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

[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".