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

[james_davis_nicoll]

Tor dot com article 481, 2024 article 26.

19 articles to go to article 500

[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!

[oh6]

Avram Davidson's Peregrine: Secundus appeared as two separate stories in different magazines, so I guess it qualifies as a fix-up, although Primus doesn't appear to have seen print other than as a novel.

Phyllis Gotlieb's A Judgment of Dragons has only the thinnest pretense of being anything besides a sequence of stories with the same central characters and the last story resolving the first, but the blurb on my copy does call it a "tale", singular.

[beamjockey]

"Five Superb SFF Fix-Up Novels with More or Less Red Covers."

[(Anonymous)]

I adore Mirabile to this day. Ms. Kagan was taken from us far too soon. 💔

Some one mentioned The Martian Chronicles, but I think of that as more of a collection.

-Awesome Aud