TODAY: Classic Speculative Fiction Series

The first of three posts: Classic series (today), Some of my Favorites, Problem series

The appeal of a series of novels vs. a standalone

I admit it: while I admire and enjoy short fiction, my true love is the novel. I want to sink into an unknown world and get to know its inhabitants, and I want to stay there a good long while. The unknown world can be practically a clone of my own, and the people who live in it could have stepped right out of my neighborhood. Or the world can be in a galaxy far, far away. Or I could get to it through a magical cupboard. It could be a medieval or ancient world (Europe, Africa, the Americas, Asia–I don’t care), checking every box for historical accuracy. Or worlds that might have been but never were.

What could be better than entering such a world and living in it to the very end of the story as if it were real?

ONE THING: A series of stories set in that world, so I have the illusion, at least, that I’ll never have to leave it.

For me the reader, this accounts for the appeal of a book series. For me the writer, it also accounts for that appeal. For me the writer, I’ll live in my book world a lot longer than any reader, because it will keep populating in my imagination, and I’ll have time to write only some of that down. But I’ll have all of it in my head.

Speculative fiction especially grabs its readers through series. I feel like I should do a lot more reading before I write this post and two more related posts about speculative fiction series. So many books. . .so little time!

SOME OF THE CLASSICS

The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien

Tolkien (1892-1973) is the man who wrote the epic fantasy series that started modern-day fantasy. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is totally immersive and hugely influential. The writing is not my favorite, but that hardly matters. Peter Jackson made wonderful movies of the three main volumes (psst, originally written as one mammoth volume, in case you’re wondering why the first and second just stop cold), and Tolkien produced tons of other material that you could think of as series-adjacent. The Tolkien universe is so huge and complex that only its most avid fans know how to thread through it all, from The Hobbit, a beloved children’s book, all the way to a multitude of related books and stories that only the initiate know about. Here’s a helpful web site if you need a guide. Tolkien himself was a fascinating man. He was a celebrated scholar of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University, the man who brought Beowulf to the attention of the world. He populated his worlds of imagination from his scholarly knowledge and his lifelong fascination with languages, building his fantasy world from the inside out. “Here’s an interesting way language could work, and here’s an interesting potential language that could come out of that. Now, what kind of people would speak such a language, and what kind of world would they live in?” That seemed to have been his thinking. His military service in World War I and his ardent Roman Catholicism also shaped his writing. For a quick read, learn more through the Tolkien Society, and for a deep dive, get Humphrey Carpenter’s 1977 biography. Carpenter also wrote an interesting book about Tolkien and the Inklings, his literary circle: The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and Their Friends (1979).

The Chronicles of Narnia, C. S. Lewis

Lewis (1898-1963) was Tolkien’s friend, academic colleague, and fellow Inkling. The Narnia books, like Tolkien’s The Hobbit, are notable classics of children’s literature. The first, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, has been a must-read for generations of children, their gateway (wardrobe portal?) into fantasy. With a few exceptions, the other six novels are rather preachy and Christian-apologetic. Lewis was a great scholar of Renaissance English literature, the man who almost single-handedly resurrected literary interest in Edmund Spenser and John Milton (very important to me personally, since that’s my academic field). He also wrote a lot of religious tract-like material beloved of the Religious Right, although he was a faithful Anglican his whole life. Some Religious Right outfit made pretty bad movies from several of the books in the series, but fans can hope Greta Gerwig’s Narnia streaming series gets off the ground. The reading order of the Narnia books isn’t quite as complicated as for Tolkien’s entire body of fantasy work, but it does have its complications. There are two ways to do it: chronologically according to story line, or by publication date. Here is a helpful guide. Unlike Tolkien, and more like most fantasy writers, Lewis wrote from the outside in. He imagined his fantasy world, and then he fleshed it out. The way he was led to do that has roots in his childhood and relationship with his much-loved older brother. Humphrey Carpenter’s book about the Inklings (see above) is a good place to start if you want to do a deep dive, and so is Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis, by George Sayer. For a quick unbiased overview, see the official C. S. Lewis web site. An evangelical Christian take on Lewis can be found here or here or here. His own book, Surprised by Joy, is a good introduction to both his life and his religious beliefs. The film Shadowlands (1993) explores many of these issues and is really well-done. It was based on a stage play and an earlier BBC televised production which might be even better than the more well-known Anthony Hopkins-Debra Winger film. Mark Saint-Germaine’s 2009 play Freud’s Last Session, imagining a meeting and debate between Sigmund Freud and Lewis, is really great, too, if you ever have a chance to see it. I was lucky enough to attend an off-Broadway production. Lewis wrote prolifically about religious subjects, but he did write other fiction, including an SF series for adults, the Space Trilogy, which is even more indebted to ideas from Spenser and Milton than the Narnia books–not to mention a big academic controversy of the day.

The Time Quintet, Madeleine L’Engle

A Wrinkle in Time, an SF book for young adults, had a hard road to publication, especially since most SF books of the time did not have female main characters. It went on to win the Newbery Medal among many other awards, and its author, Madeleine L’Engle (1918-2007), wrote four sequels: A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Many Waters, and An Acceptable Time. L’Engle wrote a second, related series and other novels exploring similar ground. Like Lewis, L’Engle was a committed Christian and attended mostly Episcopal churches (The Episcopal Church being the U.S. branch of Anglicanism). She was especially associated with the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan. Her books explore religious themes congruent with her belief in Christian universalism. I don’t find them as preachy and doctrinaire as the Narnia books, but then my own ideas about religion tilt more in her direction than in his. Some evangelical readers find L’Engle’s books offensive because of her universalism. I think they are great books for young girls to read–an intelligent and spunky young girl is the main character, and L’Engle’s religious ideas are expansive and generous. That’s just me. You, Reader, can make up your own mind. The first of these novels was made into a sadly unsuccessful movie. Learn more about L’Engle by visiting her official web site. Her obituary in the Times of London, accessed through the Wayback machine, is a good way to find out more as well.

The Hainish Cycle, Ursula LeGuin

LeGuin (1929-2018) wrote deeply-involving novels with convincing and fascinating anthropological underpinnings. The daughter of an anthropologist and a writer, she pioneered soft SF, less concerned with hardware and technology, more concerned with imagining different cultures. Her writing is brilliant, lauded by the literary world in general as well as within speculative fiction. The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), one of the Hainish SF novels, won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards in 1970 and is one of the best, most affecting books I have ever read. She wrote many other kinds of books, including the beloved coming-of-age fantasy novel A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), the children’s series Catwings, the brilliant short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelos,” and more. She must hold some kind of record for the number of her major speculative fiction awards–Hugo, Locus, Nebula, others–during a lifetime of influential and highly acclaimed writing. She was heavily influenced by ideas from anthropology and sociology and by Jungian and Taoist thought. She incorporated feminist ideas about gender and sexuality into her writing well before most were very well-informed about such matters, and crusaded for political tolerance and the rights of authors steamrolled by big publishing companies and platforms (See this and this). Learn more through her official web site. The influential literary critic Harold Bloom wrote a detailed critique of her work, which he hugely admired.

Foundation, Isaac Asimov

Asimov (1920-1992) was a scientist educated at Columbia University, with a professorship at Boston University, and he poured his knowledge and varied interests into his SF books, some of the best from the Golden Age of SF. The Foundation trilogy won a 1966 Hugo award as best all-time series. Asimov followed the trilogy up with further Foundation novels organized in a number of related series. A streaming series was based on his Foundation world-building. Here’s a terrible confession: I have never been able to get through the Foundation novels. I will say there are standalone Asimov books I’ve loved, especially a deep fondness for Pebble in the Sky (1950) and The Stars, Like Dust (1951)–and I admired but found flawed The Gods Themselves, which won the 1972 Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards in a boffo trifecta. Whatever I may think, Asimov’s influence on speculative fiction was and remains immense and his output, prolific. His envisioning of a galaxy-wide empire is the precursor to many another SF book or series of books–and movies and all the rest–world-building that features a galactic empire and its wide-ranging conflicts. Asimov has said he was inspired by Gibbons’s Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire and Thucydides’s history of the Peloponnesian War. Among several other terms he invented, the word “robotics” is probably the most well-known and widely used, and he was a true Renaissance man, writing academic science, popular science, mystery, children’s books, popular history, dirty limericks, and on and on. Hmm, maybe we should conduct a contest to see whether his number of speculative fiction awards beats out Ursula LeGuin’s. He has an impressive list of them. His political views and his behavior frequently roused controversy. To learn more about Asimov, you can’t do better than heading to this web site.

The Dune Saga, Frank Herbert

After a career in journalism, the largely self-taught Herbert (1920-1986) began selling stories to SF magazines. With his ground-breaking novel Dune (1965), he achieved fame as one of the New Wave of SF writers. The structure of Dune is innovative–episodes of adventure involving the novel’s main character are interspersed with purported anthropological, historical, and ecological accounts of the culture of his planet, part of a far-flung galactic empire. I found this first book of the series pretty brilliant, with its invented history/anthropology sandwiched between thrilling action sequences. It won the 1965 Nebula award and shared the Hugo in 1966. I could barely get through the next in the series, Dune Messiah, and I didn’t bother reading the other four sequels, the writing was so bad. But many readers love them. You may be among those fans. He died before he could finish the last in the series. Whatever you think about it, the Dune saga is a hugely influential SF series, with innovative world-building and a forward-thinking emphasis on ecology, one of Herbert’s lifelong passions. The Dune universe has tempted several different movie-makers to have a go at it. The latest films, directed by Denis Villeneuve, divided the first book into two parts and have been extremely successful. The second book of the series, Dune Messiah, is in the early stages of production, although it will be the third in the film trilogy. Villeneuve says he won’t go past that book to any later books in the series, which I think is a wise choice. I enjoyed the first of Villeneuve’s films very much, but the second only so-so. (No, really–were you convinced by Timothée Chalamet and Austin Butler going at it as supposedly the best fighters in the universe? Me neither.) But people keep trying to make movies out of this material. Even the crazy 1984 David Lynch version has its rabid fans. Herbert, a complicated man, opposed the Viet Nam War but was a lifelong Republican. Many would call him libertarian. For more about Herbert and the Dune saga, see this web site maintained by his son Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson. The two have collaborated on fiction that furthers the Dune universe.

COMING UP NEXT: SOME OF MY FAVORITE SPECULATIVE FICTION SERIES