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:

  1. 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

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

    ReplyDelete
  3. 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

    ReplyDelete