Feedback on a potential series structure that began with the end of the world, then unraveled that lost world's history in reverse with each new book? [Dark Fantasy]
Hello!
I have always had a (very silly) chip on my shoulder about "end of the world" style fantasy and sci-fi books. The world never actually ends; it always gets saved somehow.
I mean, that's cool and all---I live on a world and I'd personally hate it if it were destroyed, so 'yay world saving' and all that---but it's just... been done, you know?
I think there's something very poetic about loss, which isn't a new thought by any stretch and tends to get covered fairly well in no small number of stories. I wanted to really dive head first into the concept though, so I created a beautiful world just to destroy it... However I am introducing that world to readers at its worst state. Its death bed.
The first book follows the last remnants of two different but connected, long-lost societies as they make their way across a dying continent, the final bastion of land for a handful of different sapient creatures---humans among them---on a world otherwise consumed by ocean.
An unstoppable force that exists at a geological scale (in size and time) is ending its cycle, as it has always done and will do again. Soon the vast oceans will rise to swallow this last chunk of land, consuming the last sip of life from its planet---only to seed it again with newer, more highly evolved stock some millions of years later. We won't be there when it happens.
In the first book, you'll see these characters struggle to make it...somewhere, to find some sort of meaning in an ending world. Through their experience you'll get glimpses of what was, the history of their people, their kingdoms and cities, their various downfalls outside of the inevitable, all through a crumbling lens.
Then it ends. Everyone dies. The happiest part of the ending is that no one is around to be sad about anything.
Honestly, it's not a great way to start a series, killing your entire world.
But what if Book 2 explains how those two main characters from the first one met? How did they find each other? How did these revenant remnants survive in a world that wants them dead like they should be? Book 2 would end somewhere around the beginning of Book 1's timeline.
Book 3 is the story of one of those characters' lives in a Kingdom that's only known as a hole in the ocean by Book 1. The story of his life before he met his companion in Book 1. The story of how his kingdom fell.
Book 4 is a story about that kingdom before that character was even born. A story of how the kingdom was formed, how its rival (the "kingdom" of Book 1) came to be.
And on and on...
So, what do you think? Do you think you could be invested in something like that?
Do you think knowing it all inevitably ends and 'doesn't matter' would make it harder to feel invested in the first and subsequent stories? Or does that finality, a memento mori sort of thing, feel like it could add emotional weight that might otherwise be missing?
Of course 'if it's well written, sure' is a thing, but I am asking very specifically about the structure of ending a world in one book and then telling its history through others.
I appreciate any feedback and the time taken to read my ramblings :)