Sunday 16 June 2019

The Structures Of Several Series

A series of novels may be enjoyable to read not only because the novels are individually enjoyable but also because the series itself develops an aesthetically pleasing structure. One multi-volume story emerges from and behind several single volume stories.
-copied from here.

Series that I have in mind are: 

the Holmes canon, which ended with Holmes’ death but then found ways to continue;
The Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis;
the nine Church of England novels by Susan Howatch;
the Time Patrol series by Poul Anderson;
the Exiles/Intervention/Milieu sequence by Julian May;
and, of course, the James Bond series by Ian Fleming.

-copied from (see above).

See also:

The Structure Of A Series: Conan Doyle 
The Structure Of A Series: Conan Doyle II
The Structure Of A Series: Holmes Omnibuses 
The Structure Of A Series: Poul Anderson
Structures Of Series

To the above list of series, I now add:

Dornford Yates's Chandos books;
Poul Anderson's Technic History;
more specifically, the Polesotechnic League/Ythrian section of the Technic History.

I will post about the Chandos series on Personal and Literary Reflections when I have reread more of it. (Later: See here, then here.) I have posted about the first section of the Technic History here. (Scroll down.)

To summarize yet again:

two volumes, each collecting three stories, plus two novels equals the Polesotechnic League Tetralogy, comprising eight installments of the Polesotechnic League series which is part of the Technic History;

one novel plus one omnibus volume, collecting eleven stories and one novel, comprise the two Avalonian volumes containing thirteen installments of the Technic History;

one volume collecting three further stories would complete this pre-Flandry section of the Technic History;

however, the middle eight of the twelve items collected in the Avalonian omnibus volume comprise a second half of the Polesotechnic League series with introductions written by the Avalonian Ythrian, Hloch of the Stormgate Choth;

the Polesotechnic League Tetralogy culminates in Mirkheim which mentions an Ythrian;

the eight League installments introduced by Hloch culminate in "Lodestar" about van Rijn's discovery of Mirkheim while traveling in an Ythrian ship;

the remaining five items in the two Avalonian volumes present a systematic account of human-Ythrian interactions, first on Ythri, then on Avalon.

An extraordinary emergent structure.

3 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

When it comes to Cloak and Dagger series, my pet hope is that you try out sometime the first two volumes of William F. Buckley, Jr.'s Blackford Oakes stories: SAVING THE QUEEN and STAINED GLASS. I consider the Oakes books a worthy successor to Ian Fleming's James Bond stories.

Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Sean,
OK but first I have multiple volumes of Dornford Yates to read or reread.
Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I have no objections to that! Dornford Yates now joins those writers in the back of my mind that I should read.

Sean