If It’s Bigger, Is It Better?

First published in Warp 33, May 1983.

One day, God willing, Philip Jose Farmer will finish one of his many series and the SF world will go into a state of shock. (If you think that The Magic Labyrinth completed the Riverworld series, go and read the last page again.) One day, Piers Anthony will write a trilogy with only three books in it.

SF seems to generate series, trilogies, streams of related stories. Everything Michael Moorcock has ever written is related to just about everything else that Michael Moorcock has ever written—often at very trivial levels; but sometimes the relationships are much deeper than that. It isn’t coincidence that Jerry Cornelius shares his initials with Jesus Christ. Now go and count the JC’s in his books and think about the roles they play.

Moorcock is perhaps the most extreme example of this phenomenon, but others are rapidly catching up. Publishers love a trilogy. If they can con you into buying the first book, they’re certain you will buy the rest—just to find out what happens in the end. It’s the closest you can get, in marketing terms, to a sure thing. And that’s why Stephen Donaldson writes BIG BOOKS. Big books that split into three mean three times as much money in the bank for the publisher.

The phenomenon isn’t new, of course. Like a lot of things, you can trace it back to the magazines. They always run serials to help guarantee continuity of sales. Everyone, the theory goes, needs to know if (or, more realistically, how) the hero will escape from this week’s cliff hanger. And the more issues you can spin it out over, the more the money rolls in.

But don’t forget the other side of the story either. The longer the author can spin it out, the better it is for him as well, particularly if he’s paid by the word. At 1¢ a word, very few characters simply “say” anything (1¢). They usually “speak slowly and carefully, enunciating every word” (7¢) or perhaps they “scream and rage in a paroxysm of anger terrifying to behold” (11¢) or maybe they “speak gloomily while staring out of the window at the depressing vista of concrete buildings, all exactly alike” (18¢ and a bit of social comment to ease the author’s mercenary conscience a little). And that’s another reason why Stephen Donaldson writes big books.

And it’s escalating. Everyone these days seems to be writing series. Sometimes it is valid, of course. I seriously doubt whether Gene Wolfe could have said everything he needed to say in less than the four books that make up The Book of the New Sun; and the basic premise of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation stories virtually forces them into the extended shape of a series.

But far too often, the concept is used simply to inflate the prose and to pile meaningless incident on meaningless incident just to get another book out of it. The end result of that is not a series. It is just an overwritten book.

Any copy editor worthy of the name could have condensed Stephen Donaldson’s hyper-inflated ramblings into one book (or at the most two—given that he’s produced two trilogies); and made a tighter, more compelling work out of it.