Why are there so many Trilogies written?

[NoelWell]

Why trilogies? Full disclosure: I do not know.
But in my particular case, I could not stop. It was stronger than me, and only having finished writing the 3d volume, I felt that everything is said and done.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

Some books are naturally long, some are naturally short. This isn't always obvious to the author however...

 

[Matthew Hughes]

Authors who plan a trilogy often have other sub-series/sequel series in mind and material for it and they then put those to work.

Now, that is. After the trilogy has been established as the basic unit of fantasy writing. But, pre-Tolkien and Tolkien imitators, almost all science fiction and (they were rare) fantasy novels were stand-alones. There were no follow-ups to A Canticle for Leibowitz or Stranger in a Strange Land, or all of those Heinlein novels. Nobody knew what became of Ish's descendants from Earth Abides. Asimov's Foundation series was the exception that tested the rule.

Then came the mid-sixties, and publishers were off in a new direction, calling on Frank Herbert for more of that Dune stuff. In the eighties, Heinlein was using the same characters in different settings. And publishers were leaning on agents and authors to keep the wheels spinning.

And now we are where we are, with readers conditioned to expect volume two and three and . . . as long as we can keep it flying.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

I have to agree with Matthew, the trilogy has become the default fantasy template. That's not a bad thing, but it has led to a hell of a lot of waffle, which is a bad thing. Actually I thought all three of the original Dune books were terrific. The rot set in with God Awful Of Dune. Tolkien remains at the pinnacle. Another example of an exceptional trilogy is Brian Aldiss' Helliconia, which only has TBOTNS to challenge it. The more I ponder Helliconia, the more I think it stands alone in its sheer unique brilliance.

 

[JunkMonkey]

Erm... there was a follow-up to A Canticle for Leibowitz (Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman) it was started by Miller but finished by someone else. It was bloody awful.

 

[Matthew Hughes]

Erm... there was a follow-up to A Canticle for Leibowitz (Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman) it was started by Miller but finished by someone else. It was bloody awful.

I remember that now. Never read it. Still, it was decades later.

 

[KatG]

Now, that is. After the trilogy has been established as the basic unit of fantasy writing. But, pre-Tolkien and Tolkien imitators, almost all science fiction and (they were rare) fantasy novels were stand-alones. There were no follow-ups to A Canticle for Leibowitz or Stranger in a Strange Land, or all of those Heinlein novels. Nobody knew what became of Ish's descendants from Earth Abides. Asimov's Foundation series was the exception that tested the rule.

Then came the mid-sixties, and publishers were off in a new direction, calling on Frank Herbert for more of that Dune stuff. In the eighties, Heinlein was using the same characters in different settings. And publishers were leaning on agents and authors to keep the wheels spinning.

And now we are where we are, with readers conditioned to expect volume two and three and . . . as long as we can keep it flying.

Well hold up there now. The binary that there weren't much of series until the mid-1960's when publishers decided to change things to series isn't really a workable picture historically, especially in the category SFF market and the pulps that firmly established itself after WWII. That category market was, on the book end, primarily a mass market paperback market. As you know, MMPB relies on generating lots of cheap titles sold and distributed in bulk and as such series were often useful.

It is true that science fiction authors tended to favor "standalone" novels but that word is deceptive. Category market science fiction writers tended to write series in shorter works of fiction, published in the major magazines, and they would gather those shorter works of a series together into an episodic "standalone" novel. Or they'd do a particular short story or novella that played well and lengthen it to a short novel for book form. So what looked like "standalones" often were parts of series, just series that relied on collections of short fiction with some books, or were series of short novels that had first been printed in Astounding and such. (And that's a tactic also enjoyed today with authors doing short stories and novellas in the same series universe as their novels, including their standalone novels.) Some science fiction authors also liked to essentially have series that weren't called series because they'd take one character from one novel and put them into another. You'd have two "standalone" novels that were in the same universe, or sometimes in the same multiverse. (And this could also happen in fantasy/horror -- see Michael Moorcock and Stephen King a bit later on.)

But novel series, especially short duologies and trilogies, were not uncommon in science fiction pre-mid-sixties. E.E. Smith's Lensmen and Skylark series, Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic League series, Andre Norton's Time Traders and Solar Queen series, James Blish's Cities in Flight series, Hal Clement's Mesklinite trilogy, Clarke's Space Trilogy, Campbell's Black Star trilogy, Leigh Brackett's space opera duology, Murray Leinster's Med Service series, Lester del Rey's Moon trilogy, etc. are examples of "Golden Age" series. Heinlein himself had his first successes with his Future History series well before the mid-sixties. And serial characters like Buck Rogers and John Carter of Mars along with hundreds of imitators filled novels, short fiction in magazines and comic strips.

And again, authors are like cats. While publishers did help shape what came out when from business needs and printing and distribution changes, it was mostly a matter of what authors wanted to try out and brought to publishers (and magazines.) The fact that Asimov's Foundation series -- a mix of short works, bundled together into episodic "novels" plus then later full novels -- worked well for him, as did his I, Robot series of shorts, meant that a lot of would-be SF writers tried to do similar things coming into the market and looked at series and serial characters. As getting work into the magazines slowly did become less important in the late sixties onward to a greater emphasis on doing novels instead (which was the result of more SFF publishers forming and putting out more titles, again mostly mmpb, more bookstores and changes in the magazine market) authors didn't really need publishers to tell them that book series were potentially lucrative. Many of them simply switched from doing series through serial short stories and novellas to doing more book series. Concentrating on books from the beginning instead of starting with initial shorter work also meant that authors started writing longer science fiction novels as standalones or series, playing with the form.

Fantasy changed from a short story centered marketplace to a book one even faster than science fiction. Many fantasy stories need more back story and world-building than science fiction stories, so the longer form was a natural one that drew fantasy authors' interest. They also grew up with more fantasy novels and series through children's publishing and fiction that was often offered to children and teens even if not originally written for them as the audience. Carol Kendall's Minnipins series, E. Nesbitt's series, Baum's Oz series, Edward Eager's Magic series, The Borrowers series, Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland stories and of course C.S. Lewis' Narnia series -- all pre-mid-sixties -- were the type of works that fantasy authors were weaned on and influenced by. Fantasy authors were also influenced by category fantasy serial characters like Conan the Barbarian and Jirel of Joiry and series such as Jack Vance's Dying Earth, Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast series, Ray Bradbury's Green Town horror duology, H. P. Lovecraft's series, L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt's Harold Shea series and things like T.H. White's Once and Future King, which is several novellas bundled into one book, etc.

And as we already established earlier in the thread, fantasy authors were doing lots of trilogies in the category market even before LOTR became mega-popular as a large novel split into three -- it was simply a popular form. And again seeing the success of LOTR and other trilogies meant that many incoming fantasy authors who wanted to do a portal/multiverse or secondary world fantasy story decided to play with the same form of series as LOTR. No one had to tell fantasy authors to do series -- they were well experienced with the whole idea. And again, doing complex stories in shorter volumes could increase a chance of a deal with publishers sometimes more than one large book (at least till publishers got pretty quickly that fantasy readers adored large books.) Some fantasy writers who were doing more urban fantasy or things like supernatural mysteries wanted to do episodic long series like the non-fantasy mystery writers did and when some of those started doing very well, more fantasy authors who wanted to do stories like that tried that form.

Horror was the one area where standalones remained the favorite form for authors. Which wasn't to say that they didn't have series (Lovecraft) or come up with them in later years, especially short series. But trilogies and series, with or without publishers' interest in them, aren't as favored by authors doing horror where maintaining scares is the goal. They do sometimes like to do duologies. The slasher film series since the 1970's have influenced some series in horror and there's been spillover into dark fantasy series, but overall it's just not as much of an interest to the horror writers.

Basically, most of the time, authors aren't listening to publishers. Instead, they are more likely, especially early on, to watch what other authors are doing, particularly if it does well in the marketplace, and then, liking that stuff, decide to play around with their own version of it. If your favorite is a quartet series, it's not a big surprise if you come up with a quartet series idea. If you are used to trilogies, like trilogies, then you are also likely to think up stories in trilogy form. But also sometimes they write one thing and it then ends up becoming something else.

For instance, if you look at your own work, Matthew, you have multiple different series that mix books, novellas/short novels and short stories that are all part of the same Archonate universe (and so technically one big old series.) Was that planned? You had multiple different publishers, book and magazine on them. They may have directed you occasionally, but I doubt they were the engineers because if they were, they'd have made you do it in a much more tidy, plate-spinning direct line. A God in Chains is a "standalone" novel, but one that takes place in the same universe as your Baldemar and Raffalon short story series. Planned, just sort of developed? Please explain the genesis of Luff Imbry.

It's not that publishers don't request things or affect things. They're the ones investing in and putting out many of these works after all. But it just really doesn't work with fiction authors, particularly in SFF, to say that the book publishers are the ones driving the bus on series or what form those series take. Even authors who are very market oriented, organized and occasionally do tie-in fiction for movies have meandering writer brains one way or another. And every writer has more ideas for projects than they know what to do with.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

EE "Doc" Smith started in 1928!
Sometimes it's as you write a new setting you discover it will need more. I thought actually four books in one case, but it was really a trilogy that started a series, some are relatively stand-alone and some are groups of stories. Currently 23 planned, 19 finished and one draft. Ideas for more mysteries, adventures, quests and romances occur to me as I develop and add characters in a book.
My Daughter read first draft of my second book after a gap of nearly 20 years and said, "Scrap the last chapter, don't be Snoopy tying up all the loose threads, leave them for other books in the series."
So sometimes I've deliberately put something that seems irrelevant, even 1/2 a chapter, so as to have a hook for a later book. I decided long ago that applying "Chekhov's Gun" theory too rigorously is a mistake.
Another series planned as a trilogy ended up as seven books. I've started a "Hard SF" (or relatively so) as a stand alone book, but I can't know how much the plan might change during execution.

Biggest series I know is the Chalet School stories, about 62 books and various short stories in papers and magazines. Weirdly the last reprint or two chopped some chapters yet they are not long books.

 

[JunkMonkey]

I see your Chalet School Stories and I raise you Perry Rhodan - some Three Thousand+! stories since 1961

 

[Stephen Palmer]

And as we already established earlier in the thread, fantasy authors were doing lots of trilogies in the category market even before LOTR became mega-popular as a large novel split into three -- it was simply a popular form.

This is true, but I'd just like to emphasise the status of Tolkien in this field. There really is nobody quite like him for establishing not only a template for fantasy but a format as well. He is unique imo in genre fiction. Nobody else quite has had his impact on genre writing.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

I see your Chalet School Stories and I raise you Perry Rhodan - some Three Thousand+! stories since 1961

Books or shorts? It's not clear. I'd forgotten about that, never read any, though maybe 50 are translated?
As an actual writer (not series) Blyton was so prolific that people thought she had a team.

 

[JunkMonkey]

Books or shorts? It's not clear. I'd forgotten about that, never read any, though maybe 50 are translated?
As an actual writer (not series) Byton was so prolific that people thought she had a team.

There are over a hundred translated into English with a continuity. So stand alone novellas that build into longer story arcs and I do suggest you read some because they are the most godawful writing. Genuine laugh out loud, 'so bad it's good' stuff. I'm told they got better as they went on but as I don't read German I doubt if I'll ever find out.

 

[Matthew Hughes]

Well hold up there now. The binary that there weren't much of series until the mid-1960's when publishers decided to change things to series isn't really a workable picture historically, especially in the category SFF market and the pulps that firmly established itself after WWII. That category market was, on the book end, primarily a mass market paperback market. As you know, MMPB relies on generating lots of cheap titles sold and distributed in bulk and as such series were often useful.

It is true that science fiction authors tended to favor "standalone" novels but that word is deceptive. Category market science fiction writers tended to write series in shorter works of fiction, published in the major magazines, and they would gather those shorter works of a series together into an episodic "standalone" novel. Or they'd do a particular short story or novella that played well and lengthen it to a short novel for book form. So what looked like "standalones" often were parts of series, just series that relied on collections of short fiction with some books, or were series of short novels that had first been printed in Astounding and such. (And that's a tactic also enjoyed today with authors doing short stories and novellas in the same series universe as their novels, including their standalone novels.) Some science fiction authors also liked to essentially have series that weren't called series because they'd take one character from one novel and put them into another. You'd have two "standalone" novels that were in the same universe, or sometimes in the same multiverse. (And this could also happen in fantasy/horror -- see Michael Moorcock and Stephen King a bit later on.)

But novel series, especially short duologies and trilogies, were not uncommon in science fiction pre-mid-sixties. E.E. Smith's Lensmen and Skylark series, Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic League series, Andre Norton's Time Traders and Solar Queen series, James Blish's Cities in Flight series, Hal Clement's Mesklinite trilogy, Clarke's Space Trilogy, Campbell's Black Star trilogy, Leigh Brackett's space opera duology, Murray Leinster's Med Service series, Lester del Rey's Moon trilogy, etc. are examples of "Golden Age" series. Heinlein himself had his first successes with his Future History series well before the mid-sixties. And serial characters like Buck Rogers and John Carter of Mars along with hundreds of imitators filled novels, short fiction in magazines and comic strips.

And again, authors are like cats. While publishers did help shape what came out when from business needs and printing and distribution changes, it was mostly a matter of what authors wanted to try out and brought to publishers (and magazines.) The fact that Asimov's Foundation series -- a mix of short works, bundled together into episodic "novels" plus then later full novels -- worked well for him, as did his I, Robot series of shorts, meant that a lot of would-be SF writers tried to do similar things coming into the market and looked at series and serial characters. As getting work into the magazines slowly did become less important in the late sixties onward to a greater emphasis on doing novels instead (which was the result of more SFF publishers forming and putting out more titles, again mostly mmpb, more bookstores and changes in the magazine market) authors didn't really need publishers to tell them that book series were potentially lucrative. Many of them simply switched from doing series through serial short stories and novellas to doing more book series. Concentrating on books from the beginning instead of starting with initial shorter work also meant that authors started writing longer science fiction novels as standalones or series, playing with the form.

Fantasy changed from a short story centered marketplace to a book one even faster than science fiction. Many fantasy stories need more back story and world-building than science fiction stories, so the longer form was a natural one that drew fantasy authors' interest. They also grew up with more fantasy novels and series through children's publishing and fiction that was often offered to children and teens even if not originally written for them as the audience. Carol Kendall's Minnipins series, E. Nesbitt's series, Baum's Oz series, Edward Eager's Magic series, The Borrowers series, Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland stories and of course C.S. Lewis' Narnia series -- all pre-mid-sixties -- were the type of works that fantasy authors were weaned on and influenced by. Fantasy authors were also influenced by category fantasy serial characters like Conan the Barbarian and Jirel of Joiry and series such as Jack Vance's Dying Earth, Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast series, Ray Bradbury's Green Town horror duology, H. P. Lovecraft's series, L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt's Harold Shea series and things like T.H. White's Once and Future King, which is several novellas bundled into one book, etc.

And as we already established earlier in the thread, fantasy authors were doing lots of trilogies in the category market even before LOTR became mega-popular as a large novel split into three -- it was simply a popular form. And again seeing the success of LOTR and other trilogies meant that many incoming fantasy authors who wanted to do a portal/multiverse or secondary world fantasy story decided to play with the same form of series as LOTR. No one had to tell fantasy authors to do series -- they were well experienced with the whole idea. And again, doing complex stories in shorter volumes could increase a chance of a deal with publishers sometimes more than one large book (at least till publishers got pretty quickly that fantasy readers adored large books.) Some fantasy writers who were doing more urban fantasy or things like supernatural mysteries wanted to do episodic long series like the non-fantasy mystery writers did and when some of those started doing very well, more fantasy authors who wanted to do stories like that tried that form.

Horror was the one area where standalones remained the favorite form for authors. Which wasn't to say that they didn't have series (Lovecraft) or come up with them in later years, especially short series. But trilogies and series, with or without publishers' interest in them, aren't as favored by authors doing horror where maintaining scares is the goal. They do sometimes like to do duologies. The slasher film series since the 1970's have influenced some series in horror and there's been spillover into dark fantasy series, but overall it's just not as much of an interest to the horror writers.

Basically, most of the time, authors aren't listening to publishers. Instead, they are more likely, especially early on, to watch what other authors are doing, particularly if it does well in the marketplace, and then, liking that stuff, decide to play around with their own version of it. If your favorite is a quartet series, it's not a big surprise if you come up with a quartet series idea. If you are used to trilogies, like trilogies, then you are also likely to think up stories in trilogy form. But also sometimes they write one thing and it then ends up becoming something else.

For instance, if you look at your own work, Matthew, you have multiple different series that mix books, novellas/short novels and short stories that are all part of the same Archonate universe (and so technically one big old series.) Was that planned? You had multiple different publishers, book and magazine on them. They may have directed you occasionally, but I doubt they were the engineers because if they were, they'd have made you do it in a much more tidy, plate-spinning direct line. A God in Chains is a "standalone" novel, but one that takes place in the same universe as your Baldemar and Raffalon short story series. Planned, just sort of developed? Please explain the genesis of Luff Imbry.

It's not that publishers don't request things or affect things. They're the ones investing in and putting out many of these works after all. But it just really doesn't work with fiction authors, particularly in SFF, to say that the book publishers are the ones driving the bus on series or what form those series take. Even authors who are very market oriented, organized and occasionally do tie-in fiction for movies have meandering writer brains one way or another. And every writer has more ideas for projects than they know what to do with.

Kat:

I’m not arguing that there were no trilogies or series before Tolkien. I’m saying that the emphasis shifted markedly from the late 1960s and has picked up speed ever since.

So, yes, I read Blish’s Cities in Flight novels and Asimov’s robot novels avidly. But most of what I was reading as a true consumer of science fiction’s output before Tolkien were standalones. Just to check my memory, I googled top-ranked “classics” from the 1950s, and found standalone after standalone that jibed with my memory.

I picked a year at random: 1957. Here’s what I found:

Big Planet, Vance
The Black Cloud, Hoyle
Citizen of the Galaxy, Heinlein
The Cosmic Puppets, Dick
Doomsday Morning, Moore
The Door Into Summer, Heinlein
Eye in the Sky, Dick
The Forever Machine, Riley/Clifton
The Midwich Cuckoos, Wyndham
The Naked Sun, Asimov
On the Beach, Shute
Pilgrimage to Earth, Sheckley
Star Born, Norton
Wasp, Russell

Of those fourteen, the Asimov and Norton are part of a series. The rest are standalones. Some, like The Cosmic Puppets, may have begun as shorter pieces in the digest magazines, but I submit that that was because there were so many mags in those days, and authors could get paid once there and once more at a publisher’s, if the story had appeal and was expandable.

 

[KatG]

This is true, but I'd just like to emphasise the status of Tolkien in this field. There really is nobody quite like him for establishing not only a template for fantasy but a format as well. He is unique imo in genre fiction. Nobody else quite has had his impact on genre writing.

Nobody needs to emphasize the status of Tolkien when it comes to modern fantasy fiction. We're all aware of it. But....

One of the reasons they split LOTR into three volumes instead of say two or four, in both the U.K. and more importantly for the mass market paperback category SFF market in the U.S. and Canada, is again because readers were used to reading trilogies in fantasy fiction by that point. Lots of other fantasy authors had used trilogies, published by category publishers in the category market. So making Tolkien's work into three books was not really a factor of his work -- he wrote it as one big book, as a sequel to the Hobbit and a duology with The Silmarillion. The choice to make it a trilogy for paperback was that it was manageable printing-wise and was a format that was already popular in the genre.

With the success of the paperback versions of LOTR, you definitely had a lot more authors coming in and seeing it as a template, along with other fantasy trilogies they were reading. But it was not a template for the whole fantasy field. It was a template largely for certain kinds of sub-categories of fantasy. The first of these was portal/multiverse fantasy novels that went to a secondary world with magic. Tolkien's creation of Middle Earth was not a portal fantasy, but Narnia was and many other major fantasy works of the time were, so that was initially a more popular approach than just having a secondary world. But eventually, dropping the portal or multiverse aspect and just having a secondary world itself existing also became popular, an area of fiction that eventually just went under the term epic fantasy.

But historical/alt history fantasy, while having trilogies be common, did not take them as a super common template. And contemporary/urban fantasy, again, tended to have standalones that in the first expansion in the 1980's started to increase into not trilogies but longer, multi-volume series like mystery thriller series in mimetic fiction (though trilogies weren't uncommon.) Comic fantasy series, which might or might not be secondary world settings, also tended towards either standalones or longer series. Dark fantasy books, sitting between horror and the rest of fantasy, tended towards standalones.

And as we've also discussed, many of the trilogies were episodic rather than one big story split into three. Serial trilogies, where they do sequel or prequel stories in spurts, were very common as authors returned to settings and characters from the past. It became very popular to do longer series than just trilogies, both as one big story (Wheel of Time) and episodic (Jhereg series.) So LOTR was, through its being split into three and its popularity, a template but not the template for modern fantasy fiction. It was mainly an inspiration for epic fantasy writers, ones doing pre-industrial world settings and particularly if they were trying to do one big story.

And then there was D&D. The creators borrowed heavily from Tolkien and other fantasy writers and then pillaged every mythology for beasties they could find for their RPG. That RPG and others took off, leading also to involvement in the early rounds of electronic/video games. To promote all these gaming empires, they created tie-in fiction which included a lot of film/t.v. tie-in fiction as well. Just as a lot of science fiction authors broke in and started getting an audience by doing short fiction for magazines, a lot of fantasy writers who started in epic fantasy got their start and started to build an audience by doing D&D and other tie-in fiction projects (or sometimes from game writing.) Some of those tie-in projects were trilogies. But a lot of them were five to six volumes series. Which fundamentally changed the epic fantasy side of the market by the early 1990's.

So as a template through trilogies, LOTR was actually only partially responsible and only for about a decade, decade and a half. The work was much more influential in modern fantasy fiction not for the trilogy model -- which had been forced on the work -- but through being a model of world building for secondary worlds and the gold standard. Every epic fantasy and some others besides from the mid-1970's up until about 2005 were called by some people rip offs of LOTR. It was a rite of passage if you were writing epic fantasy, even if your secondary world was post-industrial, had no hint of elves or all powerful evil beings and did not contain a magical mcguffin people were protecting or searching for. So that's LOTR's main impact, while the actual form for series underwent a lot more experimentation by authors.

I will also probably agree that because LOTR was one giant work/story originally (in its "pure" form) that this certainly influenced many epic fantasy writers into writing longer story forms, giving us what is sometimes called doorstop fantasy or big fat fantasy fiction. Fantasy writers started pushing length limits because of LOTR, Gormenghast, etc. in the late 1980's, which was also when publishers started being willing to start more of these series off in limited hardcover runs, a strategy that increased in the 1990's and became more critical after the shrinkage of the wholesale market in the 1990's.

 

[Stanley Steamboy]

There is a tone to this discussion that suggests that trilogies are somehow distasteful and must be the product of crass capitalism.

Maybe it is a popular form because both readers and writers like it, and have benefited from its natural promotion? Not all publishing change is evil. I can't imagine having to digest somwthing like Dune via magazine installments, for instance.

 

[KatG]

Kat:

I’m not arguing that there were no trilogies or series before Tolkien. I’m saying that the emphasis shifted markedly from the late 1960s and has picked up speed ever since.

So, yes, I read Blish’s Cities in Flight novels and Asimov’s robot novels avidly. But most of what I was reading as a true consumer of science fiction’s output before Tolkien were standalones. Just to check my memory, I googled top-ranked “classics” from the 1950s, and found standalone after standalone that jibed with my memory.

I picked a year at random: 1957. Here’s what I found:

Big Planet, Vance
The Black Cloud, Hoyle
Citizen of the Galaxy, Heinlein
The Cosmic Puppets, Dick
Doomsday Morning, Moore
The Door Into Summer, Heinlein
Eye in the Sky, Dick
The Forever Machine, Riley/Clifton
The Midwich Cuckoos, Wyndham
The Naked Sun, Asimov
On the Beach, Shute
Pilgrimage to Earth, Sheckley
Star Born, Norton
Wasp, Russell

Of those fourteen, the Asimov and Norton are part of a series. The rest are standalones. Some, like The Cosmic Puppets, may have begun as shorter pieces in the digest magazines, but I submit that that was because there were so many mags in those days, and authors could get paid once there and once more at a publisher’s, if the story had appeal and was expandable.

Sorry, I had to take a bit to get back to this.

I didn't claim you said that there were no series before the mid-1960's. My dispute was the claim that publishers didn't like series before the mid-1960's and then changed their minds to prefer them, rather than what the authors were doing over time affecting things; with your claim that publishers pressured authors into doing more series. But series before the mid-1960's weren't rare, especially for fantasy but also for science fiction. They might not always be the most acclaimed of science fiction works but they were regularly in the mix. James Blish's After Such Knowledge trilogy; Gordon Dickson's Dorsai; Harry Harrison's Deathworld; etc.

As I noted, science fiction authors did like to do standalones in large part because many of them started as shorter works published in magazines. And again many standalones were short series in disguise, with short works bundled together into an episodic novel. This common occurrence continued well past the mid-1960's. Prolific authors like Andre Norton, C.J. Cherryh and Alan Dean Foster did as many standalones as they did series.

For instance, Poul Anderson's 1971 novel Tau Zero was developed from a short story he'd published and was a standalone novel. David Gerrold's 1972 novel When HARLIE Was One is an episodic novel crafted out of short stories and is a standalone. Alfred Bester's novel The Computer Connection in 1975 was first published in serial form in Analog and was a standalone. Christopher Priest's Inverted World novel in 1975, expanded from a short story; Kate Wilhelm's Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang in 1976, an episodic novel, the first part of which was in an Orbit anthology; Joanna Russ' The Female Man; Delaney's Trouble on Triton; Michael Bishop's No Enemy But Time, etc. Almost all of Philip K. Dick's novels were standalones.

Again, authors doing fantasy fiction were doing series very regularly before the mid-60's and had the grounding of past series, including children's fantasy fiction, to have that tradition. It was in the 1980's, though, that standalones started to become more rare in fantasy fiction, though still in the mix. The big increase in series in science fiction started happening later also in the 1980's, but it wasn't evenly distributed. Space opera and military SF, where world-building and big battles were standards, tended to be series and often long ones. Hard SF, sociological SF and New Wave fiction tended to prefer standalones. Cyberpunk liked to do standalones or short series. Steampunk SF favored series, time travel and post-apocalypse stories were about evenly split.

And again, the increase in series in science fiction goes back in part to the increased concentration on writing books directly for book publishers rather than starting with shorter versions or serial publications in magazines that happened post-1970's. When before authors would work out a series through short fiction published in magazines and anthologies, they instead went to series in longer book forms, series that usually had a part excerpted in magazines after book publication, if at all, rather than the other way round. And while publishers did have influence on that by offering authors book contracts for such works, it wasn't really a matter of publishers telling authors that they wanted series and authors should write series. The authors just started playing around with different forms of doing series on their own. (And yes, I agree, the lack of increase in magazine payment rates as magazines struggled and headed into the wholesale market shrinkage of the 1990's exacerbated that situation.)

Author interest in playing around with forms is also why the trilogy, while it remained popular in both science fiction and particularly fantasy fiction as a series form, was pretty quickly succeeded by quartets and quintets. And why many science fiction novels that used to be fairly short -- having been developed from short stories and novellas and aiming to fit mass market pbk sales racks -- started getting a lot bigger, closer to fantasy novel lengths in the 1980's onward. That wasn't the publishers saying please give us huge novels in a Culture series, Mr. Iain M. Banks, thank you. It was Banks deciding to do it. And especially in science fiction, authors' tendency there of writing a short book series like a trilogy and then coming back a decade later to write several more is not a delight to publishers.

So again, the regular appearance but not dominance of trilogies in SFF hasn't really been a matter of publishers demanding them as a money-spinning operation; (they often may not be, which is why publishers tend to buy rights in a first book in a possible series rather than always doing three book deals.) It's just that trilogies have been a regular tradition in SFF and authors often like playing with that form for some kinds of stories.

 

[KatG]

Maybe it is a popular form because both readers and writers like it, and have benefited from its natural promotion? Not all publishing change is evil. I can't imagine having to digest something like Dune via magazine installments, for instance.

Well Dune was first published in magazine installments. The majority of the novel was published in eight serial installments in Analog magazine from 1963 to 1965. Again, this was a regular thing for a majority of science fiction novels and some fantasy ones. It's still a regular thing, just not as frequent or central to the field.

 

[Stanley Steamboy]

Well Dune was first published in magazine installments. The majority of the novel was published in eight serial installments in Analog magazine from 1963 to 1965. Again, this was a regular thing for a majority of science fiction novels and some fantasy ones. It's still a regular thing, just not as frequent or central to the field.

I know. And I'm happy I encountered the novel post installments. It would have driven me nuts.

 

[JeffR]

Really annoying that I can't find it, but John Jarrold wrote a blog (I think) about why do a trilogy some years ago. I will search more and post it here if I do find it. And to point out, I love trilogies - the promise of what's to come, broadening the depth of characterisation and plot, often surprising me with twists and turns and unexpected endings is something to always look forward to.

 

[KatG]

I know. And I'm happy I encountered the novel post installments. It would have driven me nuts.

It was a regular thing for core SFF readers who read the magazines. They were used to it. Stephen King's The Gunslinger, starting his Dark Tower series, built up a cult following by being published in magazine installments. Joe Haldeman's Forever War was first serialized in Astounding, etc.

And the tradition has continued, even though it happens less frequently -- Allen Steele's novel Coyote was first serialized in Asimov's in the oughts and Charles Stross' Accelerando was an episodic novel first serialized also in Asimov's. And the other tradition of taking a short work or several of them (a series) and expanding it into a novel has also continued. Will McIntosh' novel Soft Apocalypse, for instance, came from three short works in a series published in Interzone, expanded into a fuller novel. The first of those, also called "Soft Apocalypse," was nominated for a British Science Fiction Award. And of course self-published authors often do the same. Hugh Howey self-published a series of novellas and then those were bundled together into an episodic novel, Wool, and reprinted in print/distributed by S&S.

Writing short and episodic is a SFF tradition, especially for SF. Writing big, sweeping stories is also a SFF tradition, especially for some types of fantasy. While some trends in format have changed over time, with different publishing options, SFF authors still tend to play with all of them, depending on their own writing preferences.