Five Superb SFF Fix-Up Novels

[james_davis_nicoll]

A celebration of the SFFnal tradition of transforming short works into more commercially viable novels.

Five Superb SFF Fix-Up Novels

Comments

[sturgeonslawyer]

H'mmm. Once again ReacTor does not seem to want to let me post.

I would not call either Leibowitz or More Than Human "novels," as the three novellas of which each is made do not really have a single story arc. Le Guin came up with the term "story cycle" for such books.

Other story cycles worthy of mention would include Gene Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Kim Stanley Robinson's Icehenge, both of which were published as novels, and Le Guin's own Four Ways to Forgiveness (later "Five" as a Library of America ebook), which wasn't. I'm not sure offhand whether Brunner's The Traveler in Black was published as a novel or not...

(5HC and MTH have something else in common -- in both cases, after the publication of the original novella ("The Fifth Head of Cerberus" and "Baby Is Three"), the author was approached by a publisher who offered to publish it if expanded to a novel; both responded with cycles of novellas. I don't know of any other such cases.)

An extreme test case might be J.G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition, a set of stories that may or may not be sequential and may or may not be about the same person, whose name (Travis, Travert, Trabert, Talbert...) keeps shifting and whose "adventures" become increasingly abstract as the book progresses ... not to mention that the stories may be entirely hallucinated by T. Is it a novel? a fix-up? a short story collection? Or...

While I agree that van Vogt was a writer of dubioius consistency, I think it incumbent upon us to mention at least The Voyage of the Space Beagle, if only because its first story appears for all legal purposes to have inspired the original Alien (1979).

There might also be a box for "interesting failures," such as Thomas M. Disch's 334, consisting of several short stories previously published elsewhere and a long novella/short novel that wasn't. Though they take place in the same (now past) future, and feature a somewhat consistent set of characters, they don't quite make a through story -- especially due to the abstract structure of the titular short novel.

One other related category: the book that tells a vast story made up of vignettes that were not published separately. The examples that come quickly to my mind are W. Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men and Star Maker, and Mike Resnick's Birthright: The Book of Man.

Cheers!

[ba_munronoe]

" I'm not sure offhand whether Brunner's The Traveler in Black was published as a novel or not..."

Well, the stories certainly have been published as a collection, although one might be unsure whether to call it a novel or not. There certainly is a through line of sorts, with chaos and magic steadily decreasing over time as a result of the Traveller's efforts.

https://www.amazon.com/Compleat-Traveller-Black-John-Brunner/dp/0312940602

"While I agree that van Vogt was a writer of dubioius consistency, I think it incumbent upon us to mention at least The Voyage of the Space Beagle, if only because its first story appears for all legal purposes to have inspired the original Alien (1979)."

Second story, at least in the edition I have. The first one is about the giant cat-thing with peculiar dietary needs. (Which did end up stolen by a Japanese light novel series. https://www.writeups.org/mughi-dirty-pair-cat/ )

[jcfiala]

I've always thought that D&D's Displacer Beast had some common ancestry with the giant cat-thing from Voyage of the Space Beagle.

[dragoness_e]

It very much does. And Final Fantasy openly calls their tentacled feline predators "coeurls".

[philrm]

Much as I loved The Book of the New Sun (at least the first four volumes, I never read the fifth), I think the expanded The Fifth Head of Cerberus is hands down the best thing Wolfe wrote.

I also have fond memories of Icehenge.