What if Percy Jackson and Carter Kane – the stars of Rick Riordan’s bestselling mythology-inspired series—Percy Jackson and the Olympians, The Heroes of Olympus, and The Kane Chronicles – met each other? That’s a question young readers often pose to the author, and a question that Riordan has now answered in a new short story called “The Son of Sobek.” The never-before-published story will appear as a bonus in the paperback edition of The Kane Chronicles, Book Three: The Serpent’s Shadow (Disney-Hyperion), which is due out May 7, 2013. (Click here to read an excerpt from the story.)
“It’s actually something the fans had been asking me for,” says Riordan. “At least once a day I’ll get an email or a letter asking ‘Are you ever going to combine the series?’ ” So he decided to give it a try. “There are a lot of gods and a lot of characters in my books,” he says. In choosing the new work’s protagonists, “I picked two that I know very well,” he explains. “Percy and Carter are my touchstones. They represent very different sides of me. Carter is thoughtful and cautious and Percy is impetuous and sarcastic. I started to experiment with how it would be to put them together and have them join forces against a common foe.”
Photo: Mike Frost
Rick Riordan.
Riordan says he’s pleased with how the experiment turned out, and hopes his legion of devoted readers enjoys reading it. “I imagine they’ll want more and start asking ‘Where’s the rest? It’s only a short story?’ ” But Riordan has not yet decided on whether Carter and Percy will appear together in other projects. “It’s possible,” he says. “I’d love to play around with that idea, and I always like to leave some room to create other adventures for my characters. My problem is never ideas. I’ve got more than I’ll ever have time to write. It’s all about how many I can get to, and which ones readers want to see the most.”



With a broad cast of players featured in his multiple series, how does an author keep track? “I have to be careful,” Riordan says. “My readers are very detail-oriented, and if I make a mistake they’ll call me on it.” But one guiding force is the original inspiration for the books. “I stick closely to the structure of the myths,” he explains. “I may have some fun with the mythology by changing the environment to modern-day, but the structure of the myths, the monsters, the relationships of the gods – none of that is made up.” It’s a strategy that has given him confidence over the years. “I get letters from college kids who have read Percy Jackson when they were younger who tell me, ‘I just passed my Classics exam.’ The books are accurate enough that they can serve as a gateway to Homer and Virgil.”

 Full story at PW