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Some of the Greatest Science Fiction Novels Are Fix-Ups
HughPickens.com writes: What do science fiction classics like Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, Van Vogt's Voyage of the Space Beagle, Simak's City, and Sturgeon's More Than Human have in common? Each of them is a "fix-up" — a novel constructed out of short stories that were previously published on their own. "This used to be one standard way to write a science fiction novel — publish a series of stories that all take place in the same world, and then knit them together into a book," says Charlie Jane Anders. "Sometimes a great deal of revision happened, to turn the separate stories into a single narrative and make sure all the threads joined up. Sometimes, the stories remain pretty separate but there are links between them."
The Golden Age science fiction publishing market was heavily geared toward magazines and short stories. And then suddenly, there was this huge demand for tons of novels. According to Andrew Liptak, this left many science fiction authors caught in a hard place: Many had come to depend on the large number of magazines on the market that would pay them for their work, and as readership declined, so too did the places in which to publish original fiction. The result was an innovative solution: repackage a number of preexisting short stories by adding to or rewriting portions of them to work together as a single story. This has its advantages; you get more narrative "payoff" with a collection of stories that also forms a single continuous meta-story than you do with a single over-arching novel — because each story has its own conclusion, and yet the story builds towards a bigger resolution. Fix-ups are a good, representative example of the transition that the publishing industry faced at the time, and how its authors adapted. Liptak says, "It's a lesson that's well-worth looking closely at, as the entire publishing industry faces new technological challenges and disruptions from the likes of self-publishing and micro-press platforms."
The Golden Age science fiction publishing market was heavily geared toward magazines and short stories. And then suddenly, there was this huge demand for tons of novels. According to Andrew Liptak, this left many science fiction authors caught in a hard place: Many had come to depend on the large number of magazines on the market that would pay them for their work, and as readership declined, so too did the places in which to publish original fiction. The result was an innovative solution: repackage a number of preexisting short stories by adding to or rewriting portions of them to work together as a single story. This has its advantages; you get more narrative "payoff" with a collection of stories that also forms a single continuous meta-story than you do with a single over-arching novel — because each story has its own conclusion, and yet the story builds towards a bigger resolution. Fix-ups are a good, representative example of the transition that the publishing industry faced at the time, and how its authors adapted. Liptak says, "It's a lesson that's well-worth looking closely at, as the entire publishing industry faces new technological challenges and disruptions from the likes of self-publishing and micro-press platforms."
Some days the sky is blue! Other days, it's cloudy.
Movie adaptations went from one to many and then to series. The edges blur and soon we'll complete the full batch of movie remakes into series.
And in this case it's also a matter of medium rather than story. A theater may need two hour long movies, but Netflix can sell thirteen chapter series just as easily.
I know a lot of the ancillary and similar stories around it were lash-ups meant to add to it (and to make a continuum for Daneel and suchlike), but wasn't the original Foundation trilogy meant to be written together, Mule and all?
Maybe it's just the distance of time since I read it, but I could have sworn that the three original Foundation books were written together intentionally.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
The first, ummm, say two-third's of David Brin's Existence is a mix of short stories (altered a bit since their publication) and a new framework that ties it all together. It works pretty well.
The last third takes place many years after the intrigues of the first part, using a subset of the initial large cast. It is threaded around an updated version of a very old story, "Lungfish," which is arguably the keystone.
Fix ups are short stories that are later weaved together - often after significant alteration from their original form - to construct a larger overarching narrative. They are not simply collections of short stories. Burning Chrome is simply a collection of short stories, some of which happen to take place in the same Sprawl 'universe'. However there is no overall narrative threading through all of the stories in Burning Chrome.
If you've ever read 'Beggars in Spain' by Nancy Kress, you'll see the first book is mostly short stories combined. It made for an interesting story told over time. 'Beggars and Choosers' was a novel, and it seemed to hurt the narrative.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
I love the way Asimov in his later novels tied the robot stories back into the Foundation Trilogy covering 20,000 years IIRC.
He tried too hard. I wish he'd left some of his works unconnected, as the stitching is embarrassingly crude in some cases.
OTOH, Andre Norton mostly left well enough alone. While some concepts and places overlapped between series, there was no attempt to force them all into alignment when they differed. Her later years, perhaps not so much, but that's when she had other people tying into her works.
Clarke's The Sentinel was the fore-runner to 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Some are, some aren't. The first two Discworld books are woven stories, but the infrastructure was basically consistent.
If you are unfamiliar with the work of Clifford Simak I strongly suggest that you give him a try. What I have always loved is that there is so much that is just unknown going on in his stories. No great hero's, no great battles, just a lot of "what the hell is going on here?"
His last book "Highway of Eternity" is great and "Ring around the Sun" has always been a favorite as well. Most of his stuff is a short quick read abd us easily found in your favorite used book store (you do have one I hope).
At a minimum read the novel synopsis over at Wikipedia to get a glimpse of a very interesting author.
Average Intelligence is a Scary Thing
A Canticle for Leibowitz was originally three novellas as well.
Interestingly, though this is fantasy rather than sci-fi, but Brandon Sanderson's recent epic, "Words of Radiance", was written as a trilogy with interstitial short stories - but meant from the beginning to have been published as a single book. (As per this interview.)
Although this isn't news, it does make me realize that it is very similar to a style of TV show I rather like: episodes that can stand on their own, but with a strong story arc that plays out over a set of shows. Typically arcs run over a season or even several, though I would like to see them run over say a half dozen episodes so a given story arc is re-watchable in a reasonable amount of time.
Lord of the Rings has nothing to do with this. Tolkien wrote it as a single work, and it was originally intended to be published in a single volume. It was decided that its size simply made that too difficult and it was split into three volumes. It was never a "series", it simply *was* a meganovel from the start. (I have a very nice single-volume edition of it, hardback in a red binding done up to look like the Red Book of Westmarch (Tolkien's fictional "source")).
I was just scanning the comments to see if this point had already been made. Thanks!
Perhaps the most obvious example of this was Babylon 5. In many ways that woke up television producers to the option of strong story arcs across seasons or even the entire show instead of the old rule that everything had to end back in the same state where it started. Sure, there are plenty of other examples, even before B5, but I think that is what really changed the market.
Now it's standard practice for lots of shows: 24, Battlestar Galactica, Doctor Who, and many others.
Of course, other factors now support this model that weren't really a factor with Babylon 5. Namely streaming video, DVRs, and DVDs. It's no longer a big obstacle to expect fans to not miss any episodes. Fans will stream the old episodes to catch up, record them, or buy the DVDs. In fact, the DVD market encourages strong arcs; I think people are more likely to want to own a complete story than a collection of independent episodes.
Including famous authors like Dickens and Hawthorne. You'd get a new chpater in every monthly magazine.
When Fantastic Voyage was being made into a movie, Bantam Books asked Isaac Asimov to write the story as a book. From the Wikipedia article, "Because the novelization was released six months before the movie, many people mistakenly believed Asimov's book had inspired the film." Asimov made some changes that he thought had to be made, but he kept to the movie's plot as much as possible.
A rule of thumb is that one page of a screenplay is about one minute of screen time. Interestingly, this works whether the page is dialog, description, action, or some combination. So if a 120 page screenplay means a movie of about two hours, most novels need to be drastically cut to be turned into practical screenplays.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
Tolkien wrote it as a two-book set: LOTR and the Silmarillion. The publisher nixed the Silmarillion, and, as you say, split LOTR into 3 volumes.
In most times, most places, by most people, liars are considered contemptible. - Ursula Le Guin
the stitching is embarrassingly crude in some cases.
Crude isn't quite the word I would use, but I felt that the reader was expected to think that the links were totally cool (some were interesting, some were very obvious) and that was supposed to make up for the lack of actual story. One of them was very long and I recall reading every second chapter and feeling very certain I didn't miss anything.