what happened?” Because yes, Jadis the White Witch shows up in the book, and hoo boy does she make an appearance—but it’s notable that we get an explanation for where she came from, but not an origin story.
What made Jadis so awful? That’s of no interest to Lewis; she’s always been wretched. Where did she acquire her powerful magics? She’s, you know, royal, where she lives magic comes with the territory. Why does she—
Hey, Lewis asks, Do you wanna watch Jadis racing a horse-drawn cab through 1900s-era London, demanding the people kneel before her as she tears lamp-posts apart with her bare hands?
Heck yeah I do!!! shouts the audience, and lo the middle third of the book is largely the joy of watching Jadis wreak mayhem in our world.
The question Lewis is actually answering is, “What did people enjoy about the previous book, and how can I give them more of that?” Whereas when you look at far drearier prequels, the question they’re starting with all too often is: “What don’t we know?”
“What we don’t know?” is often the boringest possible question you could ask.
Look at Solo—a movie that seems like it was written according to a checklist designed by barroom trivia writers desperate to drum up business. What the viewers wanted was for the film to answer questions like, “Why did we fall in love with Han Solo, and can we see him doing those flamboyant things again?”
Instead, Solo wants to answer questions like, “Where did Han Solo get his blaster?”
I mean, I dunno, I always assumed he just bought a gun at the Mos Eisley equivalent of Cabela’s, and it shoots well enough that he’s kept it.
No, says the movie. Han loves that gun. He loves it so much. He will never not use that gun. And do you know why?
I didn’t really care, no—
He loves that gun because his buddy gave it to him.
Okay, was the blaster given to him during the sort of interesting firefight that only Han Solo gets into?
No, the dude just hands it to Han over a campfire.
Huh. Can we go back to Jadis screaming “F**K THE POLICE” as she brains London bobbies with a lamp-post?
And again, The Magician’s Nephew could have easily had a scene where Digory is hiding from Jadis and there’s a man next to him smoking and Digory goes oh, the smell of tobacco, it’s so comforting, perhaps someday I shall smoke a pipe—but that doesn’t really seem like the fun of Narnia so much as a crazy 1950s advertisement for tobacco where the toasted leaves of Pipeweed™ blend make for stronger lungs.
Instead, what we get is the origin of Narnia—which is delightful in peculiarly Narnian ways, because we have newfound animals loping around being adorable as they eagerly explore this world their neo-Christian Lion-God has given to them.
It’s hard to say why, exactly, Lewis found The Magician’s Nephew so hard to write; we know there were structural issues, as pointed out by a friend of his, and there’s a (potentially false) early manuscript called The Lefay Fragment that has almost nothing in common with The Magician’s Nephew as we know it. And even if the Lefay Fragment is real, Lewis ordered his drafts destroyed, so we don’t have a good window into his thought process.
But what I think at least part of Lewis’ problem in writing “Polly and Digory” (the book’s original name) was that the genesis of the story involved answering the wrong question.
Do we need to know about the lamp-post?
For most of us, that answer is “no.” Most readers bring a delightful, childish wonder to a story, cheerfully trusting there’ll be weird spots we just roll with. Why do dragons breathe fire? How do repulsor beams work? Why is Tom Bombadil’s poetry so powerfully insufferable?
We accept “That’s just how it is” and move on.
Which is not to say that you can’t explain a mysterious part of the story. Authors have opened up wonderful new aspects of lore by diving into unanswered questions. Heck, the best fanfiction mines these blank spots to create wonders.
Yet the answers to those questions have to reverberate in some interesting way that adds depth or emotional resonance to what we already know! Because the failure state of answering questions we’d taken for granted is seizing some innocent wonder by the collar and explaining all the magic out of it.
Like all good barroom trivia, the answer must be more interesting than the question.
I think Lewis needed all that time to write The Magician’s Nephew in part because he was wise enough to realize that prequels hold their own special danger—you have to answer some questions about What Has Gone Before, yes, but which of those questions should drive the plot beats of the story, and which should be left a mystery?
In that final manuscript, thankfully, the lamp-post is an afterthought—literally a toss-off, as Jadis hurls the post at Aslan in an attempt to murder him, and it falls to the ground to grow like all other things in proto-Narnia. But the star of the show remains Jadis, our glorious hate-fueled YAS KWEEN, and the story would be no less entertaining if she tried to brain Aslan with a branch or a piece of hansom cab or even useless old Uncle Andrew.
We don’t need to know about the lamp-post.
You can tell us, sure.
But you’d better make sure you’re answering the right questions.
“Make your choice, adventurous Stranger;
Strike the bell and bide the danger,
Or wonder, till it drives you mad,
What would have followed if you had.”― C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew
Ferrett Steinmetz is the author of the novels The Sol Majestic and Automatic Reload from Tor Books, as well as the ‘Mancer trilogy and The Uploaded. He is a graduate of both the Clarion Writers’ Workshop and Viable Paradise, and was nominated for the Nebula Award in 2012, for his novelette Sauerkraut Station. Ferrett can be found on Twitter as @ferretthimself, and his new podcast, …And We Will Plunder Their Prose, analyzes the writing techniques of great modern speculative fiction.
The answer is rarely yes. Nothing sucks reader interest out of a piece of fiction than knowing what comes next. The answer may be yes in cases of people who are such fans of the writer and his world they’ll read anything, and, when like Tolkien, the world building has such depth it holds its own interest.
Yeah, prequels are tricky, because odds are you’ve already told the most interesting part of the story, and it lies ahead.
I did like Monsters University, though.
Q: “Why is Tom Bombadil’s poetry so powerfully insufferable?”
A: Because Old Tom Bombadil is a merry fellow
Hah, loved this article, Ferrett. I adore The Magician’s Nephew for all the reasons you suggest (and it tells a new story that happens to explain some things but isn’t beholden to some dire need to know all things) and I nearly despise Solo, despite its higher production value. (I think it falls short even of the Star Wars prequels.) So the comparison you’ve made is perfect.
Most prequels today seem to spend so much trying to justify and explain, they seldom invent new things to wonder at. The Magician’s Nephew brought us Charn, the Wood Between the Worlds, and some common Londoners (the cabbie and his wife) becoming royalty. All great.
Hahahah.
The only thing I never liked much about Tom was his constant referring to himself in the third person. That tends to grate on anyone, even from those who remember the first raindrop and the first acorn!
I think the tv show Watchmen did a marvelous job of sequel and prequel by doing exactly what you talk about in the article.
Every time I read LotR, I find myself greatly enjoying the Old Forest/Bombadil chapters. Dreamy and quirky and beautiful and weird. Delightful and I’m always sad to leave old Bombadil behind when the hobbits trudge off toward Bree.
And a thing about prequels I’ve discovered. Often they are self-indulgent and an excuse for authors to show off their worldbuilding. Things that the authors think are interesting are seldom received that way by the reader. Why does The Magician’s Nephew work? It’s a good story in and of itself. A fascinating and well-told story that works even if you’ve never read another Narnia book. All authors should heed this lesson. Write a prequel if you must. But don’t let it turn into a dreary chronicling of the reasons why the sequel turned out the way it did. Tell a good story peopled by good characters. That’s all we want.
This really hits the nail on the head. So many writers of prequels want to go back & explain, IN GREAT DETAIL, where elements of the original story came from, that I think telling the story becomes a secondary consideration. Watching “Solo” I couldn’t shake the feeling that the writers were elbowing me & saying “get it? Do you get it?” every time an element came up. I wanted a story, the birth of the notorious smuggler with a heart of gold, & instead I got an extended commercial for the Authentic Han Solo Dice, just like in the movie! You, too, can own the authentic Han Solo Blaster, now on sale in the gift shop on your way out!
Dude, just tell a story. If it’s good, I’ll buy the blaster.
My instinctual answer to this question is ‘No’ but that doesn’t mean it’s not enjoyable. But I like your take here – I actually do enjoy Solo for what it is and find it to be a pretty fun movie (and the things I enjoy are less about Han but about what it shows us about the rest of the galaxy and other characters at the time) but ‘all the things we love about Han came from one crazy weekend’ is pretty hilariously called out by the Auralnauts in their “Kylo Ren Reviews/Reacts’ series (which I highly, highly reccomend and honestly gives some better closure to Kylo than TROS did but that’s another story…). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_lU_GRsZbM And yes, they do mention his blaster, lol.
Contrast that with Rogue One, which is also a prequel, and that I would count as tied with 2 others for my favorite Star Wars film (one of the others in that spot also happens to be a prequel)…it adds to the world by expanding on other characters (not focusing too heavily on the existing ones) and shows us other sides of things, but while still being a good story in the Star Wars style. The story of the Death star plans is an exciting story in its own right.
Mileage varies on this too, but I quite like the Star Wars prequels (in fact, I’ll be honest and admit I love them) and for all their flaws in direction and dialogue and all that, I appreciate that they too tell their own story and add their own new things to the lore.
I’m not so sure I agree that the most important thing about a prequel is “What did people enjoy about the previous <story>, and how can I give them more of that” though because otherwise, if you go too far in that direction, it just feels derivative. But of course if you stray too far from that (and this goes for sequels too)…you risk ruining the thing people actually like about the story. So there does need to be some balance of dynamism and familiarity.
The key thing is maybe, could the story itself be interesting enough to tell in its own right? For Solo, maybe not – do we really care who Han is otherwise, or why he gets this blaster, or this ship, etc? Wheras in something like Rogue One – or even the prequel trilogy – I feel like those ARE their own stories even if you don’t watch the original trilogy. The prequels perhaps less so, but even so – the stagnation and fall of a Republic is its own thing and plenty of people in a generation behind me DID grow up with that as their primary story (along with the media it influenced).
The other main ‘prequel’ success I can think of is Tolkien and the Silmarillion, but agian, that’s clearly full of its own stories.
Anyway, I realize I’m just kind of rambling. I’ll add that, as I said, I do still enjoy Solo. I recognize it for the indulgence that it is, but I still enjoy it.
And I actually LOVE Monsters University. Monsters Inc is one of my least favorite Pixar movies – it just never did it for me for whatever reason. But MU hits a lot of beats I enjoy, including the idea of finding non-traditional paths to success after your first plans don’t work out.
Now I want to see Jadis throwing Uncle Andrew.
Hi! I don’t have any earth shattering revelations regarding the Magician’s Nephew. As an eight year old child my parents sent me on a lifelong love of literature, and I’m 62yrs. old now. Somehow most of the comments I read seemed not to capture what I perceive as ” The story”. I read this book a decade or two before I ever found out about the first book the lion, witch…. Once set upon that journey it wasn’t necessary to make story comparisons of the other books, and to this day I still believe that reading The Magicians Nephew first is the only way to start the series with a comprehensive understanding. Thanx for reading!!
No.
This article is definitely on-point when it comes to the challenges of the prequel: one suspects that the ability to tell more than one story at any given point in the timeline is one of the more demanding tests of a setting (Also, it’s only fair to mention that I thoroughly enjoyed SOLO and felt that it worked reasonably well as a stand-alone adventure; you only notice them ticking off the checklist if you have a more than casual knowledge of the series).
“Instead, Solo wants to answer questions like, “Where did Han Solo get his blaster?””
I may not know you personally, but I know you went into that movie with months’ worth of bad takes from ill-intentioned people and the movie didn’t do anything to change your mind. The point of the film was not to tell us where Han got his blaster, or the dice, or any of the other little tidbits that were thrown in. I’m sorry that was your only takeaway from it because it is one of the better Star Wars films.
Everything with a sequel is itself a prequel and I’m sick and tired of hearing people bash the very idea of stories that take place before other stories. Star Wars? Well, A New Hope is now a prequel to The Force Awakens. Tell me it doesn’t deserve to exist.
Daniel M. Clark:
I’m glad you like Solo. Most of us found it lacking in sincerity… it’s truly feels like a movie made by a marketing committee. I can’t say it’s worse than Epi 1, but “one of the best” is laughable. And your last sentence is inaccurate because they were composed as part of a whole. Prequels are written after the base material.
I believe the best prequels reveal hidden origins without over explaining, or inventing a sadistic dentist father. That natural feeling is hard to create, and I am in awe of those who can do it right.
I felt like I had to read the WOT prequel but it’s been so long ago I don’t recall if it checked the boxes or was a real story. I know how it ends but forget the feel of the story (just too many books in the series).
Does anyone recall how it stacks up?
I still think Solo, Fantastic Beasts, The Magician’s Nephew, Monsters University, and even the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy were either extremely enjoyable or epic. The Prequel Trilogy contains my least-favorites of the eleven live-action films, with Attack of the Clones being my least-favorite out of all eleven, and The Phantom Menace right ahead of it, but I thought each of them did something great somewhere, and they at least led us to Revenge of the Sith, the first of the entire franchise I saw in theaters and my fourth-favorite of the entire franchise. I currently plan on a few prequels for several of my novel series, but they have been planned out from beginning to end already, and I hope to not make the same mistakes that some authors and directors have made with them.
I’m afraid I’m one of those curmudgeons who wishes Lewis had stopped after The Horse And His Boy and thinks The Magician’s Nephew is the second-worst book in the series after The Last Battle. And that I’m afraid I’ve had that opinion for a very long time; even as a child, I didn’t think Narnia needed an explanation for anything and that the explanations that Lewis proffered took away more than they added.
Which I think is perhaps the biggest reason prequels tend to suck. They very rarely add anything to the world, and often take away too much. Ironically, they usually make worlds smaller: characters whose lives were open books for the audience imagination, stories that were set in places that once seemed limitless are now bounded-in. The Star Wars prequels serve as an unfortunate but illustrative answer: everybody, it turns out, sort of knew everybody else all along, the enigmatic “Clone Wars” are just a trade disagreement on methamphetamine, everything sort of happened on Tattooine somehow even though we were first told it was the nowhere-est place in the whole middle of nowhere and that was kind of the point of it as the place the hero had to leave to experience adventures.
I also think “Remember what you enjoyed?” is a trap too many sequel and prequel authors fall into. It’s often part of the problem with sequels and prequels, in fact: it’s the plot equivalent of the shrinking universe effect I was just complaining about. Not only are we likely in a prequel to find out everybody already knew everybody else and everything happened where everything later happened, but all too often it turns out it all already happened, too.
I’m trying to think of a good prequel and I’m drawing a blank. I’m sure there are several. The Horse And His Boy was a great “midquel,” a sequel to TLTWATW that was a prequel to Prince Caspian. It also happens to be a book in which the established cast of characters from those two earlier books are basically reduced to a cameo and the bulk of the action happens in parts of Narnia we’ve only heard of and involves kinds of characters (human and non) who we haven’t encountered before. So it’s the rare volume that makes the world bigger and adds more things for the reader to dream about and headcanon. Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom is a bad prequel, but you only notice it’s a prequel if you’re paying attention and most of it’s problems don’t really involve its prequelness (though the idea that Indiana Jones is a hardened skeptic in the first half of Raiders Of The Lost Ark only a few years after seeing people’s beating hearts ripped out and confirming the existence of magic holy stones with his own eyes is hard to stomach), so maybe it’s a quasi-exception. But yeah, I’m struggling to come up with a truly good prequel. Godfather II, I guess.
I’m not sure that Lewis had other people’s bad prequels to serve as bad examples. Tolkien was an early example, maybe the first, of the serious world-builders, so the temptation to write dull prequels that just fill in story gaps wouldn’t have been there.
I’ve wondered why there are so many prequels. Is it just that publishers are looking for relatively safe bets? Readers who want more of the same, just a little different? I’d have thought the natural thing is for readers to know what happens next.
I think one of the things that made Magician’s Nephew such a great prequel is that we didn’t know the connections that existed between it and the rest of the books going into the story. Nobody knew that Diggory was the Professor from Wardrobe. Nobody knew that we were seeing the origin story of Narnia. Nobody knew that we were going to see how the first humans came to live in Narnia and become king and queen. Nobody knew we were going to see the genesis of the talking animals.
There were no expectations set up. It was just another Narnia story.
The astute reader may have noticed some of the clues surrounding our introduction to Polly and Diggory that notified us about the timeframe in relation to the Pevensie children, but if they did, it was extra bits of fun.
The book made no attempt to sell itself or its place in the chronology; therefore, it had no expectations to live up to. So as the connections became apparent, they were genuinely delightful.
I read A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes last year and enjoyed it, but I’m not too sure it worked very well. In some respects, any idea of the character changing or being different was doomed to fail, since of course he becomes the villain. Still, a fascinating look at a psychopathic character, and the reasons why the Hunger Games became the Games we see later on.
Also in YA, I prefer Fire to Graceling. However, it was told in a completely different part of the continent, barely made reference at all to Graceling (except again, showing a younger version of the villain, still wreaking havoc). I’m not even sure the characters from that book are mentioned at all in the proper sequels, I just happened to like them better.
The area between worlds with all the pools of water acting as doorways to different realms has stuck in my imagination more than pretty much anything else in the Narnia series, and without “The Magician’s Nephew,” it wouldn’t exist. Lewis got very heavy-handed on the Christian imagery, even getting quite insufferable with a lot of “The Last Battle,” but he definitely knew how to craft a prequel, even if it took years for him to do so.
In my opinion The Magicians Nephew is the best of the Narnia Books. Its like he took everything that made a great Edith Nesbitt book, distilled it down and added his own magic. I’m glad he took his time. And IMO with Jadis and Polly it has the strongest female characters in the Narnia books. It may have established Jadis as my favourite character. Its slightly ironic that the villain of the series has a better established and more compelling backstory and motifs than anyone else.
@15 Stephen – The ‘Wheel of Time’ prequel (‘New Spring’) was enjoyable, but I couldn’t help but feel that Jordan mainly wrote it to weave Cadsuane into the story in order to make her sudden appearance as a major character out of nowhere more believable.
A great article, and I really like the point that’s been put forth in the comments – a prequel should NOT answer all of the questions about the world. If it resolves some mysteries from the original work, it needs to balance that by raising even more questions of its own.
I’m with Eric (17), pretty much agree with all of his thoughts about the Narnia books except that I’d give Magician’s Nephew the edge over Silver Chair, whose message seems to be “children should pay attention and follow directions or the giants will eat you in a pie”. But Puddlegum does mostly save it. That aside, the article is very nice. It makes an interesting assertion and ably supports it. Glad I stopped here today.
My entry into the Narnia series was ‘The Last Battle’ (found in a stack of books in my mother’s school library), so every bit of this is absolutely true for me. Every book in the series became a prequel, of sorts, and Lewis never compromises the Story for minutiae. Huzzah!
As for Tom Bombadil and his poetry: the Music is present still in Tom’s World, and reading the three-chapter arc aloud reminds you of the Elder Days, and the Time of Great Making and Great Magic; long since lost to a World where the First Children are leaving. The Music of the Prose is not dissimilar to the Light from the Lamppost, and the Ultimate Prequel is ‘The Silmarillion.’
See you on the podcast! ;) .
No prequel is ever ‘necessary’, but there are certainly some good ones that justify their existence. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a recent example.
Phantom Menace is a good example in the sense that it shows us a character we thought we knew in a different light (Anakin before he was corrupted). It’s also a bad example in that explains things that didn’t need explaining, and makes Lucas’ galaxy smaller by revealing that almost everyone was connected in some way all along.
To me, prequels smack of commercialism. Too often the author, director, or franchise owner has done a great story or trilogy and its success creates a clamoring for more but the characters have already come to the end of their story.
Terry Pratchett kept Discworld running for decades and never wrote a prequel. Instead characters came and went but time marched on. Other authors approach it by building a world and telling separate stories within it like Iain Banks. Perhaps you could call them altquels.
Most prequels that work in print merely touch on the main story line (like The Magician’s Nephew) or are short stories (like The Silmarillion). In film the only prequels that I can think of that work are pre-planned (like Star Wars). Even there, the prequels are unnecessary.
In Star Wars, the original film can stand on its own as can the original trilogy. The prequel trilogy are sequel trilogy fit better than most because they were planned by Lucas but I didn’t need them. Other franchises like the MCU have gone down the rabbit hole of alternative timelines and universes for no other reason than to capitalize on characters that they own. A much better approach is the Bond franchise which replaces characters with no explanation and keeps forging ahead.
TLDR: Prequels? No.
For #21: as a child reading the series I never noticed the “Christian” imagery, I just loved the stories. Due to inadequate library acquisitions I read the books out of order, except for the first: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
I feel that prequels can work out when they are chronologically distant from the other books in the series. Preferably, they should focus on a different set of characters (not necessarily entirely new characters, but not the same characters that were protagonists in the original work), with a Noticeably different setting as well. In my opinion, this is why the Magicians Nephew worked so well, as well as other prequels like Last First Snow or The Thran. (Notably, all three of those have major focus on a character that was an antagonist in the other books of their respective series, although the Star Wars prequels show that that is very much not a guaranteed recipe for success.)
I remember thinking the Wheel of Time prequel was really interesting as a character study. It also came out during the late middle part of the series when the last several books had been really meandering. The next book that came out, even before Jordan’s diagnosis, showed a much stronger focus as he started pulling all the threads together again. I got the impression that writing New Spring helped him regain focus on where the series was going.
So this basically boils down to “A prequel can be great so long as it’s a great story in its own right”?
This thread got me thinking about Tamora Pierce’s Tortall Universe.
The first several series (focused on Alanna, then Daine, then Kel) followed one another chronologically.
But then she went back 200 years to tell the story of Beka Cooper – and the fact Beka is an ancestor of one of the “modern” cast is probably the least interesting thing about her.
Her last book looked at the childhood of Numair Salmalín. He was introduced as an adult in the Daine books, fighting for Tortall against his homeland and former friends. Not only is Pierce fleshing out some characters who were previously painted in broad brushstrokes, but the setting is culturally very different from the stories set within Tortall.
I’d like to echo what others have said about prequels -and sequels – sometimes making the world smaller. I’m generally a fan of open-ended stories, that leave a bit of mystery, or a range of possibilities, because that’s how the real world works – things don’t all tie together, there isn’t a Puppet-Master who was there all along, and people’s lives touch for brief moments and then diverge completely.
I think a good sequel or prequel is one where there is some thin thread connected to the original narrative, and a new cloth is woven around it. If there are multiple threads the author wants to explore, a series of short stories set in the same world is much more satisfying than a novel composed of a long series of coincidences that bring it all together again.
The main problem with prequels over sequels is that everything they introduce to the world has to avoid “breaking” the original plot. Star Trek Enterprise and Discovery suffer from this – they want to have plots that are much more interesting than the 1960s series, but need to somehow lead up to it. Then again, there’s a lot of “sitcom syndrome” in Star Trek, where world-changing discoveries are never mentioned again, so maybe it’s best to see prequel story arcs as just extra-length episodes in the same vein.
That was a lot of words to say “nope, never”.