revenge of the prologue rant

I hate prologues. Out of the hundreds (perhaps more) of prologues I've read, I only remember two of them fondly: Scott Lynch and Joe Abercrombie are the authors who stole my heart. The vast, vast majority of them suffer from some or all of the following problems:

• Are used as an excuse for appalling infodumps. Huge quantities of information are crammed in with very little attempt to craft an actual story.
• Depict a long-ago historical event the author wrongly thinks we need to see up-front to understand the story.
• Feature a generic evil overlord being generically evil. He burns villages, he tortures people, he kicks the dog. Yawn.
• Attempt to be ominous yet unspecific by using painfully cliched language of foreboding: "Something terrible is coming." / "Yes, and a hero must rise to deal with it, but I fear he will succumb to the madness in his soul." (I don't understand why people ever bother with ominous vagueness when it's so obvious they're referring to the protagonist.)
• Show the special events of the special protagonist's special birth. Apart from the cliche, this supports the tired idea that everything special about a person is inherited from their equally special daddy. Alas, poor meritocracy, we knew ye well.
• Are completely unnecessary.
• Try to persuade us to get emotionally invested in the characters, even though we all know that prologue characters won't recur - whether they die at the end or are historical characters or aren't important at all except for the special baby.
• Don't even bother trying to persuade us that there's something here worth investing in emotionally.
• Tell us things that don't become relevant for another 80,000 words, by which time we've forgotten what happened.
• Are obvious ripoffs of other stories.
• At the end, rip the reader out of that scene and dump them into chapter one, frequently with absolutely zero continuity of time, place, plot or character. (I complained about this in my review of the pilot of TV series Sanctuary.)

If I could write the One Law to Rule them All, I'd probably rule that:

1. Prologues cannot contain more than 50 words of exposition at a time. Period.
2. Special protagonist's special birth prologues are banned.
3. Generic evil overlord prologues are banned.
4. Prophecies? Totally banned.
5. Ominous vaguery is not interesting.
   
6. Readers need some continuity. The prologue and first chapter should be obviously linked: the same characters, or the same setting, or the same subjects, etc.
7. At least one named character with an actual personality must feature.
   
8. Thinking, feeling, angsting, expositing, world-building, reflecting on backstory and navel-gazing of all types must be balanced with dialogue, action and character interaction.
   

Nearly all prologues I've read have been disastrous.

But when I reread the prologue of Best Served Cold, I remember how enormously I love it. :)

the problem with prologues, as illustrated by the tv show sanctuary

I enjoy a lot of science fiction and fantasy TV shows: Battlestar Galactica, Doctor Who and Darker And Edgier spinoff Torchwood, Supernatural, Flash Forward and Dollhouse, to name but a few. So I popped the pilot episode of Sanctuary on with high hopes.

I’d like those fifteen minutes of my life back, please.

(SPOILERS for Sanctuary 1x01.)

1. Our pilot opens with a woman facing off against a prostitute-killing vampire in 1880s Whitechapel, the inference being that he’s Jack the Ripper, in a scene apparently ripped directly from Angel. As far as I could tell, these characters disappear and the storyline is never brought up again.
2. Giant time, location and scene change. Present-day cops burst into a murder scene and find a kid hiding under a bed. The kid bursts out tentacles and eats them or something. All these characters drop off the radar.
3. Another time, location and scene change. In a hospital, a delusional criminal is being interrogated about the murdered bodies of a bunch of people he claims he didn’t kill ...

At this point, I’m fifteen minutes in, and I hit the exit button of disgust.

When I start watching a pilot (or open a book to the first page), I’m ready to get excited. Give me something -- a compelling character, a unique voice, conflict that gets my heart racing -- and I’ll keep turning pages.

But if you don’t give me time and incentive to engage, and you rip me out of that scene and stick me in another and expect me to try and engage with that scene too, and then you rip me out of that scene ... then I’m done.

And that’s my problem with prologues. You get one shot at hooking me as a reader. It’s a fair shot: I’ll keep turning pages to give you time to get into your stride. But if you can’t hook me with your opening scene, throwing a scene change at me doesn’t help. And if you did hook me with your opening scene -- shoving me into another, completely different scene, often with no continuity of character or plot at all? Also doesn’t help.

Honourable exceptions to my prologue hate include Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora. This prologue is so snappy and pacy and caustic, I loved it instantly: I counted down the days until I could rush out and buy the novel, which I also loved. So they can work. You just need to be brilliant like Scott Lynch.