Quality

Ideally maybe a fictional series would be written to a consistently high quality. However, if the writing of the series was spread across its author's career, then we expect to discern improvements in quality and we also appreciate the skillful incorporation of qualitatively dissimilar texts into a common narrative framework. Poul Anderson's Captain Flandry series began with pulp magazine space opera, "Tiger By The Tail," (1951) and culminated in a serious speculative novel, A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows. (1974) The Merseians, introduced as conventional green-skinned space opera villains, became a complex alien species including the friendly Dennitzan zmayi. (I refer specifically to the Captain Flandry series although there is also the Young Flandry Trilogy and two novels that feature Admiral Flandry.) Also in Anderson's Technic History, the Polesotechnic League series began with magazine space opera, "Margin of Profit," (1956) and culminated in Mirkheim, (1977) a good novel, a good political novel and a good sf novel.

The works included in Anderson's Psychotechnic History were written from 1949 to 1968 and the last-written story, "The Pirate," is of a noticeably higher quality but we appreciate its reflective contribution to the earlier-conceived fictional history.