Mind Meld was a feature on the website SF Signal, curated by Paul Weimer. For each Mind Meld, Weimer would send a question to several authors and fans, asking for their answers, which would then be published together. This page provides my answer to one of the Mind Melds I participated in, along with a listing of the other authors who responded to that particular question.Question: We asked this week's panelists about series fiction in genre.
Q: Everywhere you go in genre, series seem to predominate over single novels. How do you read a series differently as compared to singletons? Have you ever given up on a series, or returned to one after a long absence?
Here's what they said…
Sally Qwill Janin, Lisa Paitz Spindler, Peggy Hailey, Fábio Fernandes, Brent Bowen, Zachary Jernigan, Alex Ristea, Stefan Raets, Jay Garmon, and Rob Bedford
Steven H Silver, an avid reader and reviewer, has spent a great deal of his non-professional life involved with books. Although as a child he had to store books in his dresser, his library now includes bookshelves with a ladder. In addition to writing stories and poetry (and getting a few of them published), he's edited three anthologies for DAW Books and two collections of Lester del Rey's short fiction for NESFA Press. He launched ISFiC Press and spent eight years as the publisher and editor. Steven also publishes the Hugo-nominated fanzine Argentus.
Although we generally refer to groups of books as "series," in fact when we use that term, we are often referring to both series and serials. In a series, each book stands on its own, and in a serial, books are conceived, or at least written, to tell one on-going story and later volumes require a familiarity with the earlier volumes.
Prime examples of series include Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan saga or Heinlein's Future History series. For the most part, each book stands on its own and can be read without knowledge of the previous books in the series.
Examples of a serial include George R. R. Martin's The Song of Ice and Fire or Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time. More often than with a series, a serial is conceived of as a single unit, even if the author may lengthen the series of books as work progresses.
And for a strange amalgam of both, we have Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, which can be read as stand alone novels, but also have an internal chronology for specific sub-serials.
When I was younger, I loved series, being able to dive in an engross myself in a strange world for three or five books. However, as I've grown older, and my time has grown less my own, and as serials have gotten longer, I find I prefer either stand-alone novels or loose series. While I would love to be able to spend the time reading through a well imagined world over the course of several books, watching a multitude of characters' relationships grow and plot become more and more complex, because of my review schedule, I scarcely get to read that many books in a row that are my own choice, and I usually wind up reading books as they come out (or before they come out). My chance to read them as a solid block, or re-read earlier books before the newest one is published, are minimal.
So, when I do read series, no matter how much I enjoy them, I read them with the knowledge that I'm missing many of the nuances that stretch over the course of several novels, details which I would obsess over when I was younger, much as my daughters obsess over the details and continuity of Rowling's Harry Potter novels or Rick Riordan's Heroes of Olympus. I'm glad my daughters can focus and remember those details, and I know several adult who can remember the same intricacies of plot and world building as they read serials by their favorite authors. Sometimes I miss having that ability.
And so, I have a tendency to read series more than serials, but either way, I just figure the author will give me the cues necessary to remember what happened in earlier novels and who the characters are. This doesn't require a lot of repetition, but it does require that characters and events have significant signifiers.
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