Thanks for the Hainish suggestion -- I've read bits of that, but not enough to have known on my own whether it was a good example.
Generally recommended, especially now that you can get the entire thing from the LOA.
I appreciate that this is the model which most closely resembles real life, but after a while I tend to lose interest because it doesn't feel like it's going anywhere.
I've never had the experience of really attaching to a series of this kind and then finding that it ran so long that I tired of its people or wished other lives for them. I don't like all nineteen of the Campion novels equally, but I like its central characters through to the end. My major grief with Torchwood is that there are slightly less than two seasons of an ensemble cast whose interactions and evolving relationships I really enjoyed in the midst of ridiculous alien weirdness plots. I have one open-ended, episodic series that I never returned to; it's the Dresden Files; I read as much of it as existed and I could lay my hands on while my grandfather was dying; Spiders Georg is an outlier and should not have been counted.
I'm curious as to why.
"Resent" is probably too strong; it just chimed irresistibly with the earlier assessment. I don't enjoy the inherent shapelessness of this model—I have read many first books of planned series which do not function as novels so much as whacked-apart portions of plot—and the absence of structure often makes me mistrust the writer's ability to catch up to their ambition. If it sticks the landing, great. But I'm having a hard time thinking of an open-ended, non-episodic series that's done it, even outside of cases where it's unfair to blame the author because they died. In the interests of fairness, because this is a mode of long-form narrative I don't especially enjoy, I haven't read tons of it.
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yati
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Date: 2021-03-12 04:05 am (UTC)Generally recommended, especially now that you can get the entire thing from the LOA.
I appreciate that this is the model which most closely resembles real life, but after a while I tend to lose interest because it doesn't feel like it's going anywhere.
I've never had the experience of really attaching to a series of this kind and then finding that it ran so long that I tired of its people or wished other lives for them. I don't like all nineteen of the Campion novels equally, but I like its central characters through to the end. My major grief with Torchwood is that there are slightly less than two seasons of an ensemble cast whose interactions and evolving relationships I really enjoyed in the midst of ridiculous alien weirdness plots. I have one open-ended, episodic series that I never returned to; it's the Dresden Files; I read as much of it as existed and I could lay my hands on while my grandfather was dying; Spiders Georg is an outlier and should not have been counted.
I'm curious as to why.
"Resent" is probably too strong; it just chimed irresistibly with the earlier assessment. I don't enjoy the inherent shapelessness of this model—I have read many first books of planned series which do not function as novels so much as whacked-apart portions of plot—and the absence of structure often makes me mistrust the writer's ability to catch up to their ambition. If it sticks the landing, great. But I'm having a hard time thinking of an open-ended, non-episodic series that's done it, even outside of cases where it's unfair to blame the author because they died. In the interests of fairness, because this is a mode of long-form narrative I don't especially enjoy, I haven't read tons of it.