Some of the Greatest Science Fiction Novels Are Fix-Ups 104
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."
Um, duh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Some days the sky is blue! Other days, it's cloudy.
Re:Um, duh? (Score:4, Informative)
Slashdot editors shouldn't post as AC.
William Gibson (Score:2)
Don't forget Burning Chrome. Shouldn't it be on the Wikipedia list for Fix-Ups?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... [wikipedia.org]
Re:William Gibson (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Thanks for the clarification. I thought it would fit the definition since some of the stories contained the same characters.
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Some are, some aren't. The first two Discworld books are woven stories, but the infrastructure was basically consistent.
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The first two Discworld books are woven stories
Didn't know that, but I can remember thinking the string of adventures was particularly episodic and, well, strung together. I chalked it up to youthfulness and perhaps trying to mimic older style adventure books, but this explains a lot of it.
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I read several of the Discworld stories in magazines originally, which is how I know. Then one day years later, "Small Gods" came to my attention and I started backtracking from there. I don't know if he wasn't as well-known in the USA for his first few books or I'd just missed them.
The opposite of current movie adaptations (Score:3)
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.
Re:The opposite of current movie adaptations (Score:4)
Good point... but selling 13 chapters would be akin to selling a television season (not counting commercials), as opposed to a cinematic thing. Some stories (e.g. Foundation, Heinlein's Future History, etc) would be best treated in a TV series-style format, so you can get the 13 hours (not counting commercials) needed to stuff that much damned content into it.
Movies are limited by necessity - 3 hours is a long-ass stretch in one go at a theater. The classic Dr. Zhivago movie was IIRC 2-3 hours, and it had an intentional intermission inserted smack in the middle of it, even on the DVD. ( Originally it was so that folks could get up and stretch their legs, have a smoke, etc.) It was one of the few movies I've seen that didn't completely butcher the novel in order to make it fit into a small (-ish) timeframe. Consider that even a fast reader will take hours on end to consume a typical novel... a straight movie is way too short a format.
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Many films have intermissions in them, even on the DVD. Just off the top of my head, trying to get a good range of eras: Gone with the Wind (1939), Camelot (1967), Hamlet (1996).
A screenplay rule of thumb (Score:3)
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Including credits and such:
Dr.Zhivago: 192 or 200 minutes depending on version
Gone With the Wind -- 238 minutes
(also usually shown with an intermission)
I don't know of any longer films, but I'm not a film buff.
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It comes down to money/society placement
First We had short stories. Because before the written tradition, they were passed verbally and needed to be short enough to be memorized. So the local story teller who's place in society is limited on his memorization skill, and story telling ability.
Then when the printed word came out, the stories became longer, because we are able to pass on more complex issues, and store it. Getting a book was expensive, so you might as well get a big one, as the economy of sca
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Re: The opposite of current movie adaptations (Score:2)
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The actual quote is:
"If I have seen further than some, it is because I have stood upon the shoulders of Blaster." - Master.
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The actual quote is by Newton.
That's relatively true.
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Absolutely
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Personally I recommend binoculars.
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Foundation? (Score:3)
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.
Re:Foundation? (Score:5, Interesting)
No. The first book, specifically, was a collection of short stories. Reread it, paying attention to the structure: a series of events years/decades apart dealing with the problems of the Foundation as it grew to replace the Empire....
Re:Foundation? (Score:5, Informative)
The first Foundation novel was eight short stories published together. Foundation and Empire was a complete novel, as was the Second Foundation.
Re:Foundation? (Score:5, Informative)
There were eight original Foundation stories, but _Foundation_ only contains 5 stories: "The Psychohistorians", "The Encylopedists", "The Mayor"s, "The Traders", and "The Merchant Princes". "The Psychohistorians" was written specifically for the book.
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I thought that "Foundation and Empire" was originally two novellets.
OTOH, why did they leave out Triplanetary. That was an earlier "fixup" and any of the others they mentioned (and I don't think the idea was new then.)
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There were eight Foundations stories published separately. The first four with one new story were combined for _Foundation_, the next two made up _Foundation and Empire_ and the remaining two made up _Second Foundation_. The other Foundation books were written as entire complete novels.
More recent example: Brin's Existence (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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.
For me Existence started out OK, delved into "where is this going?", followed by a "is there any point to this story?" but then pissed me off with that hacked version of Lungfish slotted in at the end. While in general I thought it was a weak book, I thought that the hacking of Lungfish was a travesty that he committed against his own work and in the process lost a lot of what made the original Lungfish so good.
And I say this as a fan of Brin's work, and recognize his ability to write a great story with
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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.
My own existence is nothing but a bunch of short stories sharing some of the main characters. Doesn't cohere well.
It happens with modern novels. (Score:2)
They are turning into series that are meganovels.
Lord of the Rings, I don't of as an example of this phenomena, but mnore a precursor.
Lois McMaster Bujolds Vorkosigan series does seem to be one of the major ones.
The prototypical ones are the Harry Potter series.
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Simply amazing that creative individuals, trying to make enough money to survive, modify their creations to fit the wants and needs of their prospective audience.
I'm just totally dumfounded. Next thing you'll tell me is that graphic artists are using computers these days. Maybe somebody should patent that.
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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.
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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.
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They are turning into series that are mega-novels.
I lament the falling of the ability of an author to construct and present a complete story in a single novel. To me, the preponderance of multi-book series highlights the loss of ability.
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You have mistaken "revenue generation" for "ability".
That said, don't view the past through too rosy glasses. Harry Potter consisted of seven books, but so did LotR (if you include The Hobbit), and so did the Chronicles of Narnia. HHGttG has five books by DNA. Dune has six (and a half) by Herbert. Clarke's Space Odyssey has four. And to address the FP topic, Asimov's Foundation has seven.
Now, if you want to tackle "seri
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Not to forget Niven's "Known Space". That's not a loss of ability, that's a BIG playground, with lots of stories to tell.
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In some cases of novel series, each novel is a good stand-alone work, as well as part of a larger whole. Some stories will not fit well into the scope of one novel.
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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
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I don't know about any later intent of Tolkien to finally publish the Silmarillion alongside the LOTR, but the bulk of the material that was eventually published posthumously as "The Silmarillion" was written long before Tolkien ever scribbled down "in a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit", much less wrote a whole book around that phrase, much less the obligatory sequel that got so big it became a trilogy connected to his old mythopoeia about the Eldar and their history.
Also, the LOTR is internally str
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This really doesn't mean anything. Sometimes a novel is structured into "books" that have nothing to do with the physical format it's issued in, as an additional layer above the chapters. The practice is perhaps less common than it used to be but you still see occassionally. Tolkien definitel
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Well, no. The Silmarillion came first but was never a publishable manuscript in Tolkien's lifetime--only after some extensive editing by Christopher Tolkien after J.R.R.'s death did it get to see print. Tolkien showed some drafts to publishers and got told it was not sellable, so he wrote the Lord of the Rings instead. There were never at the time any plans by anyone for a "two-book set."
Also Time Travelers Strictly Cash (Score:2)
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Well, you have three different things you need to distinguish: You have books that are collections of unrelated stories, books that are collections of separate stories set in the same future/alternate history/fantasy world, and then you have books that take separate stories and stitch them together into a single narrative. Heinlein's Future History collection is the second. I believe what we're talking about here is mainly the third.
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As stated, the key elements of "fix-up novel" is that you fix-up something that wasn't a novel, and at the end of it you have a novel. If you just put a bunch of separate short stories together into a book without editing them at all then you've neither done any fixing-up nor ended up with a novel, regardless of whether the stories are all set in the same universe or not.
The _real_ grey area is serials.
Another three fixup novels (Score:2)
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I remember doing "The Forever War" for my sci-fi book club. When we met to discuss it, we were shocked to find that we had read different versions. Depending on which printing you get, you may or may not get the depressing story in the middle. I don't believe it was ever written as separate stories, though. This was a case of an editor cutting something out, and then having it restored years later.
Sometimes this helps, e.g. Beggars in Spain (Score:3)
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.
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Re: Sometimes this helps, e.g. Beggars in Spain (Score:2)
She wrote 'Beggars and Choosers'. It's good enough to get, it's on Amazon as a used book.
Plus the obvious one (Score:3)
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And if you haven't read Simak (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org] to get a glimpse of a very interesting author.
Can't forget one of the classics (Score:3)
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 [tor.com].)
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"Words of Radiance" is the second and not the last in a series of novels. I have yet to see Sanderson write a self-contained novel (he has managed to write self-contained shorter fiction).
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A Canticle for Leibowitz was originally three novellas as well.
That probably explains why it reads like three loosely connected stories then.
Similar with series (Score:2)
Then books started taking over. They made more money for several reasons.
Now a book is not profitable, at least not first ones. It takes time for authors to become famous enough to get enough readers.
So the only way to make money writing a book is to do it in series. First one creates a market, the second one makes small profit, the third or greater one makes the real money.
I can't see the trend continuing - having to
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Sounds like good TV (Score:3)
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.
Babylon 5 (Score:3)
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: 2
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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.
B5 wasn't the first series to have a long overlapping story arc, but it was the one that refined it into what we know today. The Prisoner from the 60's is the earliest example I can think of off the top of my head.
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You're assuming that fix-ups involve the same characters. That need not be the case. For example, most people would probably categorize my first novel as a fix-up, because a chunk of it started as an unrelated short story that I adapted into the universe. It uses different characters, and is expressed as a flashback to the main character as a child, being told the secondary story by his grandfather (who otherwise plays a very insignificant role in the book).
Other fix-ups interleave stories about diffe
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It grows tiresome quickly though when the series narrative only comes out in dribbles and is used mostly as a teaser. The "standalone" content is often formulaic and only loosely tied to the overarching narrative.
I'm watching Fringe right now and it's so annoying to deal with basically the same episode structure over and over only to get bits and pieces of the larger narrative. Maybe it's just a JJ Abrams thing, but I'd rather have a true narrative that spans episodes than a mix of repetitive filler with o
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As with all things, there are good ways of doing it and bad...
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It seems like so much relies on the bad way of doing it. The larger narrative is just an annoying teaser that they don't seem to develop very well but tease out. It's seems like just laziness on the part of the writers.
I think the best method is to have multiple story arcs. Very small stories that can fit into a single episode, medium sized ones that can span 2-4 episodes and a larger arc that spans the season and/or series.
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I think Grimm is doing it about the best of any of them: you have the "Wessen of the week", there's the small arcs of various things happening in Portland and then you have the larger arc of the Royals/Resistance/Keys (which they could devote a little more time to admittedly). Combined with interesting characters and it's no wonder it's one of my favorite shows at the moment.
Perhaps (Score:2)
The Illustrated Man?
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blogs and online 'zines are the new serial? (Score:2)
Wheel of time was written this way.. (Score:1)
There are some modern examples (Score:2)
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I read every sci-fi short story I could get my hands on, usually in collections or anthologies. Once I ran out of short stories, I stopped reading science fiction. It just doesn't make it in novel form, with many great exceptions.
So you claim to have read every single science fiction short story ever written?
two of the better fix-ups (Score:2)
and Catacomb Years by Michael Bishop http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... [wikipedia.org]
Raymond Chandler: Killer in the Rain (Score:1)
common with 19th century novels (Score:5, Informative)
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That's serialization (which is, in SF, far more common), not compilation (the topic of TFA).
Re:common with 19th century novels (Score:5, Insightful)
Others have pointed out that these were serials, not fixups, although some Victorian authors may have published fixups: the concept is ancient.
Two examples:
1) the Iliad is probably a fixup. The first bunch of books are heavily focused on Diomedes, who then more-or-less disappears completely from the story. There is some contention that the parts of books V and VI dealing with him were once a separate story.
2) going even further back, Gilgamesh is probably a fixup. There's a good deal of evidence that it was assembled from pre-existing stories of Gilgamesh and Enkidu (and also Utnapishtim, the Chaldean "Noah" who was lifted by the early Hebrews along with so much else).
3) and the Bible itself, which seems to have been written rather late in Jewish history, almost certainly assembled from pre-existing stand-alone tales, which explains the contradictions in the two stories of creation and so on.
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Traditional science fiction serials were somewhat the reverse: take a story, and divide it up into several smaller chunks, each of which would work as a story in its own right, although most would have cliffhangers rather than resolutions.
Try that today ... (Score:1)
Screenwriting (Score:2)
Despite different origins, there's a screenwriting theory that forces this process. The mini-movie method asks writer to create eight "stories" that as a whole are supposed to result in a satisfying movie. In brief:
paging captain obvious (Score:1)
Fantastic Voyage - movie to book (Score:2)
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 [wikipedia.org], "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.
Publication (Score:2)
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Innovative? Bullshit! Dickens was doing this 150 years ago. The only significant difference was that Dickens had guarantees of the order in which his installments would be published. but he still needed to set up each story (not everyone would have got all the previous parts), continue the established story lines, and lead to a cliff-hanger for the end of the episode. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Foundation a "Fix-Up"? (Score:1)