This is in response to another post in “Awards and their Meanings” that said Eric hasd suggested categories for novels including stand-alone and several series categories, plus a Hugo for short fiction. Definitions of short stories, novellas, and novels are well-established and based on word count. What I found interesting was his dicussion of mega-novels, line series, and cluster series.
Looking at an additional 13 years of development in the 1632verse, I think it’s become possible to identify some examples of these within the universe. Bjorn Hasseler’s NESS novels are potentially developing into a mega-novel. With four novels published to date and more planned, there is a lot of story both there and in planning. Garrett W. Vance’s Time Spike novels may develop into a line series. I think my own novels (Mrs. Flannery’s Flowers, Gourmets of Grantville, Red Shield) fit the description of a cluster series, albeit a bit short of enough books to count as a series: the same characters and settings are used throughout but have fully separate storylines.
If you think about it, it’s really quite amazing that a single series has grown so large that there are other series’ of books within that series. On top of that, it spawned a (now closed) publishing company to support it and two magazines with 120 issues published over more than 20 years!
– Bethanne Kim (Publisher, Eric Flint’s 1632 & Beyond magazine)
Baens Bar
12 September 2013 00:04
Your memory is a little jumbled. I wasn’t suggesting awards, I was analyzing long form fiction to show — okay, argue — that there are at least as many distinctions between “novels” as the three distinctions between short fiction (short story, novelette, novella). I argued that there were five different types of long form writing, each of which posed challenges that were at least as distinctive as those between short story, novelette and novella. Those were:
1) Short novels. Anything between 40K and either 70K or 80K words. This was the length that novels used to be, including almost all of the ones that won the Best Novel award back in the 50s and 60s. Novels of this length do still get written — I’ve written four of them myself — but the only significant market for them is in shared universe anthologies.
2) Novels. Anything over 70/80K.
3) Mega-novels. These are still novels in the sense that they are one single story with a clearly unitary story arc, but they are so long they have to be published in multiple volumes. The classic example in our genre in probably Tolkien’s Lords of the Ring. In my own work, I consider the six-volume Belisarius series to be mega-novel.
4) Line series. These are series in that the novels have a separate identity of their own over and above whatever they share as part of the series. But they also have a clearly linear structure that makes them somewhat akin to a mega-novel. I.e., the series comes in Books 1, 2, 3 etc. There are many examples of this type of series. Drake’s RCN series, Lois Bujold’s Vorkosigan series, and many others.
5) Cluster series. This type of series has no definite linear structure, or if it does, only at the beginning. It’s a cluster of stories, all of which share a common setting and some common characters. There are many examples of this also. My own 1632 series, for instance. But it goes way back. Over half of James H. Schmitz’s writing were his Hub Universe stories, which shared a common setting and often had the same characters appearing and reappearing.
But that’s not the same thing as creating awards for such writing. I am not in favor of that. The problem is that the minute you abandon narrowly empirical and definable criteria — word count being the key one because it’s a matter of fact, not opinion — you start wandering into a mine field. How do you distinguish between the different types of series? One person’s mega-novel is another person’s line series. How, for instance, would you categorize David Weber’s Honor Harrington series? It began as a line series but eventually morphed in a cluster series.
