Threequels. Not the groundbreaking first, not the stake-raising second, but the one that goes big or goes … elsewhere.
Return of the Jedi is equal parts ham-fisted plot cleanup and high emotional moments. Henry V is high-stakes action and excitement that nonetheless manages to create a closing arc for a complex character, even if it eschews the comic complexity of Henry IV parts I & II. Then there’s Die Hard with a Vengeance. And Terminator 3. And Alien 3. And … Okay, threequels are usually terrible. But here’s a list of threequels that rule their particular series.
Since the third child usually gets hand-me-downs, each book gets its very own special new present.
(Aside: this was not easy! I adore Octavia Butler, but her strongest series novels are definitely the tour-de-force Wild Seed, sitting at Patternmaster #1, and the intensity of Adulthood Rites, Xenogenesis #2, far outdoes the sedate pace of Imago. Naomi Novik’s best Temeraire book was the fourth, and both Jane Yolen’s Pit Dragons and Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain have stellar second books and slumpy third books. So don’t be hating because I picked some really well-known books. It just might be that it’s hard to do a good threequel.)
Spoiler warning for the first three books of A Song of Ice and Fire and The Expanse, Mockingjay, and a few older books as well!
A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin
When I first read the series, young’ns, there were only three, and if George had been consumed by a dragon in 2001, he would have gone out on a high note.
It’s not just the Red Wedding although ouch, that still hurts. All the highlights were in this particular book. Tyrion’s betrayal of his family! The Hound’s duel with Beric Dondarrion! Jamie, Brienne and the bear! Jamie’s hand! Jon versus Ygritte! Dracarys! And most of all, with Martin running at maximum Martin, the duel between the Mountain and the Viper. Anywhere else in fantasy, especially in the early 2000s, you wouldn’t find such shades of gray, such reversals and heartbreak, and especially not a fist-pumping duel that ended with the “good guy” getting his head smashed in for his arrogance.
It’s also no surprise to me that George originally planned the series in 5-year-gaps—an idea he abandoned in order to write A Feast For Crows—and that this novel was supposed to climax the first arc before the gap set in. Nearly every character reaches a breaking point and is transformed into someone new. Each character, even the walk-ons like the Viper, is undone by their flaws. Jon, Dany, Tyrion, Arya and Sansa, all carrying the story, are undone and remade.
Well done, A Storm of Swords. You shine like Valyrian steel, so you get a new sword that you don’t have to share with your brother. We were gonna get you a new puppy, but he’s dead and his head is sewed to your brother’s corpse.
(STILL OUCH!)
The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien
There’s a lot of coronations, goodbyes, and fanboying about caves and trees, yes. But, for all that Aragorn and Gandalf spend a good twenty pages chatting in snow, The Return of the King is the book that contains all Tolkien’s greatest moments. It’s got his sharpest critique of industrialism in the Scouring of the Shire, his most profound musings on hope in the Houses of Healing, and the heart-wrenching despair in the wasteland of Mordor.
Plus the Crowning Moments of Awesome just keep coming. Sam carries Frodo up the mountain. Pippin leaps into the fire to save Aragorn. Gandalf faces the Witch-King at the gate of Minas Tirith. Aragorn summons the Dead to the Stone of Erech. Eowyn slays the Witch-King (an especially crowning moment of awesome after two books in which women are rare as Balrogs or dragons).
Actually, let’s see that. And again. Oh yeah.
In the end, Frodo’s permanent wound is a reminder that home never waits for us the same way—at least, not until we reach a “far green country under a swift sunrise.”
Well done, Return of the King. You get your very own tree. Yes, a tree, because you third kids like some odd things sometimes, but we sure love ya.
Abaddon’s Gate by James S.A. Corey
Everyone agrees that The Expanse is great, and everyone also has very different opinions about which is the best book. And I have to agree this was a tough choice—for one, Gate doesn’t feature a viewpoint for Detective Miller, one of the best characters in the first book, although he features in the story as the alien surrogate. Nor does Chrisjen Avasarala figure in, with her Sol-system-spanning politics and entertainingly foul mouth.
But this book, designed to serve as a finale if Corey’s remaining story was not picked up, shows the heart of The Expanse. Humanity is ready to move on, in theory having outgrown a few planets and asteroids, and the ring gate is the key. But humanity is not ready to move on in spirit. A brutal, short-sighted force seizes control of the ship at the heart of the ring gate, and Clarissa Mao’s quest for vengeance almost ends interstellar exploration before it starts.
Anna Volovodov, a preacher, reaches out to Clarissa, and who becomes the voice of calm during the uprising. The books never comment on whether there is a divine force in the universe, other than extra-dimensional threats. Anna’s character, though, and all of Abaddon’s Gate, show that faith and hope are as real in space as are avarice, vengeance and despair.
Well done, Abaddon’s Gate. You get a brand-new David Bowie CD, to take into the farthest reaches of space. No, it’s not weird that I’m giving you a CD in 2018. It’s not used. It’s new, I promise. Fresh from the factory that definitely still makes CDs.
Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
My wife and I have a running argument about Mockingjay: I think it’s the best novel in the trilogy, and she thinks it’s the worst. The ending changes Katniss permanently, removing her core tie to humanity (trying to avoid spoilers here, though you’ve probably all read it). For my wife, that was like telling the audience that everything meaningful was over.
For me … I like that sort of thing. And had (spoiler!) lived, I doubt that the books would feel so relevant.
The Hunger Games is by far the best Exploding YA Fad Book of the 21st century, and the one that will probably get taught in high school lit classes. Mockingjay proves it. When the brave resistance sees themselves in the actions of the Capitol, and when Katniss must question whether Coin has simply become another Snow, Collins manages to make the audience ask all the questions of 21st-century America. It’s all well and good to honor the troops and thank soldiers for their service, but when we continue to support and engage in eternal, unwinnable wars, do we perpetuate our own Hunger Games? And when we accept a culture of school shootings? When we say “freedom” as if it means something to people halfway around the globe getting hit by drones?
Collins’ answer is as brutal as it is resonant:
“I think that Peeta was onto something about us destroying one another and letting some decent species take over. Because something is significantly wrong with a creature that sacrifices its children’s lives to settle its differences.”
This book leaves us with a broken hero who has no ship to take her to a far green shore.
Well done, Mockingjay. You get your own pre-made dress for Katniss! She won’t have to wear the communal wedding dress after all—wait, isn’t Katniss like, seventeen? Why is she so worried about marriage anyway?
The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin
I love The Tombs of Atuan, as do many lapsed church kids, but I have to honestly admit that The Farthest Shore is the strongest of Le Guin’s early Earthsea books, and the one that best gives the essence of Earthsea. (Disclaimer: I haven’t read past Farthest Shore, so Tehanu might change my mind.)
Ged confronts his dark shadow-self in Wizard, in Tombs Arha must confront the darkness of denial and brainwashing. In Shore, the darkness is everywhere, and when it takes hold of Arren, he runs through a brutal gamut of emotions as he tries to reconcile Ged’s own human frailty with the every-darkening world. When Sopli leaps overboard to his death, and the boat drifts in horrid ennui, the book takes on a somber and scary quality that wasn’t there in the first two books. It’s not quite the fun, magical place, but it returns to the themes in Wizard and Tombs. Le Guin’s evil never comes from a Dark Lord, but always our own fear and despair, amplified and twisted by human creation, and Ged and Arren must cling to hope to get through death itself.
I may just prefer this one because of the title itself. What is the farthest shore but the other side of our own despair?
Well done, Farthest Shore. I got you a special night light to drive away the darkness, and to keep your brother awake.
Spencer Ellsworth is the author of the Starfire Trilogy, and his very own threequel, Memory’s Blade, is out as of February 27, resolving a trilogy of galactic genocide, sun-sized spiders, and a longtime craving for a tomato. His short fiction has also appeared in Lightspeed Magazine, the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and here on Tor.com. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, works at a small tribal college on a Native American reservation, and blogs and newsletters through his website.
I love Mockingjay. I picked up Hunger Games as basically ‘plane reading’ and it entertained me but didn’t draw me in. I finished it and then never got around to the sequel. Eventually I picked it up again and went on to read Catching Fire (also entertaining) and then Mockingjay just blew me away. That was the book that really seemed to put it step above the somewhat tropey YA dystopia that it was
Also a huge fan of Return of the King :) As I get older, I find the ending so much more bittersweet.
Iain M. Banks’s third Culture novel Use of Weapons would fit but the most striking example I can presently recall of is from outside SF: John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold eclipsed the two previous George Smiley novels.
I think you meant that Pippin jumped into the fire to save *Faramir*, rather than Aragorn.
Alien 3 certainly pales in comparison to the far superior Alien and Aliens. However, it is by far the 3rd best film in the franchise, and actually isn’t bad to borderline pretty good. Resurrection is a joke and Prometheus and Covenant are head scratchers. Totally agree on Storm of Swords though, that’s when I picked up the series too and it’s an amazing book.
I personally found “Tehanu” and “The other wind” a bit of a quite late retcon for the world of Earthsea.
I understand that, in light of some evolution of her thinking and changing sensibilities, Le Guin may have grown unsatisfied with some aspect of the world building she had done for the first three novels, and felt the need to go back at it and change some of the roots of that world, but I found the change of themes, writing styles and reinterpretation of what had been said in the previous works a bit jarring.
I would have appreciated those works more if they had been independent works and left the original trilogy alone as it was.
fizz: they were very different novels (and don’t forget Tales from Earthsea, which is an integral part of the whole and part of it a prequel to The Other Wind), but I think that even ignoring the rectification of the horrible “weak as women’s magic; wicked as women’s magic” Hardic treatment of women in the first three books, taken together they exemplify Earthsea even more than The Farthest Shore does with its emphasis on voyaging and the restoration of balance. Tehanu is about quietness and things found in stillness; The Other Wind, about conflict; Tehanu about growing old, and raising the young, and the power of women; The Other Wind has more than a bit in it about the bit in the middle, adulthood, and the young coming into their own, and there’s a lot of men in it, both now and in history, dashing about at cross purposes: and all of these things are themes that recur over and over throughout the other books, as well. Both also have almost opposing things to say about the interactions of dragons and humans which cannot be described further without massive spoilers. (This definitely is a retcon from the original conception of Earthsea, but frankly I consider it a wonderful retcon.)
I will say this for both The Other Wind and The Farthest Shore: both contain climactic sections in the Dry Land which are I think among the best lyrical writing in the English language, and which always, always get the tears flowing, for me anyway. So I’m certainly not disagreeing with the post’s opinion of The Farthest Shore, even if I can never rank the Earthsea books in order because I’m fairly sure that each is better than all the others. (I think they vary along multiple axes, so this is perhaps not nonsense!)
Spencer: I strongly recommend reading both: Tehanu is so different it is a wrench, but no more different than The Tombs of Atuan, which was also about stillness and silence. (Heck, I strongly recommend reading everything Le Guin ever wrote. If she’d published her grocery lists I would read them.)
I am a huge fan of Jacqueline Carey and Kushiel’s Avatar is my very favorite of her Kushiel’s Legacy series. It has all of my favorite moments, and some of the most beautiful writing. Doesn’t hurt that the ending always makes me cry (always).
Eh, I’d argue that “Part 3 of a trilogy” =/= “threequel”. Return of the Jedi, for example, was a bit of a mess, but I wouldn’t call it a threequel any more than I’d call Hero of Ages or Assassins quest one.
Henry V is high-stakes action and excitement that nonetheless manages to create a closing arc for a complex character, even if it eschews the comic complexity of Henry IV parts I & II.
But Henry V isn’t the third in the sequence; it’s the fourth. The sequence starts with Richard II. (And ends, eight plays later, with Richard III). So the threequel is Henry IV Part II, which is my least favourite of all of them.
Other terrible threequels: the book of Leviticus!
Seriously, Genesis and Exodus are packed with drama and interest – the Creation! The Fall of Man! The Flood! The Tower of Babel! Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, Captivity in Egypt, the first Passover, the crossing of the Red Sea… all terrific stuff. So, how are you going to follow that?
– Well, Bob, I thought I’d spend the entire book going on about food rules and the laws around sacrifices and how to treat people with contagious skin diseases.
It’s like GRRM writing “A Game of Thrones” and “A Clash of Kings” and following it up with “A Comprehensive Guide To The Footwear Of Westeros”.
Three words: Deep Space Nine.
I never paid proper attention to this before, but you’re on to something; as much as I look forward to the big wrap-up of a trilogy, they do fail a lot of the time don’t they? The one I remember especially working for me was “White Gold Weilder”, if you take the 2nd Chronicles of Thomas Covenant as its own trilogy. But I could name a lot of third books where I didn’t think it was all that.
Third books come with their own challenges, the biggest being how to make anything in it new and fresh when the business at hand is to wrap things up – not too neatly though, has to be just right.
@10 ajay:
Haha, yes! I totally agree!
Also, Spencer, I’m with your wife on this one. Mockingjay wasn’t very good. Maybe the social commentary was deep and all that, but the story was not nearly as engaging or well done as the first two. Actually, the Hunger Games series is interesting to me in that I thought the first book was the best, but the second movie was the best. And admittedly, I may be letting the disaster of the 2-part 3rd movie cast shade on Mockingjay the book. I guess I’ll have to back and reread the series.
@11, yes, DS9 was excellent.
Actually, Alien 3 rules…
@whitespine, I love the Hunger Games books so much that I’ve refused to see the movie. Maybe that’s one reason I still love Mockingjay? Actually, I think I love it just because I love a depressing ending…
I know it is not a true ending, but the Dragon Reborn – Book 3 of WoT – really is a good ending. After it the world cracked open more and the plot bloat happened. I loved most of the plot bloat – but tDR does hold a place in my heart. It could have been an ending if the WoT had not taken off. Unlike all the rest of the books until Book 14.
Slight SPOILER ALERTS for Patricia McKillip’s Riddle Master trilogy
Harpist in the Wind is not as brilliant as the first book, The Riddle-Master of Hed, but it pulls out all the stops: the wizards have emerged from hiding, the High One is revealed, Morgon gathers the power he needs to protect the lands from the shapechangers and he discovers his true destiny, and two immortals in love find a way to keep their love alive though the millennia. A fine conclusion to a VERY good trilogy.
While LOTR is my favorite work of all time, I don’t think Return really belongs on the list. Tolkien wrote LOTR as one book. It was published as a trilogy to maximize revenue and because the mass-market presses of the day couldn’t really fit it as one volume. The climax of a book should be its best part and Return definately lives up to that, but it is not really a threequel.
N.K Jemisin’s The Stone Sky manages to be even better than the two Hugo-winners that preceded it.
@16 Reading Memory Blade now, should l expect a depressing ending? Just kidding don’t tell. Either way thanks for the enjoyable adventure.
I also think there is a difference between a third book in a longer series and the final book in a trilogy. I think Stephen King took the Dark Tower series in a really interesting direction beginning in The Wastelands. It is where the series started to feel like a series to me. I also think Patrick O’brien’s third book in the Aubrey-Maturin series, The H.M.S Surprise, is one of the very best.
Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Mercy
Elizabeth Hand’s Icarus Descending
Wild Seed was the fourth book written in the Patternist series, not the first. I remember it as the third since I apparently missed the actual third one (Survivor). First was Patternmaster, second was Mind of My Mind.
I definitely agree about A Storm of Swords. When I read ASoIaF, I had never read anything like that before. Never read a book where point-of-view characters died, where main characters weren’t safe, where such terrible things happened to ‘good guys’, where I could learn to root for the ‘bad guys’ (I still can’t believe that I like Jaime Lannister!)
But Feast and Dance really pulled me out of the world. I started each chapter trying to convince myself to care about these people, and really only finished them because I felt like I had to. It would have been better to wait for these.
Return of the King, of course – I couldn’t agree more. Perfect in every way. And I count among those that really liked Mockingjay. I thought it was right that Katniss’ world was totally different from how the books began. Different and not altogether perfect. She changed, her life changed, her world changed. The ending felt true.
I suppose most people would rank Children of Dune behind Dune (no one seems to like Messiah), but the third book did a brilliant job wrapping up the first trilogy. And the twins quite frankly rock.
Hero of Ages was a good third book that ended a series.
My favorite third book in a series is Memories of Ice from Malazan though, so much awesome in that. The punitive army of 3, Moon’s Spawn showing up, T’lan Imass army, Itkovian, Gruntle with the banner…
“Storm of Swords” & “Memories of Ice”. These remain the gold standards for the 3rd book in a series.
I thought Brian Staveley did a commendable job with The Last Mortal Bond. And of course there is Sanderson with The Hero of Ages, which almost turned the series on its head.
I just really need to tell people that Ptolemy’s Gate, the third book in the Bartimaeus Sequence by Jonathan Stroud, will rip your entire soul in half in the best way possible. I am not usually a fan of anti-hero books, but the payoff in this one is so, so, so worth it.
Good stuff here, but let me toss my 2 cents into the ring.
Asimov. Foundation; Foundation & Empire; Second Foundation.
The double whammy surprise at the end of 2nd Foundation was awesome (1 you knew was coming, 1 you [at least I] didn’t).
Abaddon’s Gate is the best of the first three of The Expanse, I will agree, though the first two (especially Leviathan Wakes) are very good. Cibola Burn (the fourth in the series) was a bit of a mess (at least in comparison) IMHO, a cliche squatters against the homesteaders in the unknown wilderness story with a really muddy ending. But the next two (Nemesis Games and Babylon’s Ashes, which together form a single story) were the best so far. I haven’t gotten to Persepolis Rising yet, and may not for a while: I understand that one and the two following will form a single story arc, so I’m going to wait until they are all available before starting on them. And I’ll be waiting for the TPB editions so the books on my shelf sorta match. But waiting is hard…
@26 You beat me to it, so I just have to agree, Children of Dune and the twins rock. It was my entry into the series and a good one to start with too.
The White Dragon is by far the best of the Dragonriders of Pern series. The cover alone got me to want to buy the book.
@Ajay LOL. And that rule works equally well for both Testaments. Luke is a snooty version of Matthew with a revisionist Nativity agenda!!!
@Ken Great Point!! My favorite of that series as well! The little white dragon and Jaxom made a great cover.
@SpencerEllsworth/OP About Mockingjay, I think I read the ending as more hopeful than some. Katniss has suffered loss after loss, clearly has PTSD, but still tries to gain whatever happiness and peace she can. I found that hopeful. Grief and pain may never leave us but we can still gather the comfort we can.
I’m not sure that LOTR can really be seen as three books (how the publisher divided them) or six books (how Tolkien divided them, following the conceit that they were “found” manuscripts) or just one magisterial epic— but I do know that Return of the King is my very favorite!!
At that sound the bent shape of the king sprang suddenly erect. Tall and proud he seemed again; and rising in his stirrups he cried in a loud voice, more clear than any there had ever heard a mortal man achieve before:
Arise, arise, Riders of Théoden!
Fell deeds awake: fire and slaughter!
spear shall be shaken, shield be splintered,
a sword-day, a red day, ere the sun rises!
Ride now, ride now! Ride to Gondor!
With that he seized a great horn from Guthláf his banner-bearer, and he blew such a blast upon it that it burst asunder. And straightway all the horns in the host were lifted up in music, and the blowing of the horns of Rohan in that hour was like a storm upon the plain and a thunder in the mountains.
Ride now! Ride now to Gondor!
Suddenly the king cried to Snowmane and the horse sprang away. Behind him his banner blew in the wind, white horse upon a field of green, but he outpaced it. After him thundered the knights of his house, but he was ever before them. Éomer rode there, the white horsetail on his helm floating in his speed, and the front of the first éored roared like a breaker foaming to the shore, but Théoden could not be overtaken. Fey he seemed, or the battle-fury of his fathers ran like new fire in his veins, and he was borne up on Snowmane like a god of old, even as Oromë the Great in the battle of the Valar when the world was young. His golden shield was uncovered, and lo! it shone like an image of the Sun, and the grass flamed into green about the white feet of his steed.
For morning came, morning and a wind from the sea; and the darkness was removed, and the hosts of Mordor wailed, and terror took them, and they fled, and died, and the hoofs of wrath rode over them. And then all the host of Rohan burst into song, and they sang as they slew, for the joy of battle was on them, and the sound of their singing that was fair and terrible came even to the City.
Wow.
That just rocks.
Children of Dune is the book that really pushes the Dune series over the top for me. Didn’t always feel that way about it, but after re-reading the series few times it is at least my co-favorite of the six books.
Sigh. “The Lord of the Rings” is a single book.
While I love all three books of Xenogenesis (it’s a regular re-read for me), Imago is the best of the three in many ways. We get to see more of Oankali society, and we also get to really explore what it means to be an ooloi. For me, the ooloi were one of the most fascinating aspects of the series.
@33, That book cover improved my relationship with my mother…She ran out of new reading material, and picked it up because it had a pretty cover. Reading it made my mom stop calling sci-fi and fantay stuff “Pure escapist drivel” and it was the brilliant blue Michael Whelan cover that made her pick it up!
I can’t believe that nobody’s mentioned Tad Williams’ “To Green Angel Tower.” yet. It takes the loose ends in the series, and ties some in nice neat gordian knots, and lets others hang in the breeze, waiting for their own stories. It leaves you wondering about a few things, and at the same time, very satisfied with it.
‘The Scouring of the Shire’ is the worst anti-climax I’ve ever read. Thank heavens Peter Jackson left it out of the movie. It’s like telling the story of World War Two with an epilogue where Hitler survives to lord it over a small English town. Like Monty Python’s ‘Hitler in Minehead’ sketch!
@rivka, I need to revisit the Xenogenesis trilogy. It’s been about ten years, and I remember loving Adulthood Rites because it was so fast-paced, like Wild Seed, my favorite Butler book. I think I probably didn’t give Imago a fair shake.
I also consider LOTR to be a novel (continuous narrative) and not a trilogy, but I do see Spencer Ellsworth’s point here – even though one of my very favorite parts of the novel was the meeting between Faramir and Frodo and Sam (not if I found it by the highway …)
Beginning, middle, and end – doesn’t it make sense that the end would be the most exciting, the most tense, the most climactic?
I liked Dune Messiah and Children of Dune the best, and equally well. Those who prefer adventure novels prefer Dune. I am of the opinion that they do not perceive that Dune ends in failure and tragedy (better to have accepted the Guild offer of sanctuary on Tupile), whereas Dune Messiah ends in victory, even if at a cost. The same applies to the ending of Children of Dune. Seriously, condemning yourself to a life lived as a Sandworm is not all its cracked up to be.
If we take the story of the life of Paul Atreides as the first of a trilogy, and the story of Leto in Children of Dune and God, Emperor of Dune as the second part, with the story of Odrade Atreides in Heretics and Chapterhouse as the third part, then perhaps we have a case here where the middle part of the trilogy was just slightly better than the others.