For a while (I understand this has changed) Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen worked as an example of the Setting Series.
My impression -- formed entirely from what I've heard about it, mind you, as I haven't read it -- is that it was always planned to be more, so it only looked like that when it was still incomplete. But whether I'm right about that or not, I suspect there's a strong tendency for the Setting Series to be an early phase on the way to it becoming the superset of something else, because somewhere along the line the author decides to do more with those characters, or to bring those two stand-alone bits together into a third thing, etc.
Re: Perpetual motion: a lot of Pern works like this: the first third is a recap of the previous novel, the last third leads into the next novel, so that of each novel only one third was truly unique. I stopped reading Pern at around that point...
When did that start? I don't recall the books being much like that, but I also stopped reading around the time they found the AI.
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My impression -- formed entirely from what I've heard about it, mind you, as I haven't read it -- is that it was always planned to be more, so it only looked like that when it was still incomplete. But whether I'm right about that or not, I suspect there's a strong tendency for the Setting Series to be an early phase on the way to it becoming the superset of something else, because somewhere along the line the author decides to do more with those characters, or to bring those two stand-alone bits together into a third thing, etc.
Re: Perpetual motion: a lot of Pern works like this: the first third is a recap of the previous novel, the last third leads into the next novel, so that of each novel only one third was truly unique. I stopped reading Pern at around that point...
When did that start? I don't recall the books being much like that, but I also stopped reading around the time they found the AI.