Well, I saw the attractions and was modestly pleased with the results but here was the case of commercial considerations dictating the shape of the volume. Signet, however, thought the title unadventurous and wanted me to try what they called another “chronicle-novel”, to follow up the success of Galaxies Like Grains of Sand.

Starswarm, on the other hand, originally “was just a collection of tales,” and published as such by Faber as The Airs of Earth:

I always liked Galaxies Like Grains of Sand the better, believing that the narrative strengthened the stories.¹ Signet loved the connecting narrative and asked to drop some stories Faber preferred the stories. It contained about fourteen stories embodied in connecting narrative. The result ran to about 110,000 words, which my British and American publishers (Faber and Signet) then regarded as far too long for an SF book. I was ambitious early in my career, and soon began to compose stories which would fit roughly into a millenia-long plan for the future, to create a giant perspective. (City is of course further unified by chronological sequence and the saga of the Webster dynasty.) Another representative example is Lewis Padgett’s Mutant (1953), in which a telepath recalls episodes in the history of his 200-year-old mutant race he happens to be marooned on a mountainside and thus has plenty of leisure to recall/relive each tale in full.īrian Aldiss early in his career produced two volumes of stories with frameworks - they were called “chronicle-novels” by his publisher, Signet. Simak’s City (1952), in which the links purport to be scholarly analyses of a collection of “ancient tales,” fussing over the tales’ credibility and textual inconsistencies. In SF, probably the best known volume is Clifford D. Outside SF, perhaps the most famous volume of linked stories, in American literature at any rate, is Hemingway’s In Our Time (1926), an experimental structure with deliberately oblique relations between the stories and the linking passages. Ballard’s Vermillion Sands, 1971.) Somewhat more unusual are volumes with connecting passages: new material to give a framework to the original tales, at best creating an organic whole, at worst gluing the tales together like an album of photographs with captions.

The most memorable volumes as volumes are usually novel-like in some way, as when the stories have a continuing cast of characters in a more or less chronological sequence (e.g., William Faulkner’s The Unvanquished, 1938 and Go Down Moses, 1942) or at least a common setting (in science fiction, Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, 1950, and J. As everyone knows, it is customary for writers to gather previously published stories into books, in pursuit of larger artistic schemes or simply of larger sales.

Vanguard From Alpha by Brian W. Aldiss