(Well, the taxonomic categories I care about, anyway.)
First of all, a Series is not a Collection. Collections can be organized in similar ways (e.g., a Collection of stories about vampires) but they don’t in general need to make a unified whole of any sort, just a pile. A Series, on the other hand, has a organized form, a shape that recognizes boundaries and relationships among its entries.
Though I’m sure there are other forms, I classify the fiction series I care about into three characteristic organizing principles:
- The same characters (more or less) persisting through the series
- An expanded (space or time) group of related characters that appear in the series
- The same world (in some sense) where series stories take place
There are other sorts, but these seem the most common to me.
Different genres vary in the utilization of these categories. For example, a Mystery series will typically fall into the “same characters” form, a Romance series will perhaps explore “related characters” in series, and the “same world” form is often useful for a historical series over time (think: Ken Follett/Pillars of Earth), or SFF exploring cultural interactions (think: Iain Banks/The Culture).
While every individual book within a series has characters and a world for us to invest in, what I wanted to talk a little about is what effect these different categories of series have upon the nature of the stories we want to tell when they’re part of a longer series.
As readers, we want the delight of getting to know characters well, and then following them through a story. In a “same characters” series, we get the pleasure of deepening our experience with them again and again as the series continues. To a degree, we get the same depth from the friends and family of the original primary characters, as we follow the series, though the focus remains on the original protagonists. The spine of the story is often framed as a chronological account, perhaps interrupted by flashbacks of earlier times.
Think of series stories as varied as Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes entries. The characters grow and their friends and associates evolve, but it is essential that they not change so drastically as to alienate their faithful readers.
And that’s part of the challenge of a “same characters” series. If you start the leads too young, they may not suck the reader in for the long haul. If you age them too quickly (or, god forbid, throw them over the Reichenbach Fall), you may run out of runway for continuing the series.
On the other hand, pity the poor Romance writer who has just married off the lovers that all her readers were worried about. Unless she plans a succession of divorces or widowhood, what can she do for an encore? One-and-done. Unless… she launches a “related characters” series starring some of her first book’s characters (the original protags, their siblings/neighbors/etc.). Personally, I don’t think this works ideally at retaining the reader’s delight, for the Romance genre, since the focus switches to the next couple in line or, if it doesn’t, attention is split between the old and the new at a different stage of their relationship, so the reader still has to do much of the heavy lifting of a wholly unrelated book. But other genres embrace this form with teams of characters that draw new people in to the series, where they move the reader’s focus around as first this character and then that one surface to carry the story along. Some characters might even take a holiday for a while before returning to carry their parts again.
Some Adventure or Military genres can make good use of the “related characters” form by moving the spotlight from one group of characters to the next. Fantasy plots that send teams of characters on different paths for a joint quest can do well with this, too, as long as there’s a sensible multi-part goal to pull each series entry along.
And then there’s the “same world” series form, where the character clusters may or may not be aware of each other (in person or by reputation), but they’re all swimming in the same pond. The shared world provides a unifying structure that supports as many forms of life as needed. Mega-universe/timepoint stories can do well with this in SciFi, where a series entry can cross-fertilize with a “related characters” drive-by (with Nathan Lowell’s “Solar Clipper” entries as an example blending both forms).
One drawback of the “same world” form is that you have to capture the reader’s interest for each of the series’ groups of characters, but if you can make that magic happen, and cleverly intertwine their appearances, then the readers will invest in the expanded world that you’ve created.
Do any of your favorite reading series fit these categories? If you write series, how do you handle the needs of these forms?
Mad Genius Club 
22 responses to “A Taxonomy of Series”
One notes that series can migrate. Pratchett’s Discworld had same-character series within the setting one, but often when you start relating the books, or repeating characters, you tend to migrate toward related characters, or even same characters, from setting.
Breaking out from the characters is also possible but less frequently successful. Narrowing it to characters adds an attraction of continuing characters as well as setting, but widening it removes one.
I love Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe series. We follow Richard Sharpe through book after book of adventure during Wellington’s Spain campaign and on. (And then there’s prequels.) He’s ferocious, competent, driven, and has a weakness for the ladies. He’s always like this. Once I like a main character, this is my favorite approach. I like all the good guys around him, and hate the venal, feeble baddies on his side. The enemies are the worst. Of course.
Butcher’s Harry Dresden is another example of this hyper-focus on one MC. Since it’s told from first person, it has to be.
Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series follows two main characters: the captain and the doctor. Also good.
Personally, I find it frustrating to be sucked into a story and then find that the person I’m interested in only gets a sixth of the page time. I particularly don’t want the villain front and center for a substantial portion. Enough to build suspense, fine. 50 percent? Not so much.
The Wheel of Time series (takes a breath and ducks) has too many characters. I didn’t like all of them, and found the books really dragged when the spotlight shifted to the dull ones. Oh, well.
I write “same characters” series because that’s what I like. I do have more than one person’s POV, but the main character has the lion’s share. This was tricky when I got to the last book of my current series. The first two books focused on Peter Dawe. We meet his older brother Thaddeus, but we don’t get his story until books 3 and 4, and then it’s all his story. Book 5 shifts back to Peter. Book 6, the finale, has both. Oh, boy. Book 6 is long.
Ringo and Flint have both used these in the Posleen (Legacy of Aldenata) and 1632 (Assiti Shards) series, both series that I love. Unfortunately for me, the entries came out so fast that I’ve fallen way behind, and then the ADD kicked in and… oh, shiny got distracted by other things. As with my writing, my reading is really good at starting a story/series and complete scheisse at finishing things. My current distractions include The Belisarius Saga by Drake/Flint and Ringo’s Black Tide Rising series, which also fall into your categories.
Oh, I just thought of Tony Hillerman’s Navajo Police novels. They start out with Lt. Leaphorn as the main character, then migrate to Jim Chee and Leaphorn & Chee. Then to Chee & Manuelito.
And I always suspected that’s because Hillerman didn’t plan for the long term, and Leaphorn was already fully developed and too old to carry the primary role for the length of the unanticipated further series.
I read them as they came out and remember how irritated I was as the primary character moved around in a disorderly way, and then faded out.
I think Craig Johnson had a similar problem with Longmire, and C. J. Box really ran out of runway for his protags.
An aside, a recent change to this and a couple other (but not all of them) word press blogs did something weird on Android. The comment block only brings up a paragraph/list selector, but won’t bring up a text window.
Apparently I can still comment through the notification window.
On series, I actually think the Xanth series has a solution to the romance series issue: each story is a boy meets girl adventure where to two end up as a couple at the end. The key thing is it goes through generations. Many times either the boy or the girl is one of the children of the prior main characters.
I suspect that would resonate with romance readers because not only do they get the core romance, they get to revisit prior couple in their (hopefully) comfortable/happy older years. Instead of requiring the reader to know the other stories in the series, it become a fun bonus for having read the rest.
I suppose I use Xanth as my gold standard for long series because it’s the one I’ve read the most of, and seems to hold up the most consistently.
That’s a “related characters” form. But my problem with those for Romance is that (1) the first couple may still be present and their relationship can deepen, but the focus moves to the “next couple(s) in line”, and (2) I may not care about them at all… and that is a real problem. You have to get past each new primary couple as the series continues, and that’s not much different from not having a “series” at all. One misstep, and the reader’s gone, since the characters he liked have less and less presence to attract him.
When I open a Romance book and immediately discover that one or more of the main characters has many siblings, I sigh…
If the later series books stay with the original (and organically spreading) main characters from the first entry (a “same characters” form) you get to grow with them as primaries, and the new relationships take the back seat as secondary. That’s my preferred sort of series to write (and read). As an extreme version, look at C. J. Cherryh’s “Foreigner” series which over 22 books (so far) have had one single POV primary character, plus an occasional second (child) POV character. And the reader has been everywhere with them, without it ever seeming forced.
Dorothy Grant’s Combined Operations series could be considered a “Romance Series”, at least the first three books.
But all of them are more SF action/adventure with a romantic sub-plot in the first three books.
Yes, I agree – SFF with romantic sub-plot.
SFF has a long history of “women? what are these mysterious creatures called “women” and why would I care?” which had a way of, um, reducing the number of romantic sub-plots for a while. People are still a bit reluctant to link the two concepts. 🙂
I think it was more that Xanth would move to the original characters’ kids, rather than their siblings.
So you’d come back to the OG couple when their kids are about to go through the same, or extremely different troubles than they were, and compare and contrast how they handled it.
And sometimes you’d run into a kid who was the spitting image of their grandparent, and have no clue.
It’s either change characters or
Shifting genre is harder on series than shifting characters. Setting it up as a series of books about the life of the characters requires it to be not quite a romance in the first book.
As for undermining the happy ending of before, it is the sin I can not forgive in a series. One consequence is, for instance, that I can never believe in your next happy ending.
I suppose my historicals fall into the ‘shared world/time span’ category; a collection of loosely related heroes and heroines, all of who have their own stories and challenges. The central character in two or three books is a minor character in another, and in the final book in the sequence, the two main characters are the granddaughters of main characters in two previous books. They grow and change, or even pass away in the course of the series, and other characters take center stage.
Luna City is more a ‘cast of hundreds’ with interbraided stories. It seems to me this is more like real life – nothing stays the same with people. Nothing would be more boring to me than writing the same story in different variants about the same continuing characters.
Romance series tend to be related characters same world, each individual book is linked but can stand alone as a complete series. Say, Gemma Weir’s Mountain Man series which is about the seven Barnett brothers, each has his own book. The next, related series, will be about the brothers of one of the female main characters in the first series. Or Ruby Dixon’s blue alien series. Mina Carter has the Warriors of the Lathar and some related same-world but different time.
PNR often has everyone in the protagonist’s group searching for his or her soulmate/fated mate/perfect other half, whatever. Shared world, shared common back-story of a sort, shared conventions (all vampires or whatever) but different individuals.
I remember a romance series that when the second book came out, the heroine’s true love turned out to be a dastard. Which he was not.
So I quit reading it.
I much prefer the romantic couple’s friends and relatives stories being told. But it’s very possible to go to far afield and stretch it out forever. Mary Balogh did that with her Westmacott series. The first few were excellent.
After a while though, it got to be tedious.
(“Westcott”).
Yes, that’s the sort of issue that makes it very hard. The best multi-sibling (the men) Romance of that type that I’ve encountered is Nora Roberts’s “The Inn Boonsboro”. It’s very hard to do, and most Romance authors (IMHO) don’t do well with it.
I’ve often wondered what makes the difference, and I think that (for same-generation siblings) it’s the men-as-tribe, women-as-brides. Or, to put it in simplistic anthropological terms, patrilocal men and heterogeneous outsider wives, aka exogamy.
No doubt this echoes more deeply our own (long term) society’s customary mating practices. Matrilocal tribes (sisters) with outsider men seems more wish-fulfillment than echo of historic practices. The women adapt to the tribe they enter and find their support that way. The men train for the support/respect of the other men in the tribe they grow up in, and have that asset reduced if they change tribes.
Yes, I always get the name wrong. I keep putting that extra syllable in there.
As for historical marriage patterns, you’re right!
It does seem to flow better (in my romance reading experience) if it’s brothers and cousins or a band of male friends rather than sisters or female friends. I’d never considered the underlying pattern before.
It doesn’t feel particularly weird to me in a Regency context, maybe because the template novels often track the marital choices of a couple of sisters in one book – Frederica, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice come to mind. And by definition the sisters are marrying in a somewhat narrow circle of acquaintances. As far as Brotherhood of Male Leads series go, I feel like it often ends up being an excuse for doing the same generic “alpha male” over and over, or a nonromance subplot (usually crime or espionage related) executed too poorly to be worth the trouble.
But broadly speaking there’s no easy, series-based solution to the fact that a romance is conventionally a one-book story-arc between two people, but most romance readers would like a bunch of similar books in the same setting. There’s always going to be someone like me, who’ll read Book 2 because the characters sound interesting, and bypass Books 1 & 3-5 because they don’t.
… which may have something to do with the rise of significant romantic subplots in other genres (in particular SFF) which never used to have them. People miss the warmth of Romance, but rely on the strength of the foundation genre to carry the larger plot and extend it into series form. (Sharon Lee/Steve Miller; Nathan Lowell; etc.). The “romance” isn’t necessarily the point of an individual series entry, but the continuing glimpses of relationships is essential.
Eric Flint also categorized series as “Mega novels” where the entire series had a single over arching problem, with hopefully lessor problems that could be solved in a size that that could fit into a single book. Verse series where each book solved the main problem, and then went on to the next problem in the next book.
I try for the latter, but some of my books are best read two or three in a row. Of course, in reality, I seem to accomplish every sort or definition of series, chaotically.
I don’t quite agree with that.
It’s true for many series (Fantasy vol. 49 — “at last the quest is completed!”), but what’s the “goal” of a series world like Lowell’s Solar Clipper? A “same character” series may come to a natural end with the death of the main character or descendents, but that’s not a solution to an overarching problem, much as we may hope to define “death” that way.
So, true for some, but not for all, I think.