The History of Serialized SF Gets a New Chapter

Since its early days, Science Fiction and Fantasy has told astonishing stories, but you couldn't always find them in a bookstore, or even as a single novel.

The genre has seen many changes over the years, beginning with the magazine before the rise of a bound novel, and now, the introduction of the eBook. The pioneering SF novels weren’t released at once, but in a serialized format. Now, that might be returning.

In the early 1900s, magazines reigned supreme in the United States. One author, a destitute Edgar Rice Burroughs, in a magazine market with fiction of such poor quality, he could write something just as entertaining and just as bad. He was enormously successful with it: his first serialized stories created iconic characters and story lines, such as John Carter and Tarzan in the early 1910s, and continued for decades. Shortly after the serialization of his stories, he was able to quickly put his serialized stories back together into a single volume: Tarzan of the Apes was published in 1914, and A Princess of Marswas published in 1917. He eventually published dozens of follow-up novels.

Other authors, such as E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith, followed suit, writing up his stories, and splitting them up for the magazine market, and eventually publishing them as a single, cohesive novel. Smith, considered the founder of the Space Opera subgenre, wrote long, episodic space epics which were well suited for the pulp magazines. His first serialized series, Skylark, was assembled in 1946 with The Skylark of Space. Another was collected in 1947 as Spacehounds of IPC, while his next major series, the Lensmen, was serialized in Amazing Stories in 1934, eventually published as novel,Triplanetary, in 1948, with a number of sequels.

The first major stage existed without a dedicated market for novels, and as a result, authors found ways to get their stories published, helping to set up the demand for standalone science fiction novels. As the market for novels grew, authors began putting their short stories together into books of their own, in a type of story known as the ‘Fix-up’ novel.

One notable story, A.E. van Vogt’s, The Black Destroyer saw publication the seminal July 1939 issue of Astounding Magazine.  The story was the first part of what would be an early example of a ‘Fix Up’ novel, where several stories, not all of which were necessarily related, were re-edited and assembled into a single story. Three other short stories by Vogt, War of Nerves, published in May 1950 in Other Worlds Magazine, Discord in Scarlet, published in the December 1939 issue of Astounding Magazine, and M33 in Andromeda, appeared in the August 1943 issue of Astounding Magazine came together in 1950 to formThe Voyage of the Space Beagle.

Other novels followed in similar fashion: in the same year, Ray Bradbury’s acclaimed novel,The Martian Chronicles, contained almost 30 short stories, some of which had first appeared with the novel’s publication. Another notable book, Isaac Asimov’s collection, I, Robot, features ten short stories, all centered around Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics.

Asimov would return for another collected novel, Foundation, considered his greatest work, assembled from four stories, Foundation, Bridle andSaddle, The Wedge and The Bigand the Little, all published in Astounding Magazine between 1942 and 1944, with a fifth, The Psychohistorians, written specifically for the novel.

The serialized novel was a popular format for authors for a couple of reasons: the science fiction market was mainly focused around the short fiction and magazine scene, and the successful authors were writing numerous stories for publication, leaving plenty of material for larger stories. Additionally, there was a much smaller market for standalone novels: full time authors, who depended upon the small paychecks that they received from magazines, found this a harder market to break into.

In the mid 1930s, publishers had begun to experiment with cheaper, mass produced books. In 1935, Penguin Books founder Allen Lane found himself looking for something to read at a train station, only finding cheap magazines. He wanted a cheap, high quality paperback, and within the year, a publishing experiment had begun: Penguin began selling their classic novels, and was immediately successful. The success spread: in 1939, Simon & Schuster introduced Pocket Books. The world had been introduced to the mass-market paperback, a new format for books.

Serialized fiction continued: while science fiction magazine markets did decline, they didn’t vanish, and authors continued to find success with longer stories that were eventually republished in a single volume. A number of notable SF novels found their way to print in this fashion: Walter M. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz was published in 1960, which had originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Joe Haldeman’sThe Forever War was originally serialized in Analog Magazine (formerly Astounding), and Stephen King’s famous novel The Gunslinger were put together from various stories published between 1978 and 1981 in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

As the magazine markets faded over the course of the century, the market for novels grew, aided by changing tastes in literature, and by the 1990s, fewer stories were published first in magazines before being published in a regular novel. However, a number of notable stories have followed this historical route to the bookstore.

King would later have enormous success with another serialized novel: The Green Mile, which was first published in six smaller volumes beginning monthly in March 1996, before being published as a single volume in 1997. The unique publication method earned King the title of the first author to place 6 novels on the best seller list at the same time.

Allen M. Steele’s novel Coyote: A Novel of Interstellar Exploration was initially published as a serialized novel in Asimov’s, beginning in the January 2002 issue, with Stealing Alabama, and continued with The Days Between, Coming to Coyote, Liberty Journals, Across the Eastern Divide, Lonesomeand a Long Way From Home and Glorious Destiny, with the final book published together at the end of the year. A sequel, Coyote Rising, continued the story in 2004, and a third book, Coyote Frontier was written as a single novel, but wasn’t serialized.

Another author, Charles Stross, published his novel Accelerando in 2005, which was put together from a collection of stories from Asimovs between 2001 and 2004: Lobsters, Troubador, Tourist, Halo, Router, Nightfall, Curator, Elector and Survivor. The novel would eventually be nominated for the Hugo, Campbell, Clarke, and British Science Fiction Association Awards, and won the 2006 Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.

By this time, fewer stories seem to be Fix Up novels, although there are exceptions to this rule: Will McIntosh’s debut novel came together out of three of his short stories set in the same world: Soft Apocalypse, Street Hero and Dada Jihad. McIntosh noted that when the time came to write a novel, he found that the three formed the core of a connected story. The final version, bearing the title Soft Apocalypse, was released in 2011.

The major change has come with the rise of the eBook market. As the print magazine market has declined, the publishing world has moved into unknown territory. With eBook sales doing well, but conventional, mass market novels declining, it’s clear that we’re in the midst of a major shift in the landscape. Where publishers were limited by the physical limitations of books, online booksellers have found an unprecedented ability to market and publish fiction of all lengths: where novellas and novelettes might have only been found from specialty publishers, websites such as Amazon.com, and online Magazines such as Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons and Lightspeed have the ability to publish a wide range of stories of all lengths.

In 2013, author John Scalzi began a new experiment in publishing with a serialized novel called The Human Division. Taking advantage of both electronic, audio and print media and distribution, the latest addition to the Old Man’s War universe was serialized through e-retailers with an episode a week, beginning in January. The model for these thirteen stories appears more along the lines of a television show than that of a magazine, and a completed version will be collected in a hardcover volume set for release in May 2013.

With the rise of eBooks, tablet computers, eReaders and smartphones, it’s going to be interesting to watch how the publishing world will change and adapt to new reading habits. Throughout the history of the science fiction field, it’s clear that change has been a constant and continuing factor in how readers receive their entertainment: from weekly and monthly magazines to assembled novels to electronic experiments, the serialized novel has had a constant presence on readers bookshelves, and from all appearances, will remain there for years to come.