Two Lines No Waiting / Literature

---

Two Lines, No Waiting in Literature.

---

• Clive Cussler:
  • The Kurt Austin series do this. Kurt Austin and Joe Zavala are plot A, Paul Trout and his wife Gamay Morgan-Trout are Plot B. Then because of various reasons there will be parts where Austin will work with Trout while Zavala and Gamay work together. Which gets humorous when Kurt and Paul have to sneak around because Trout is nearly 7-feet tall.
  • Sahara has two plots running side by side, interlinking with each other. It eventually then focuses exclusively on one, with the other only coming back just when the audience has forgotten about it.
• Peter F. Hamilton does this quite a bit. His Commonwealth Saga follows something like seven plots all at once, and they'd each be enough for a book of their own. The Night's Dawn Trilogy has three major plots going at once. There's a reason his books are so thick.
• Several Discworld novels feature two parallel plotlines that occasionally interact, finally uniting near the end, for example Reaper Man (Death's retirement and Windle Poons's "afterlife", with slightly different typefaces to distinguish them) and Hogfather (Death taking the Hogfather's role; Susan stopping Teatime).
• Author Haruki Murakami is good at this.
  • His earlier novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World was, as the title suggests, two separate stories. One is a cyberpunk neo-noir thriller (Wonderland) and the other is a magical fantasy (End of the World). The two stories have the same protagonist, though - and they can't both have happy endings.
  • The Mind Screw book Kafka on the Shore features two completely different stories alternating every chapter. The odd numbered chapters have a mostly realistic (at least until the end) story of a teenage runaway, and the even numbered ones are about a guy who can talk to cats and is convinced he has to fulfill some destiny to keep evil from taking over the world. The two stories impact on each other from time to time without ever quite intersecting.
• Neal Stephenson is especially fond of this trope. Nearly all of them feature at least 2 plots, although they almost always intersect by the end.
  • Cryptonomicon, for example, has a plot following Lawrence Waterhouse and Alan Turing breaking Axis cyphers in 1942, Bobby Shaftoe in service at the Navy around the same years, and Randy Waterhouse setting up a business operation in the present.
  • The Confusion deserves special mention for being presented as two separate novels mixed (or "confused") together (the other volumes in The Baroque Cycle contain three books, but present them one at a time). Both novels have a couple of strands to them.
  • Snow Crash has Hiro Protagonist and YT as major viewpoint characters. They work together and spend much of their time together, but during the story have completely separate conflicts. It turns out that they are heading towards the same plot climax, but from two completely different directions.
• The Empirium Trilogy: The trilogy follows the lives of Rielle and Eliana as they come to grips with their powers and the expectations that come with them. Rielle's story is about her rise as the Sun Queen and the events that caused her to turn into the Blood Queen. Eliana's story is about her learning the truth behind her powers and heritage, all while trying to figure out how to bring the Undying Empire to its knees. Their stories eventually intersect towards the end of the trilogy.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • In the first book, it starts with three plots - basically one following Eddard Stark, one following Jon Snow, and the third following Daenerys. Over the course of the first book the characters end up getting really spread out and by the second book there are a huge number of interwoven plots, plus Daenerys who has spawned no other point of view characters and has really had minimal interaction with the rest of the cast. The plot is incredibly convoluted with dozens of characters and more than a dozen different point of view characters. Of course, given that Daenerys has gotten so much time, and yet is on the other side of an ocean, we all know something very important is going to happen with her in the last book...
  • Daenerys is an odd example, because the actions the characters on Westeros actually have a constant impact on her life—it just sometimes takes a while to cross the ocean and get to her. The first example that springs to mind would be the time Robert Baratheon sent an assassin after her, after hearing about her marriage to Khal Drogo. And by the time the assassin and Dany meet, King Robert (and Khal Drogo) were already dead.
  • It looks like Dany might be moving into the main plotline, or the main plotline might be moving to Daenerys—preview chapters from the next book strongly indicate that she'll be joining forces with Tyrion Lannister in the future.
• The Wheel of Time the later books fragment into several plotlines. One book in fact is Book B to the previous. This either creates a vivid, appealing world or makes the books hopelessly convoluted, depending on the reader.
• Mercedes Lackey - in her Mage Storms trilogy, the main plot gets interwoven with machiavellian scheming in a distant and uber-powerful empire. The B plot gives the readers insight into one of the major characters as well as answering several questions that any smart reader would be asking and couldn't be properly answered any other way. Same goes with The Obsidian Trilogy, which has the main plot with the main characters and another equally important plot happening back in the city.
• Malazan Book of the Fallen does this with around 4-5 lines. Book 2 and 3 even happened at exactly the same time.
• Sandy Mitchell's Warhammer 40,000 novel Scourge The Heretic breaks into two infiltration plots: One for the smugglers, one for the Chaos cult.
• The defining characteristic of the Victorian multiplot novel. For example:
  • W. M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair
  • George Eliot, Daniel Deronda and Middlemarch (more than two in the latter).
  • Charles Dickens, Bleak House
  • Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now and most of his other novels
• After the first book, The Lord of the Rings breaks down into two stories for most of its run: Frodo & Sam on one hand, and the rest of the Fellowship on the other. Even then, there are sub-divisions in the rest of the series for a good deal of the time, such as the two views of the march of the Uruk-hai—one from Merry & Pippin, the other from Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli. The early parts of the third book, "The Return of the King", fragment this a little more, as we get separate views on Pippin & Gandalf in Minas Tirith, Merry with the Rohirrim, and Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli on the Paths of the Dead. All this is in addition to Frodo & Sam's part of the story, which eventually leads to the re-merging of the disparate threads.
• The Swallows and Amazons series of children's novels by Arthur Ransome follows several families of children who only meet in their school holidays. After the fifth book in the series (Coot Club), there are often two plots running concurrently in different novels, and the characters even send postcards to friends who don't appear. The thirteenth book would have united characters who had never met, but Ransome never finished it.
• The latter half of Dark Lord of Derkholm ping-pongs between the adventures of Derk and those of his children, Blade, Shona, and Kit, as they lead a party through the "game."
• Older Than Feudalism: The Odyssey has Odysseus attempting to get home, and Odysseus's son Telemachos's attempts to find his father.
• In Mike Lee's Warhammer 40,000 Horus Heresy novel Fallen Angels, Nemiel's and Zahariel's stories.
• Timothy Zahn does this all the time in his Star Wars Expanded Universe and Legends novels. All of his many protagonists have plotlines that weave and diverge and intersect and merge constantly. In Allegiance, chosen for an example because it has a smaller cast, the plotlines belong to Mara Jade and her mission to follow a pirate/corrupt Imperial connection, Daric LaRone and the Hand of Judgment with their efforts to do good and figure out what to do next, Luke Skywalker and Han Solo fumbling with Han's reservations about the Rebellion while on a mission, Leia Organa and her quest to keep bits of the Rebellion together, Villim Disra's gambit to get more power, and Captain Ozzel with his increasingly desperate attempts to hide the fact that five stormtroopers defected from his ship. And all of these plotlines forms its own narrative, but is related somehow to all of the others. They rarely get forgotten, either. Zahn's awesome like that.
• The multi-author Fate of the Jedi series. It's loosely based on The Odyssey, with Luke and his son exploring strange places and meeting exotic force-using organizations. But, there's also a murder trial, a power struggle between the government and the Jedi Order, a conspiracy right out of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, a little girl Chosen One who gets into trouble, and a big sub-plot about slavery. Each book shows some Jedi falling into a paranoid psychosis and causing trouble. Can you remember all of these?... Well, the authors have ignored the investigation into Jacen for a new plot involving an Eldritch Abomination for several books (though they still visit strange places/groups), and a group of Jedi got sent out to fight slavery, only to be ignored the next book.
• Holes, by Louis Sachar, alternates between the story of Stanley Yelnats' life at Camp Green Lake, the story of Stanley's "pig-stealing" great-great-grandfather Elya, and the story of schoolteacher Kate Barlow in the Old West town of Green Lake and how she became a feared outlaw. The connections between the three stories become ever clearer throughout the book.
• Brandon Sanderson:
  • Mistborn: The first book starts with Kelsier, Vin, and Elend as viewpoint characters. When their plots diverge, each of them tends to be given a chapter at a time, which helps things move smoothly along. The even spread of viewpoints chapter-by-chapter becomes very noticeable by book three when several secondary characters have become viewpoint characters and they all have their own plots.
  • The Stormlight Archive also does this. Kaladin, Shallan and Dalinar are the main characters for the first 3 books (the ones published so far), and each book has them pursuing their own plot lines with significantly more intersections as time goes on. Several side characters like Szeth and Lift also have their own plot lines that get less focus but still weave into the overall narrative.
• It's SOP for Nancy Drew books to start with two seemingly unrelated mysteries that turn out to be the same thing by the end of the story.
• Leviathan, by Scott Westerfeld, has two plots like this. The first tells of Aleksandar Ferdinand, who is on the run after the assassination of his father, Franz Ferdinand. The second is about Deryn Sharp, a girl who dresses like a boy to get into the British Air Service. About 2/3 through the book, their two stories intersect when the Leviathan crashes on the glacier outside of Alek's bolt hole bolt castle, he goes down to help, and is put into custody.
• Ken MacLeod has used this, most notably in The Sky Road and The Stone Canal, two novels in his Fall Revolution series. He was also credited by his friend Iain Banks for suggesting it as a way of bringing together the various ideas and storylines that became Use of Weapons.
• The story in Nick Hornby's About a Boy is told alternately by the two Protagonists, at the beginning of the book both plots are separated, as the story proceeds they get somewhat mixed up a little, owing to the time they spend together.
• InterWorld gets a bit weird about this. The book is divided into two halves. The first half is about a guy by the name of Tom Dunjer searching for a sample of something called linzetium, which has been stolen. It's mostly pretty sensibly laid out, except that at the end of each chapter, there's a section in ALL CAPS from the point of view of Klox, a robot who starts off not knowing where he is or what he's doing. At some point in the second half, Dunjer meets Klox. After that, chapters start alternating between those following Dunjer, and some written in italics, told from the point of view of another Dunjer in a Parallel Universe. Both the Dunjer and alt-Dunjer chapters still include the Klox sections at the end. The final chapter constantly switches between the Dunjer and alt-Dunjer sections, with the Klox section running along on another trajectory which intersects with both.
• Ragtime features three families living in the early 20th century. While each has its own story ranging from following the American Dream to avenging your baby mama's death through terrorism to adjusting to the New Music, they find themselves interacting to an almost ridiculous degree, in an amount of detail that would make J. R. R. Tolkien envious. At the end the surviving main characters become one family.
• Spock's World alternates between a history of Vulcan and the present as the heroes try to stop the planet from seceding.
• Several of Jane Austen's novels have this. Sense and Sensibility has Elinor and Marianne as the main characters. Each sister has her own plot.
• Eastern Standard Tribe has two converging storylines that mix with How We Got Here.
• In Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian story "A Witch Shall Be Born", Valerius and La Résistance; Conan himself; and Salome, the Big Bad.
• Ian Irvine's The Three Worlds Cycle does this regularly. The first book, A Shadow On The Glass, opens with two separate plot threads from Karan and Llian, which later converge, and over the course of the quartet the action often switches between different characters in different places, who tend to come together for the final events of each book only to separate again in the next one. It all comes to a head with the third series, the Song Of The Tears trilogy, where all the keysurvivng players from the entire series join forces to deal with the overarching threat.
• Jonathan Safran Foer gets a lot of mileage out of this practice.
  • Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close alternates between Oskar's journey to cope with his father's death and letters from Oskar's grandparents detailing how they met and their eventual separation.
  • Everything Is Illuminated provides 50% more threading. There are 2 plotlines - the protagonist's search for his ancestral home in the Ukraine and his grandfather's life and escape from there - but the first thread is narrated in turns by the protagonist himself and by his tour guide.
• Spider Robinson's Mindkiller has two plotlines, told in alternating chapters — odd-numbered chapters are in third-person, through the eyes of college professor Norman Kent, and even-numbered chapters are told in first-person by Army-vet-turned-techie-burglar Joe Templeton. It's not until at least two-thirds of the way through the story that it's made explicit that the book has only one POV character.
• Watchers of the Throne follows three characters: Aleya, on a mission to reach Terra and seek revenge for her fallen sisters; Valerian, who has to deal with riots and unrest on Terra; and the Imperial Chancellor, who tries to navigate the byzantine Imperial politics.
• For the the first two books of The New Prophecy, the second arc of Warrior Cats, the point of view switches between Leafpaw, a medicine cat apprentice watching as the forest crumbles around her, and one of the six journeying cats, who are on a quest to find a way to save the forest.
• Sharyn McCrumb's Ballad novels typically have one plot following the investigations of Sheriff Spencer Arrowood in the present, and a parallel case from the past which is connected in some fashion.
• The Rift War Cycle's first book Magician. by Raymond E Feist. Has no less than separate plots following 3 major plot lines and 2 secondary plotlines. Primarily, Pug, Tomas, Arutha's main lines. Carline, Roland and Martin. making up subplots but relating to the over all story. Further books in the series extend this further.
• Principles of Angels by Jaine Fenn shows us Kesh City from two viewpoints; a street kid who wants revenge for his mother's death and a musician who's visiting the city from elsewhere, on a reluctant mission for aliens. The perspectives start off in alternating chapters, and while it quickly becomes clear there are definite connections ( Taro's mother's killer is the bodyguard of Elarn's only apparent friend on Kesh), we don't realise how linked their missions are until the Wham Line at the end of Chapter 19. Starting in Chapter 22, the storylines start coalescing, although Taro and Elarn only meet briefly near the end.
• In Poul Anderson's After Doomsday, two separate ships, one of men and one of women, try to survive after the Earth's destruction — and find other humans to reproduce with.
• In Welcome to Night Vale: Diane is trying to find her missing co-worker Evan, and Jackie is trying to learn more about King City. Their stories seem unrelated at first until they discover Evan is from King City about halfway through the book, before then Diane and Jackie are unaware of each other's mission.
• The novels in Amitav Ghosh's Ibis Trilogy, set during the early 1830s, cut between five or six plots running simultaneously in different countries. All of them come together in the end.
• In Empire from the Ashes book three Heirs of Empire the story alternates between Emperor Colin and his wife facing a dangerous plot on Earth and their kids trying to survive on a remote planet Pardal.
• In the Imminent Danger and How To Fly Straight into It series, the second book, Chasing Nonconformity, is structured like this. The main plot continues to follow Eris and Varrin as they evade authorities and attempt to recover their ship, however a second plot emerges in the form of Trystan and Sebara's attempts to track them down.
• The Obituary Writer centers around the lives of two women: Claire Fontaine in The '60s and Vivien Lowe in 1919. These narratives are interconnected by the shared themes of grief, guilt, love, and loss. As well as the eventual revelation that Claire's mother-in-law Birdy is Vivien.
• Agatha Christie's The Clocks features two concurrent plot threads: one involving the murder of an unknown man, and one about espionage. However, the two cases barely have any connection to each other, aside from the fact that they take place in the same location.
• Each of the Gentleman Bastard books intercuts the present storyline with a second storyline of flashbacks to the Bastards' upbringing that relates in some way.
• Philip K. Dick tended to do this - in his last interview he flat-out says he usually makes two outlines for every novel, then slams them together.
• Beautiful Losers flips back and forth between the disjointed story of the narrator and his relationship with F. and his wife in the midst of the Quebec separatist movement in the 1960's, and the story of the life of Katherine Tekakwitha, a 17th century Iroquois saint.
• Philip Wylie's 1951 novel The Disappearance begins with all the females on Earth simply vanishing. In a parallel Earth, all the males vanished. The novel alternates between describing how the world continues without women, and without men.
• Most Redwall novels involve multiple, interwoven plots. Salamandastron and The Long Patrol are possibly the most convoluted in this respect.
• All of the Out of Position novels have Dev and Lee's subplots affecting one another. In the first two books, whatever Dev did usually affected Lee's storyline; the following books reversed this, and everything Lee did (especially regarding Vince King's suicide) affected Dev.
• Terry Brooks almost always does this in his Shannara books, when the parties split. Normally one half fights some epic but largely mundane battle, while the other party (with the main protagonist) goes off to kill the Big Bad. This is probably in deliberate imitation of LOTR.
• I've Got You Under My Skin divides itself easily between Laurie and her crew's investigation of the Graduation Gala murder at the Powell mansion and the plotline involving Laurie's stalker; upon learning of Laurie's TV show, the stalker, under the name Bruno Hoff, takes a landscaping job at the Powell mansion to keep a close eye on Laurie right under her nose. He plots to kill her and her son Timmy on camera during the final day of filming, so the climax of both plotlines come together almost simultaneously.
• Acid Row switches back and forth between the riot in Acid Row and the search for ten year old Amy Biddulph (contrary to what many in Acid Row believe, the paedophile living on their estate has nothing to do with Amy's disappearance).

---