Too mundane for a great debate and too pointless for the pit, but why does every science fiction/fantasy author insist on trying to imitate Tolkien and Asimov? Has the concept of a single, standalone novel passed into the past along with ray guns and atomic rocket motors?
I have, once again, been perusing the shelves at the local library. I confess that I am a fan of “hard” science fiction and that I have never really gotten used to the notion that science fiction and fantasy are often considered the same genre. But I am most disappointed in finding three out of every four books on the shelves labelled as “Book Four of the New Dawn World Pentalogy!”
For starters, I’m not about to read the first three books as an introduction to the fourth. The first three books aren’t even on the shelf, for crying out loud! And I hate picking up a story in the middle, almost as much as I hate reading a story that doesn’t end. So why does every two-bit hack science fiction author think they have another Foundationor Lord of the Rings in their word processor? Most of them can’t even write a short story that contains a new idea.
I don’t mind a sequel to a good novel. I don’t mind a series that has the same characters in it. What I object to is the huge unfolding of a new universe with infinite detail about all the new lifeforms and governments and technologies and cultures just to tell the same wheezy old story of the underdog triumphing against impossible odds. And taking three or four long volumes and several generations to tell it. If you can’t make a “future world” believable and interesting in ten pages what makes you think you can do it in a thousand? News flash: YOU CAN’T!!
Hmmmph!
[Pluto crawls back to his home in Curmudgeon’s Corner, taking along his battered copy of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.]
Actually, neither the Foundation Series nor LotR are trilogies.
The first three books of the Foundation Series are short stories and novellas pasted together with introductions and bridging comments to look like novels (somebody pointed out that Foundation’s Edge was the first real Foundation novel). LotR was one story; it got divided in three when it was pointed out that nobody was going to buy (or even publish) a 1500-page book.
Why are there more trilogies, tetralogies, multi-volume novel, and series? Well, because of the nature of the publishing business. They’re more willing to assume the risks of an author who writes a trilogy (and less willing to assume the risks of publishing a new author) than they were a couple of decades ago.
You want a standalone novel? Pick up Larry Niven’s Destiny’s Road (there are a couple of throwaway lines referring to The Legacy of Heorot in it, but they’re basically window dressing – you could delete them without affecting the story).
This has been a pet peeve of mine for a while, brought on mostly by fantasy trilogies written in the 80’s and 90’s by the vast numbers of new famale writers courted by all the different publishing houses, all of them trying to find the next Anne McCaffrey or Marion Zimmer Bradley.
Well, they found a few. Mercedes Lacky and her cohorts; Elizabeth Moon, and a few others.
I think the main problem is that in today’s writing field, the main impetus is to write books, rather than short stories or novellae (novelli? noveleenies?). In the good old days of Asimov, Heinlein, Dickson et al., they could write for the trades and get their short stories publishes, and their short novels published in series. Once they were established as writers, they could sell novels as books.
Today’s writers are all trying to leapfrog the trades and go straight into paperbacks, and the whole idea of grabbing the reader, holding the reader’s attention for 10 pages, and then ENDING THE STORY is foreign to them.
Also, writers like McCaffrey and Bradley have gotten bitten by their lax practices at startups… inconsistencies in their backstory, timelines, and character groups have been pointed out ad nauseum by the teeming hordes of fandom. Today’s writers get all the backstory down before they publish their first book, and it seems sometimes as if we’re reading travelogues or documentaries rather than stories (… and here we see how the Fibnatz tribe of the southern continent learned to cultivate the wooka plant…).
Sorry. I did mention that this was a peeve of mine, didn’t I?
Stories come in all different kinds of lengths and shapes and sizes.
Some are about a leaf’s journey from branch to the ground. Some are about the tree’s entire life from acorn to lightning-dead shell. And, yes, some are about the tree becoming the base of a race of evil super-bees from the planet Bzzzzz and the efforts of a heroic young squirrel…
The exact form a story is going to take is rather difficult to predict, unless you’re writing commerically and are willing to artifically pump things up or down, or dig them deep or shallow, to fit a format. There are plenty of horrible examples of this and you have mentioned a few.
I recently loaned Roger Zelazny’s “Jack of Shadows” to a girlfriend. She’d read it like me at a younger age, and we were marveling over how it packs so much into about an hour or two’s time of reading. It’s somewhere between a novel and a novella, concise and powerful. That particular length is not often seen, at least by me.
I do agree that one mark of a good writer is a variety in length in his/her works. This demonstrates at least a understanding of the organic form of a story.
But I don’t think a really long book or series of them is automatically bad, either. Any length can be done well. I tend to think of that as style, even sign o’ the times stuff. Short sci-fi fiction may make a comeback, who knows.
You’re putting the cart before the horse. A “Soft” Science-Fiction or Fantasy writer doesn’t have an idea for a world, which he then writes a story for; he has a story which won’t work in the constraints of the “real” world, so he invents a world in which it does. If he changes the ground rules (but doesn’t change human nature) he can adress certain themes in ways that would be impossible in more mundane forms of fiction.
But then, you shouldn’t be asking me. I love epics, either Science Fiction or Fantasy.
I must agree with the OP about the whole Library thing. I love to go to the library and read new Sci Fi and then pick up copies of other books from the shops. But, the libraries around here have the same disturbing tendancy to only have books 2, 3 and 4 of the new trilogy in 9 parts. What good is that without book one.
I do like some stories which develop into trilogies and more, but I prefer to be able to pick up a book and read it knowing that the story is self contained. I have not read many short stories or anything like that because they are not very widely availabile around here.
I can understand what was said about publishers needing to sign deals that are going to make them money, and tying an author into writing a series of books is one was to do it, but OTOH, I think it may stiffle creativity (the authoer knows he has to develop the story over three or more books) and it does not encourage the author to branch out into other areas of Sci Fi. Sometimes publishers need to take chances to get new authors established. I would agree that authors need to play thier part, which may include writing short stories and being published in collections so that people discover their work and want to read any new books that come out.
Sometimes even hard writers go back to established worlds - Haldeman’s Forever Free is about 25 years later than Forever War (Forever Peace was about 22 or 23 later, but not really a sequel, no characters in common, no plotline really in common.)
I think part of it is they have set up a world, fleshed it out, and either get lazy and just reuse, or want to explore another aspect of it or their characters. A good writer may just want to add depth to a previous charater he wrote, and liked.
I’d like to submit Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red/Green/Blue Mars series as an example of a science fiction epic done extremely well. As opposed to simply establishing an environment in which a storyline could play out, the Mars series explores its context thouroughly; the entire series could be seen as the characters’ interaction with their environment, and the changes both go through as a result.
So, I agree, most authors who embark on epics have little or no reason to do so. But then there are the ones that can actually handle something of that scope, and make it work to tell the story better.
Granted there are exceptions, but even these exceptions eventually pimp themselves out. Think about Hyperion. I’ll admit the second book was almost needed to complete the story, although a ballsy move would have been to just end it with one and let the readers fill in the gaps. However the third and fourth trips to the well were just greed, and the stories were sub-par at best.
Disclaimer: The above comments do not apply to Terry Pratchett and the Discworld series. The man is a genius.
It’s the Saturday Night Live syndrome. There are so many bad skits out there that if somebody laughs at one, do it over and over and over. Hell, let’s make a movie out if it.
I’m a huge fan of a fully-realized universe. Nothing I like better than a writer developing, over a series of novels, short stories, etc., a universe and a society that is well-detailed and makes sense.
That being said, the novels and short stories don’t have to be related to each other and, quite frankly, when they are, the results are very often disappointing.
Asimov created a fantastic universe in the Robots and Empire series of stories. But the stories were simply placed in the same future; they rarely directly related. When towards the end of his career, he started deliberately tying them together, the stories, well, sucked.
David Brin’s Uplift stories are all fantastic, but the first trilogy, which barely mentioned the other stories, was much better than the second.
Hamilton’s Reality Dysfunction “trilogy” did a good job of creating a universe, but fer chrissakes, it wasn’t worth all of the trees cut down to print the five books. The story could have been told in two or three.
Incredibly, one of the two books I did actually check out from the sci fi section was Destiny’s Road. I’m looking forward to reading it. I almost put it back when I read the cover blurb, which said “A NEW world from Larry Niven!” But I figured at least I had volume one.
And Alessan, just to quibble, I’m not complaining about creating new worlds to tell the story. That, IMHO, is what science fiction is all about. And that, also IMHO, is why it gets tied together with fantasy – a different means to the same end. I’m just upset with the notion that it takes a gazillion words to do it.
And I’m not arguing against the long, or even the serial novel. When done well they are a rare treat. My complaint is that every story doesn’t deserve that treatment. (E.g., if I come across one more obscure, persecuted kid who turns out to be the salvation of the universe (“I am your father, Luke!”) I will scream!)
A side effect of my grousing here has been your responding with short listing of some worthwhile efforts of the multi-volume type. I appreciate that. It’s daunting to have to separate the wheat from the chaff just to get a good read.
Pluto - naturally, what I said doesn’t apply to bad science fiction and fantasy. In that sense, you’re right: a bad, short book is better than a bad, long book. And I also have no problem with single volume stories. Just look at the origin of my namesake: Tigana, by Guy Gavriel Kay, possibly the greatest single-volume fantasy novel ever written. A lesser writer would have drawn its complex, multi-layered story over two or three books, diluting it and subduing its power. So no, I’m no fan of Jordan, Modesett and their ilk; however, Stephen R. Donaldson wrote long stories, and I love everything he does, and I think George R.R. martin is moving along at just the perfect pace. So it all depends upon the talent and vision of the creator.
I also share your hatred of the innocent-young-hero plot contrivence; if I read one more tale of Mulch-the-Miller’s-Boy (who’s not actually a miller’s boy, of course) I will be forced to hurt someone. I’m sorry, but naivete ain’t sexy, it ain’t cool, and it ain’t interesting. If you’re under 20 and your last name isn’t Atreides or Wiggins, I don’t want to know you.
P.S. - Destiny’s Road is good, but not great. It has some interesting ideas, but don’t go looking for a plot, or multidimensional characters. It also looks like Niven grew tired of writing about three-quarters of the way through, and decided to wrap his story up in a rather purfunctionary, by-the-numbers fashion. So enjoy, just don’r expect too much.
I actually thought Destiny’s Road was one of Niven’s better books, and I’ve read about 95% of his work. It’s very different from his earlier stuff, less action-oriented and more character-driven.
There are plenty of good, standalong SF novels – they’re just often hard to find. I’m currently reading “The Pickup Artist” by Terry Bisson, for instance, and all of his books have been small delights, without a sequel in sight.
Recent award-winning novels that haven’t been epics include Nicola Griffith’s “Slow River,” Pat Murphy’s “The Falling Woman,” “The Six Messiahs” by Mark Frost, and Neil Gaiman’s “Stardust.”
As far as shorter works are concerned, it’s a matter of money. Back in the 40s, you could make a living writing short stories; now, that’s impossible. You want great short stories, look for Ted Chiang. AFAIK, he’s had four things published, two of which won awards. I’d love to find whatever novel he’s writing.
It just doesn’t work that way. Had you heard of Ted Chiang before I mentioned him here? People don’t read short stories, and popularity there doesn’t carry over to novels.
I never looked at it this way before. I grew up reading Ray Bradbury and John Wyndham, simply because they were what was lying around the house. Their stories stand alone, but with the Martian Chronicles, a bunch of stories were brought together into a one-volume epic. Kinda worked but kinda didn’t: I always felt the stories were better left as free as possible. For myself, I love the IMPLICATION of a fully-realised universe. It doesn’t have to written. And this goes back to the days when I read Asterix - my imagination will provide a more amusing background than the author’s pen will, sometimes. This becomes easier as the story becomes shorter.
Epics are all very well but who’s got the time? Okay, for Tolkien, spare it. If a new writer is really as good as he seems, maybe Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett, follow along. But HOW many L.Ron Hubbard books are there? That put me off before I started. Wish it hadn’t but it did.
There has certainly been an economic change in the publishing industry. When I look over my collection of old sf, the books from the fifties through the mid-70s are amazingly thin. Even works by the masters measure less than 1/3 of an inch, and usually a lot less than that. There are a LOT of collections of short stories that seem to be abouyt 1/4" thick. More recent books, though, are a LOT thicker. Compare the books from the end of Heinlein’s career — To Sail Beyond the Sunset, The Cat who Walks through Walls – with those from the first part – Puppet Masters, Door into Summer, Double Star, etc. His old books could be used to even out the wobble in a table. His newer books can be used as table LEGS.
A lot of newer authors ONLY seem to publish such table legs – Jack Chalker, Robert Jordan. You NEVER see thin books out on the shelves anymore, except for deliberately odd things like the Penguin minis or the Dover Thrift editions.
I admit I don’t understand the economics behind it, but clearly changes in the publishing industry are driving the switch to thicker books.
Actually, it’s the readers (along with book prices). People don’t want to spend $20 for a 200 page hardcover (or $7.95 for a thin paperback). The books are published, but don’t get into as many outlets or have strong sales.
I am not a big fan of science fiction, and perhaps that is why I like Robert Sheckley. He writes short stories using the science fiction genre as a background and I find them quite intriguing, inventive and often amusing. A story doesn’t have to be of epic length to be good!
Search for him on Amazon; one book title that I like, listed as out of print but available used, is “Can You Feel Anything When I Do This?” and there are other compilations shown.
If you like Sheckley (I do – one of the first sf books I bought was by him) you should try some of the other great short sf story writers of the 50s and 60s. By all means look up Fredric Brown (who wrote SUPERB mysteries as well), Theodore Cogswell, William Tenn, Richard Matheson, and Charles Beaumont.(Thse last two also wrote a lot of Twilight Zone episodes, not to mention movie scripts.)
I have collections of all of their works – and they make my point above. All these collections are very thin books, no more than 1/3" thick at most.