Of the authors who concern us here:
Poul Anderson
The Last Viking
the Trygve Yamamura novels
Three Hearts And Three Lions, Operation Otherwhen and A Midsummer Tempest
SM Stirling
Shadowspawn
James Blish
After Such Knowledge
(Cities In Flight was a Trilogy but Blish, asked for a juvenile, made it an Okie one.)
CS Lewis
The Ransom Trilogy
The Millennium Trilogy (Larsson planned ten novels but died.)
Not all these works have the same status as trilogies but I am sure that readers know that. Look at the differences between the characters and outlooks in these works, e.g.:
Ransom, Christian and conservative;
Blomkvist, secularist and promiscuous.
Lewis, in That Hideous Strength, and Anderson, in his complete works, particularly Mirkheim, present every kind of character.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I question the correctness of calling Anderson's Yamamura books and then THREE HEARTS AND THREE LIONS, OPERATION "OTHERWHEN," and A MIDSUMMER TEMPEST "trilogies." The Yamamura books are best considered a linked series of independent novels sharing a common background and a unifying main character. And the other works have even less in common, as regards a common background/unifying character. I don't think Anderson ever meant to think of these stories as "trilogies."
Only THE LAST VIKING can be considered a true trilogy, depicting as it does Harald Hardrede of Norway from youth to his death. THE GOLDEN HORN, THE ROAD OF THE SEA HORSE, and THE SIGN OF THE RAVEN were written and meant to be parts of a single work. And THE KING OF YS (with Karen Anderson as co-author) is a similar single work in four volumes.
And I agree Stirling's three SHADOWSPAWN books comprise a true trilogy.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Yes, there are different kinds of "trilogies." The Yamamura novels just happened to be three in number. Anderson stopped writing detective fiction because he was making more money writing sf - thank goodness.
I have argued that THREE HEARTS... and the other two came to have structural connections. Holger appears in Vol I. Valeria appears in Vol II. They meet in Vol III. The 3 books are united by the idea of parallel worlds.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I agree that it was fortunate, despite his liking for mysteries, that Anderson stopped writing detective novels. His science fiction and fantasies were better. Altho we do see occasional elements of a mystery in those other works.
I agree THREE HEARTS AND THREE LIONS, OPERATION CHAOS/OPERATION LUNA, and A MIDSUMMER TEMPEST have some "structural" connections--such as Holger Danske and Valeria Matuchek meeting in MIDSUMMER. I would argue for calling the OPERATION books a duology which had links to the other two. And they all have in common the idea of alternate universes.
Ad astra! Sean
Trilogies were typical in Victorian novels because of a marketing ploy — multiple volumes could be priced each within the budget of a wider audience, but reading one made you want to read the rest. Books were -expensive- in that period, relatively much more so than now.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
That I had not known, about the Victorian era's use of trilogies. I had known of how some writers were deliberately verbose, because their profits from stories originally SERIALIZED in magazines cane from the number of words in those stories. The more words, the more money a writer got (and vice versa).
Ad astra! Sean
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