Shared universes! The practice of having multiple authors write works in a common setting is a well-established one. No surprise, because shared universes offer a variety of benefits to participating publishers and authors, from being able to farm out specific creative tasks to those most suited to them, to providing a backdrop for series whose commercial value is proven1.
Oh, and I should also note that humans have been riffing on plots/characters/tropes that they didn’t create for millennia. Think of all the versions of “Cinderella” out there. SFF has done this too—fantasy, in particular, seems to have long been fond of riffing on common fairy tales and folklore. SF was slower to adopt shared universes, though the 1952 Twayne Triplets, discussed here, bordered on the concept. Shared universes eventually took off and enjoyed a golden age from the late 1970s through the 1980s2.
Here are some examples, starting with the 1970s…
A World Named Cleopatra, edited by Poul Anderson, produced by Roger Elwood (1977)
Master worldbuilder Anderson provided contributors with a setting, a planet both surprisingly Earth-like and inconveniently alien, scribed an introductory tale himself, then invited Michael Orgill, Jack Dann, and George Zebrowski to enjoy the playground he’d created. Together, they document the rise and fall (and hope of renaissance) of the human settlement on Cleopatra.
No surprise to see Anderson’s name here, although his editorial role was an unusual one for him. He contributed to a number of shared worlds, including the Twayne Triplets. Clearly, the form appealed to him.
While A World Named Cleopatra shows something was in the water where Disco Era shared world prose anthologies were concerned, Cleopatra was a one and done. Perhaps no further volumes were planned. Perhaps the unattractive cover failed to catch readers’ eyes. Perhaps it was because the mid-1970s were a particularly gloomy time for Anderson and the anthology reflects this, beginning with the Carlyle epigram at its beginning:
“A sad spectacle (the stars). If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly.”
Ah well. That’s still more upbeat than Anderson’s story “The Pugilist.”
Medea: Harlan’s World, edited by Harlan Ellison (1985)
With roots in a 1975 UCLA seminar (“Ten Tuesdays Down a Rabbit Hole”), Ellison’s project was in all ways more ambitious than Anderson’s. Where Cleopatra made do with one worldbuilding essay, Ellison commissioned four essays to paint his gas giant’s moon setting. The essayists were Anderson, Clement, Niven, and Pohl. There was also considerable ancillary material. Where Cleopatra had four authors, Medea had eleven: Jack Williamson, Larry Niven, Harlan Ellison, Frederik Pohl, Hal Clement, Thomas M. Disch, Frank Herbert, Poul Anderson, Kate Wilhelm, Theodore Sturgeon, and Robert Silverberg. Cartography was by Diane Duane, with illustrations by Frank Kelly Freas. No surprise that the tome weighed in at over five hundred pages.
What prevented Medea from kicking off the shared world universe boom likely boils down to the publication date. Inexplicably for an ambitious Ellison anthology, progress between inspiration and final product appears to have been glacial… Many of the stories saw first print in magazines long before Medea appeared on bookshelves3. Delay appears to have cost Ellison his chance to inspire the shared universe golden age, as dangerous a vision as that seems. Nevertheless, Medea is worth tracking down just for the essays.
Thieves’ World, edited by Robert Asprin and Lynn Abbey (1979)
Thieves’ World (fantasy rather than science fiction) introduced readers to Sanctuary, a once-great trading community whose decline and isolation made it an ideal destination for refugees and rogues, as well as a convenient oubliette in which to immure superfluous royals. Thieves’ World didn’t offer the same obsessive meticulous world-building as did Cleopatra or Medea; the editors made a point of keeping details vague in order to provide authors with greater scope for creativity. It did feature a cross section of respected names of the era: Robert Asprin, John Brunner, Lynn Abbey, Poul Anderson, Andrew J. Offutt, Joe Haldeman, Christine DeWees, and Marion Zimmer Bradley.
In addition to the SFF Who’s Who in the table of contents, Asprin and Abbey made a couple of judicious decisions. First, their setting was fantasy, at a time when fantasy’s popularity was soaring. Second, while the stories were often grim, the essays convey infectious enthusiasm about the project. Third, perhaps most importantly, the pair immediately followed up the first volume with further volumes to capitalize on the success of the first.
It’s hard to put a firm number on the quantity of follow-up volumes. There were twelve anthologies in the original 1979–1989 series, in addition to which there were two anthologies much later, in the 21st century. There were seven official novels, at least nine collections and novels related to greater or lesser degree, and a roleplaying game adaptation.
And now, let’s turn to the 1980s…
Success invites imitation. Much to the irritation of editor/anthologist Gardner Dozois, who often took page space in his annual Best SF anthologies to complain about the phenomenon, a golden age of shared universe anthologies followed. Examples include Temps, The Weerde, Villains, Liavek, The Fleet, Heroes in Hell, Merovingian Nights, Man-Kzin Wars, and many more. So many more.
Some of these efforts were good. Others possessed positive qualities too subtle to easily summarize or in some cases, detect at all. There were sufficient shared world projects for every taste and age. For an idea of the range, consider these two series.
Borderland, edited by Terri Windling and Mark Alan Arnold (1986)
Having absented itself from the human realm for centuries, Faerie re-impinges on the mortal world at the Borderland. Neither magic nor technology work reliably in the Borderland. Governance and law enforcement are likewise unreliable. Thus, it’s a perfect refuge for people from both Faerie and America, as detailed by Steven R. Boyett, Terri Windling (writing as Bellamy Bach), Charles de Lint, and Ellen Kushner.
Unlike most of the other series of the time, Borderland was aimed at teen readers. While the series was not as voluminous as some (four volumes in the main series, as well as three novels, and even an RPG!), subsequent volumes attracted such luminaries as Neil Gaiman, Patricia A. McKillip, and Jane Yolen. These days, it’s easy to find testimony from readers young at the time for whom the Borderlands series filled an important need.
Wild Cards edited by George R.R. Martin (1987)
As documented here, Wild Cards is ultimately the late Steve Perrin’s fault. Having invested creative energy playing Perrin’s Superworld tabletop roleplaying game to the exclusion of other (paying) projects, editor George R.R. Martin prudently monetized his hobby by turning it into a shared world. Edward Bryant, Leanne C. Harper, Stephen Leigh, George R.R. Martin, Victor Milán, John J. Miller, Lewis Shiner, Melinda M. Snodgrass, Howard Waldrop, Walter Jon Williams, and Roger Zelazny painted a vivid four-colour picture of a world transformed by an alien bioweapon, in which uncanny abilities are used for good and ill.
Two things stand out in these volumes. Having been provided by Martin with a single source for all superhuman abilities—transformation by alien virus—Martin’s contributors cheerfully proceeded to create heroes4 whose abilities were not drawn from the virus: aliens, an android, superlatively trained warriors, and the unpowered Jet Boy, who died just as the virus was released. Also, the series’ longevity is astonishing: more than thirty volumes over the course of five decades.
A hat tip to the upcoming Tales from the Silence shared universe project, the appearance of whose Kickstarter in my inbox made me reflect on the many shared universe series currently clogging my book shelves. The works named above are a few of my favorites. However, I read only a very few of the available series. Which noteworthy examples were overlooked? Let us know in the comments below.
- Technically, I suppose authors sharing a house name to write series (such as Nancy Drew or Doc Savage) could constitute a shared universe, but that’s not something I will discuss here. ↩︎
- Star Trek deserves more space than I can give it, here. There were a few shared world anthologies such as Myrna Culbreath and Sondra Marshak’s 1976 Star Trek: The New Voyages. Tie-in shared universe works deserve their own essay, to be penned by reviewers who are more up on Trek than I am. ↩︎
- Fred Pohl’s Jem seemed to owe not a small fraction of its worldbuilding to Medea. ↩︎
- Well, let’s say “protagonists” rather than heroes. It is a Martin project, after all. Everyone is grey. Also, I should note that there’s an alarming frequency of sexual violence as plot parsley. ↩︎
I read all of the Thieves World and Merovingian Nights books, as well as Heroes in Hell, because my favorite authors weren’t writing fast enough. Theives World was the Morrises, and Merovingian Nights was Cherry, and they wrote together in Heroes in Hell. I liked the people who wrote Borderlands too, but they were better on panels than on the page.
Thieves’ World also had a board game from Mayfair (the “characters” represented by the tokens were named after the authors), and Wild Cards had several TTRPG books.
Oddly, while Wild Cards grew out of a Superworld campaign, there has never been (to my knowledge) a Superworld supplement [1]. Just GURPS and Mutants and Masterminds. Kind of a missed opportunity, since Wild Cards was probably the biggest thing to emerge from Superword.
I think Superworld is slated for a new edition. Maybe this time around they can find room in the schedule for Superworld Wild Cards…
1: But there were only three supplements for Superworld: Trouble for Havoc, Bad Medicine for Dr Drugs, and the Superworld Companion. I blame Superworld being released after Champions and V&V were well-established.
AFAICT Superworld committed the unspeakable crime to Chaosium of being neither Runequest nor Call of Cthulhu, so it’s kind of amazing it lasted as long as it did
Superworld also had a few glaring problems. The character creation system was needlessly convoluted, and relief on random rolls. Also IIRC, with 4-6 different damage types, and protective abilities needing to be bought for each one individually, offense massively outstripped defense in terms of cost effectiveness. I definitely recall it had the same “can’t afford to build the character I want” element Champions did, and I seen to recall it was actually rather difficult to increase abilities.
However, those are problems a second edition could easily fix, and the game had as loud to recommend it. But they never actually came up with much of a setting, and didn’t seen to have that much interest. A pity, because Glorantha REALLY needed some teenagers in brightly colored outfits to crash the party.
Cthulhu Mythos? Starting as a magazine phenomenon rather than multi-volume book series, but that was mostly because of the dominance of magazines in the genre world at the time. The books have come since the vast downsizing of the magazine market, and we still seem to get new mythos books every few years.
And some of those are, like Ruthanna Emrys’s Winter Tide and Deep Roots, are consciously and deliberately, doing things that would have horrified Lovecraft.
As I understand, Lovecraft never intended the “world” of his stories as a shared-world. The stories written by others during his lifetime were more like an elaborate inside-joke among colleagues. It was August Derleth, who, for better or worse, attempted to codify the “Cthulhu Mythos” (a term invented after HPL’s death) that often went to strained and contrived lengths to reconcile the rather vague and nebulous ” worldbuilding” in the original stories.
Generally speaking, characters carry over from one shared world story to another but I can see why that might present challenges in a setting where the traditional ending is a horrifying revelation followed by death.
Lately, morosely, I’ve been pondering what could go into a song titled “I’m hemorrhaging SAN points”.
Footnote two seems to have been truncated.
Oh Harlan. I really liked Medea when I read it. I have never fully delved into why his anthology collaborations were such a goddamn disaster.
I remember in the appendices at the back of Medea, reading the transcript of a round table with Harlan, Frank Herbert and many of the other authors involved. Herbert really comes across as arrogant (at least as I remember it some forty or so years later, often telling Harlan to “shut up” and let the others speak. I enjoyed what there was.
I think Partners in Wonder went more or less according to plan?
According to ISFDB, some of the stories were first published in the 1950’s, and only one was first published in the anthology; it wasn’t an intended-to-be-short-term collaboration like the ones he edited.
LDV seems to have been a victim of unbounded ambition and a lack of clearly defined project goals. On the plus side, after long delay, every word of Ellison’s title will soon see print.
Will it be translated into Modern English?
Might be worth mentioning the 1632 project as one development of the idea.
I don’t recall Borderlands nearly as well as I would expect to, I know I had a copy back in the day.
“h, and I should also note that humans have been riffing on plots/characters/tropes that they didn’t create for millennia. Think of all the versions of “Cinderella” out there”
Not disagreeing with your point, but I think there’s a meaningful difference between a direct retelling of an existing story and a new story in the same setting as an existing story. Both are valid, but they’re not the same thing. (Unless they are; The Asteroid Queen is a Stirling/Pournelle story in the Man-Kzin Wars ‘verse, and also a retelling of Casablanca IN SPACE with Kzinti subbing for Germany. Also mind-control aliens. Come to that, the same duo did In the Hall of the Mountain King in a later volume which is a pretty strong riff on Treasure of the Sierra Madre).
I think the better pre-modern analogy is with things like the Arthurian stories, where people kept coming up with new stories involving familiar settings characters, as well as adding new characters (Lancelot, Galahad, etc.).
I love Wild Cards probably more than it deserves (partly because of a general bias in favour of super-hero like fiction, partly because of the fun set-up and the authors they get who range from big SF names to people I hadn’t heard of before who still do great jobs). I really hope the TV show makes it to air and is good. (the second part of James’ footnote is definitely true, although I’d say it applies more to the first 8 or 12 books than the later ones).
I read several Thieves World books, but I didn’t read them twice. Borderlands were pretty fun too and seem to have inspired some local RPG campaigns.
Re: Footnote #4
AIR, Wild Cards doesn’t just have an alarming amount, some of it is the sort of thing that would have had people in alt.sex.stories reacting with “that needed a squick tag you idiot!”
Zero for five here.
What, no mention of Perry Rhodan ? Dozens of authors producing over 3,000 novellas !
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Rhodan
ISTM those are different from shared-world books, in which each author takes an aspect, and more like the house names JDN cites (in footnote 1), in which each author writes some scattering of stories using the same characters in a single sequence. OTOH I’ve only glanced at them, so I may have misunderstood the series.
I was a fan of the English Perry Rhodans back in the 70s (and am enjoying the English translated alt-universe / updated Neo series that is slowly coming out in ebook format); PR was where I first read the round-robin Cosmos serialization from the early 1930s(?) which included the top writers in SF at the time. Are there enough SF round-robin stories out there for a future article, by any chance? Would be a good companion piece to this article.
Merovingian Nights is such a wonderful, interesting, beautiful mess. It’s one of my most favorite things I’ve read, and it is so complicated and contradictory, and un-put-down-able.
The fascinating thing about that series is that the novel from which it’s spun off (Angel with the Sword) is written in a very dense, ornate prose style that I found very difficult going when I first read it – whereas the stories in the subsequent anthologies (probably wisely) almost completely abandon that style in favor of much more direct, plain-spoken prose. At the end of the day, I quite liked both – but the transition from one textual tone to the other was really striking, and more than a little unsettling at the time.
Culbreath and Marshak’s Star Trek anthologies (there were two of them) weren’t any more shared-universe than the pre-Pocket Books Star Trek novels, or the early Pocket Books novels, in that while they were all based on Star Trek (as it existed at that time) there was no attempt to make the various stories and novels consistent in any way. I’ve read very few later Trek novels so I don’t know if this has changed at all; I suspect it has to some extent since I know there are various series of books which are each written by multiple authors.
The Pocket novels began to develop a loose continuity among some books during the later ’80s; initially it was just returning authors maintaining continuity with their own earlier books, but eventually an effort began to be made to tie different authors’ books together, though only loosely. This ended when TNG came along and took the continuity in its own direction that conflicted with the earlier novel continuity. The books remained pretty standalone while the shows were on the air, since it’s hard to maintain an ongoing novel continuity when screen canon could contradict it at any moment. But there were some attempts in the later ’90s to do crossover miniseries among the various novel series, and then Peter David introduced New Frontier, a novel-exclusive series focusing on an original ship and crew so it didn’t have to fit into any of the shows’ continuities.
But novel continuity really took off around 2000 with the Deep Space Nine post-finale novel series and others that followed. Once the shows were off the air, it became feasible to continue their storylines in an ongoing fashion, so there was a span of about two decades in which most of the novels were set within a single unified continuity, with some exceptions. My own career as a Trek novelist began early in this period, and all my Trek novels and short fiction to date have been set within that unified “Novelverse.” However, once Star Trek Picard came along and established a canonical post-series continuity that contradicted what we’d done in the novels, the “Novelverse” was brought to an end, and the novels have returned to the traditional role of tie-ins, telling standalone stories consistent with the current state of the screen continuity.
It’s really quite bizarre to see someone in 2024 citing the 1970s New Voyages fan fiction reprint anthologies as their only referent for Trek literature, given that literally hundreds of books have been published since then — probably thousands if you count comic books. This includes numerous anthologies, including the 10-year run of the Strange New Worlds story contest for new writers, and anniversary anthologies for the first four series. (I’m the only author who contributed to all four.) Other anthologies have included The Lives of Dax, Mirror Universe: Shards and Shadows (I’m in that one too), and Tales of the Dominion War.
I suppose that fan fiction could get a look in here, even though strictly speaking it’s not ‘published’.
Cue the endless Harry/Draco stories, and let us hear nothing of My Immortal, shall we?
The big shared world in fanfic would probably be the Infinite Loops: The multiverse is broken and while the powers that be are fixing it the individual universes are put into time loops. To keep the loopers from going too insane, the loops have variations and crossovers.
Read quite a few of the shared world anthologies when they first came out, Wild Cards first and favorite. I liked Merovingan Nights enough (especially Cherryh’s standalone novel, Angel With the Sword, setting up the world and society) to write and submit a story of my own. (Didn’t sell; I later revised the manuscript into a story set on a space habitat… which also never sold. The writing life is wonderful.)
Some of the shared-world series got into repetitive cycles of endless political intrigue without any forward movement for characters and their societies, and I lost a lot of interest after a few volumes.
I would give a shout out to Murasaki – it ended up being just one book of short stories, but some of the greats are involved and it is quite good!
There’s also the Man-Kzin Wars anthologies, which I think were one of the first cases of an author opening up their writing universe to other others for generally canon short works. In this case, it was an era of the Known Space history he had no particular interest in writing about himself.
Although I have the impression that the canon status of the non-Niven MKW stories is ambiguous. Like, they were originally intended to be, but Niven changed his mind later, or something.
Jerry Pournelle’s CoDominium milieu was the setting for a number of shared world novels and projects. Most notable were his collaborations with Larry Niven on The Mote in God’s Eye and its sequel The Gripping Hand, There’s also a large body of work in the continuing War World series that is an offshoot, consisting of ten anthologies and six novels to date.
I have a particular fondness for Liavek; it seemed to me that the writing and the plotting were so much better than Thieves’ World. (I found out in later decades that Liavek was written by a group of people in something like a workshop; a Thieves’ World contributor, OTOH, said one writes one’s first TW story for money and one’s second for revenge. This could have affected either the writing or how it hit me.) Merovingian Nights was a good read, but people who didn’t like Cherryh’s intense style may not have liked it.
I’ve read very little Thieves’ World so I can’t compare them, but I agree the Liavek stories were in general good, although the only ones I re-read regularly are John M. Ford’s. (I’m hoping Tor’s line of Ford re-issues includes a new edition of Casting Fortune that includes Ford’s other Liavek story and his poetry).
They also tried to keep the universe very consistent IIRC.
Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius universe qualifies – there was at least one printed anthology by other authors, The Nature of the Catastrophe, a lot of individual works such as Spinrad’s The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde, and a 2018 online thing The Further Adventures of Jerry Cornelius which unfortunately seems to have folded, but fortunately the Wayback Machine has backups
https://web.archive.org/web/20210417051249/http://www.faojc.com/
A handful of observations:
I’d draw a distinction, if a narrow one, between shared worlds that were designed as such from the first (Thieves’ World, Liavek, Wild Cards), and those spun off from a pre-existing work (Merovingen Nights, the 1632 setting, Man-Kzin Wars), though it is certainly the case that some of the spinoff franchises have been markedly more successful in their shared incarnations – I’m thinking notably of the anthologies spun off from Keith Laumer’s “Bolos” milieu and Fred Saberhagen’s “Berserkers” series, as well as 1632, which is probably the most popular shared world currently in print – and almost certainly the largest in terms of word count, with the majority of its material being novel-length.
There’s also a distinction to be made between (and again, a somewhat fuzzy one) between “true” shared worlds and those cases where an author has opened their universe in a limited way, sometimes by way of anthologies whose individual stories don’t impinge on the parent canon’s continuity (MZB’s Darkover anthologies, Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar anthos), and sometimes by allowing nominally collaborative sequels (see especially McCaffrey’s “Ship Who Sang” universe and several of Andre Norton’s series settings).
My personal favorite of the classic-era shared worlds was and is the Liavek series (and indeed, I learned not too long ago that there’s evidently a much later small-press volume in that one that I need to get hold of).
One area not well-covered in either the essay or the comments is the subset of shared worlds focusing specifically on military SF – in addition to those populated by the likes of Niven, Pournelle, and David Drake, I recall a fairly interesting series edited by Bill Fawcett about “The Fleet”.
And in the much-more-obscure department, a cousin of sorts to Ellison’s Medea project, that being a world called Epona developed by attendees at a conference of some kind, which led to a long worldbuilding essay by Wolf Read and a novella by G. David Nordley, which together took up about half of a 1996 issue of Analog. (That one I recall because I was at the time reviewing for the print iteration of Tangent, and was thereby assigned to cover the Analog issue in question.)
[thwaps self on forehead]
One other instance of the shared-universe concept worth mentioning – that of the “house universe”, most often found in the context of an RPG game setting, most commonly but not always specific to classic fantasy milieus. The prime examples here both come out of TSR/Wizards of the Coast, these being Dragonlance and the Forgotten Realms. As I understand the history, the Forgotten Realms were originally created by Ed Greenwood, who wrote a good deal of material for Dragon and in campaign supplements before selling the universe to TSR – which then proceeded to further develop the Realms both as a game setting and in several decades’ worth of novels by a variety of hands, Greenwood’s included. The Realms, in terms of overall word count, number of contributors, and sheer scope, are probably the single largest and most commercially successful shared world developed to date.
(As I reread that last sentence, I should qualify that slightly. Speaking purely on a structural level, the biggest of the media mega-franchises – Star Trek, Star Wars, the MCU, the collective DC multiverse – can almost certainly account for more zeroes to the left of their respective decimal points. But where prose fiction is concerned, I think the Forgotten Realms wins going away, with the prose-component of the Star Trek universe a clear but distant second on the grounds that overall Realms continuity has been more carefully and consistently overseen on a long-term basis.)
Forgotten realms fiction by Ed Greenwood predates D&D. I think he started when he was five. When the game came out, he used his existing fiction setting for his home game. I’m not sure how much of his fiction (if any) was published outside of zine format before the sale to TSR.
[Thieves’ World ]. . . did feature a cross section of respected names of the era. Is C. J. Cherryh not considered a “respected name?”
I read a grip of these back in the ’80s! My favorites were Borderlands, Liavek, and Merovingian Nights. I read a lot of Thieves’ World, too. Started Heroes in Hell and Wild Cards but those didn’t really click with me for whatever reason.
There was a Borderland roleplaying game? Who published that? When?
Read all of these as a teenager, except for the Cleopatra stories. Never heard of that one, even though was a a big Poul Anderson fan for a good many years. I’ll still pick up a Thieves World book from time to time and will usually get the new Wild Cards book when it comes out, though I know I don’t have every volume in either series. Fun stuff.
A longtime favorite of mine are the two anthologies set in the world of The Crafters, edited by Christopher Stasheff and Bill Fawcett. Each short story in the books features a different member of the same family of magically gifted folk through generations.