Suppose for the moment that you were a hard-working speculative fiction author with a lengthy backlist of short fiction. Further suppose that you wanted to package some of that short fiction into a collection that readers might buy. Imagine your consternation on discovering that collections weren’t selling well and that no publisher wanted to gamble on your work. What is a hard-working author to do?
One solution to a temporary shortage of funds is to don a garish costume, adopt a memorable nom de crime, and launch a series of unnecessarily complex schemes to rob banks. But there is an even easier solution! Simply take those unsellable short works, apply narrative spackle, and transform them into what A. E. Van Vogt called a “fix-up” novel. Readers will barely notice the seams as they enjoy your latest novel1. You will enjoy extra income. Everyone wins—especially your bank manager.
While Van Vogt’s own fix-ups were (to put it charitably) of variable quality, the form has produced legitimate classics that are well worth readers’ time and money. Herewith, five truly glorious fix-ups you might want to read.
Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1959)
Miller’s only novel published during his lifetime, Canticle details the efforts of the pious brothers of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz to preserve scientific knowledge following the Flame Deluge and subsequent Simplification. The results are mixed at best, but the brothers’ hearts were pure.
The novel Canticle began as “A Canticle for Leibowitz,” “And the Light is Risen,” and “The Last Canticle,” all published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction between 1955 and 1957. Each was substantially reworked before appearing as the fix-up Canticle for Leibowitz in 1959. The result was an instant, Hugo Award-winning classic. In fact, Canticle was so successful that it eclipsed Miller’s other work; I have encountered people who are entirely unaware Miller wrote other stories.
Pavane by Keith Roberts (1968)
Following Queen Elizabeth I’s assassination, the Reformation is crushed. Spain remains ascendant. The Catholic Church remains the Church and technological and social innovation is discouraged. The consequences (and ultimately, the true cause) of this historical alteration are detailed over generations from the perspective of England’s Dorset region.
The novelettes that became Pavane began as “The Signaller,” “The Lady Anne,” “Brother John,” “Lords and Ladies,” “Corfe Gate,” and “The White Boat,” all published in 1966, all of which save “The White Boat” were first published in Impulse. “The White Boat” first appeared in New Worlds. As with Canticle, the result was an instant classic. While Pavane did not win a Hugo, it was featured in the first Ace SF Specials and is still in print over half a century later.
In the Red Lord’s Reach by Phyllis Eisenstein (1989)
Alaric the Minstrel (bard and teleporter) gains employment in the Red Lord’s court. The mysterious screams heard from the Red Lord’s tower lead Alaric to question the prudence of working for the lord. A man who can teleport need not worry overmuch about imprisonment…but is Alaric the sort of man who will simply walk away from injustice?
Red Lord began as “The Land of Sorrow,” “The Mountain Fastness,” and “Beyond the Red Lord’s Reach,” all of which first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction between 1977 and 1988. Annoyingly, despite Eisenstein’s talent as a writer, both this volume and 1978’s Born to Exile are long out of print2. Alaric-curious readers can seek out Eisenstein’s more recent Alaric tale, 2014’s “The Caravan to Nowhere,” which may be found in the Rogues anthology edited by Gardner Dozois and George R.R. Martin.
Mirabile by Janet Kagan (1991)
A mishap en route to an exoplanet cost the hopeful pioneers the index that was key to a cutting-edge biotechnological tool. Lack of index did not prevent genetically-engineered animals and plants from occasionally producing dissimilar, sometimes dangerous, offspring. It falls to Annie Jason “Mama Jason” Masmajean to deal with the resulting “Dragon’s Teeth.”
Mirabile’s composite parts—“The Loch Moose Monster,” “The Return of the Kangaroo Rex,” “The Flowering Inferno,” “Getting the Bugs Out,” “Raising Cane,” and “Frankenswine”) first appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine between 1989 and 1991. As fix-ups go, the efforts to transform the original short pieces into a novel are perfunctory to the point that for years I thought it was a collection. Nevertheless, the result entertains. It’s too bad that Mirabile is currently out of print. Perhaps a letter-writing campaign to Mirabile’s publisher Tor could change that!
Accelerando by Charles Stross (2005)
As was foretold by techno-optimistic futurists, the Singularity utterly transforms the world. A trifling side effect barely worth mentioning is that intellectually out-classed humans are swiftly reduced from Earth’s dominant thinkers to cognitive archaea. As detailed over generations, the post-Singularity era is an exciting time to be alive…or to be consumed by ruthless, super-intelligent AIs.
Accelerando’s component chapters (“Lobsters,” “Troubadour,” “Tourist,” “Halo,” “Router,” “Nightfall,” “Curator,” “Elector,” and “Survivor”) were all first published in in Asimov’s Science Fiction between 2001 and 2004. Accelerando was very well received; I don’t have the spare word count to list every award nomination that the fix-up and its parts earned. One wonders how Stross finds the mantlepiece space for all the awards. Accelerando can be downloaded here. Try not to burn out the servers.
Fix-ups are a venerable, respectable approach to writing and publishing speculative fiction. The five examples above are only a very small sample of a very large body of work3 [3]. No doubt I’ve missed some very notable examples. Feel free to lambast me for my omissions and correct my oversights in comments below.
- Seams are less obvious in fix-ups that were planned to become fix-ups from the beginning. One thinks of the many Victorian novels that were serialized and later collected into books.
- As far as I can tell, anthologized stories aside, Eisenstein is completely out of print. I am astonished there hasn’t been A Complete Alaric, at least. The world found space to keep They’d Rather Be Right in print. Why not Eisenstein’s far superior books?
- I seriously considered mentioning a certain fix-up first serialized in Analog way back in 1963 and 1965. However, the resulting fix-up was so unappealing to SF publishers that the author eventually settled for a publisher specializing in automotive repair manuals (an acquisition for which the purchasing editor was subsequently fired). Ultimately, I reluctantly deleted my discussion of that fix-up. After all, would 21st-century readers have even heard of Dune?
Martian Chronicles
Martin Prince: As your president, I would demand a science-fiction library featuring an ABC of the genre. Asimov, Bester, Clarke.
Wendell: What about Ray Bradbury?
Martin Prince: I’m aware of his work.
Bester’s works are a constant source of delight.
Two more novels that first saw daylight in short form in F&SF – Stephen King’s “The Gunslinger” and Robert F. Young’s “Starfinder”
One thing that frequently bothers me is the idea that the Catholic Church was anti-progress. This antipathy to progress must explain why the Renaissance occurred first in Protestant northern Europe. Oh, wait.
Sometimes you have to make peace with Prod propaganda to enjoy good works of fiction.
This is a very popular idea among Protestants, especially prevalent in the mid-19th through late-20th centuries. The “Dark Ages*” began to be attributed to the malign influence of the Catholic Church in impeding progress, along with highly-coloured accounts of execution of Giordano Bruno and the trial of Galileo. That said, witch hunts were a Protestant thing** , whle the Catholic church said witchcraft was nonsense. it’s not like any powerful institutions acquitted themselves very well in the Early Modern.
*so-called and much-misinterpreted
**the Inquisition did burn people at the stake, although not as many as anti-Catholic propaganda would have it, but that was for heresy (or, in Spain, suspicion of being a Jew or Muslim), not witchcraft.
Some recent scholarship suggests that after the Counter-Reformation, about 1550, Catholic countries did fall behind in scientific research.
But if Protestantism was no longer a factor, would anyone feel the need for continued Counter-reformation?
https://twitter.com/_alice_evans/status/1671405931496701952
The concept was articulated in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904) by Max Weber. His thesis was that after the Reformation, Protestants who had set aside church doctrine and church hierarchy sought “signs” of God’s grace through success in worldly matters; that doing so represented a “calling” that God had intended for them. The thesis has been largely discounted today in light of more intensive scholarship.
There are…Reasons…for that in Pavane.
Keith Roberts has another fixup – The Chalk Giants – a series of stories on the recovery of civilization in Britain after a nuclear war. I don’t know where the constituent bits were published – I believe that I came across one in an old issue of F&SF, but that was may years ago and I can’t be certain.
There was quite a bit of interstitial material in the British edition of the book, that was omitted in the first American edition, which was a pity, as it served to frame the stories as (possibly) hallucinatory episodes experienced by a modern survivor of the nuclear attack as he died of radiation sickness.
Up to Roberts’s usual high standards. I’d rank it close to Pavane.
Poul Anderson’s Operation Chaos is another fixup in which the seams aren’t obvious.
Operation Chaos! I read it many times a few decades ago. The trip to hell has stayed in my memory. Not because it was horrible, hot, and hideous, but because (to me) it rang true.
At least per ISFDB, the previously published stories appeared in New Worlds.
Thanks. I can’t imagine where I would have come across a copy of New Worlds. Maybe a university library.
I think my copy was a Berkley. I think I need to add a title to my quest list for used bookstores.
Oh, those punny story titles in Mirabile…
I just bought Glenn the Bookseller’s last copy of Mirabile, but there are others on Amazon, (used).
I’m trying not to buy more books, but just could not resist learning more about these critters.
It’s also available for Kindle, and so I presume for other e-readers.
It’s not clear to me that Dune represents a fix-up, rather than a big long book broken up into chunks for magazine publication.
It’s not science fiction, but a court lady-in-waiting in Heian period Japan wrote a series of stories that were put together into one volume that is often called “the first novel”, which to my mind rather does violence to the concept of “novel”. (How many things that are actual novels, kill their protagonist — offstage! — two-thirds of the way through, and then continue on writing about his son?) Why can’t we call The Tale of Genji a story collection?
I suppose I should mention a fix-up that is actually SF. Isaac Asimov’s Foundation books come to mind: the early books (not of course the ones written in the eighties) were a series of stories published in Astounding, and then bound together into three separate volumes.
Honestly, I think more fantasy novels could be improved by killing of the protectionist 2/3 of the way through the book, if not earlier.
I think there’s a step in the hero’s journey where the hero’s wise mentor is written out, at least from the action. Examples will come to mind. It’s the same as why children’s adventure books often remove parents who would stop the “adventure” from happening. But I think you meant to say “protagonist”. That’s harder to justify, although if that is where the book ends now, sometimes you’ll take that. ;-)
“Blake’s 7” was a television SF serial in which the actor playing revolutionary leader Roj Blake quit after two seasons.
“Taggart” is a Glasgow TV detective show whose police officer title character’s actor died. They persisted. Another British detective show, “Morse”, had the writer kill off Morse, but then his sidekick got his own series, “Lewis”.
Oh – and “Robin of Sherwood”.
Also I, Robot.
Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human. Alan E. Nourse’s The Universe Between.
Mirabile is definitely worth seeking out. A throwback to the science puzzle stories of the past, it greatly exceeds them in having characterization and women as well as just plain being fun. A shame it’s OOP!
I managed to find a copy and thoroughly enjoyed it. Mama Jason is a great character.
I’m pretty sure I read it, but it’s not on my shelf. Either I had it and sold it, or I read it as a library book. I sought it out because Kagan wrote one of my favorite Star Trek novels, Uhura’s Song.
My favorites in this genre are undoubtedly Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd&theGrayMouser books from Ace, with those glorious Jeffrey Catherine Jones covers and the evocative ToC story descriptions. His first F&G book, Two Sought Adventure (Gnome,1957), is getting hard to find but it has some interstitial material that was lost when the stories were repurposed into Sword Against Death (Ace, 1970).
Vance’s Cugel books (The Eyes of the Overworld and Cugel’s Saga) rank almost as high for me.
Howard Andrew Jones is carrying on the tradition in the 21st C; his Hanuvar books (Lord of a Shattered Land, and City of Marble and Blood) are novels built on story episodes, many of them published in various heroic-fantasy periodicals.
I wonder if series collections (e.g. C.L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry) count in this form, but it seems to me that they don’t, quite—unless some effort has been made to novelate (novelize?) them.
An omnibus edition of all Eisenstein’s Alaric tales would indeed be great to have. If commercial publishers aren’t interested, maybe this is a project for NESFA or some academic press.
I sort of abominate the term fix-up for this form, because A.E. Van Vogt invented it and his fix-ups are terrible. I think his best stuff has a disconnect-your-brain thrillride quality in its original versions, but he was the worst rewriter in the history of sf/f. De gustibus etc. I keep trying to promote the term episodic novel for the form, but it fails to catch on, in spite of the fact that it has 3 times as many syllables as fix-up and is therefore objectively superior.
I still like “The Voyage of the Space Beagle” by van Vogt, also at reread
Oh, yes. The Voyage of the Space Beagle is a good one. I still reread it from time to time. Quite frightening in spots.
That’s the only van Vogt I like and also the first book by him I read.
I quite like Voyage of the Space Beagle, The Weapon Shops of Isher and The Silkie.
It’s killing me how forgotten Clifford D. Simak seems to be, and his glorious fix-up novel City.
I’ve mentioned Simak in general and City in particular on this site before.
At least one can, if aware of Simak, purchase collections of his short work in Open Road’s 14 volume The Complete Short Stories of Clifford D. Simak. I was very put out in the 1990s to discover that within a decade of his death, all but one or two of his books were out of print.
I think Simak’s City is brilliant because of the “Editor’s” notes that introduce both the collection as a whole and each individual story. I had read several of the stories prior to reading City, but found the “Notes” to be very clever in that they reframe the collection into a sacred text. I was teaching several courses on the New Testament at the time, and I appreciated the debates/discussions that the “Editors” had regarding theories of interpretation. I even proposed a special reading with some students in some sociology classes; another teacher and I would read the introduction to the students, and they would try to figure out who the audience was.
Everyone buy this! As I’ve said before, I love a good short story and Simak’s are good. Now I have to go find my copy of City.
That was my first thought too. But I haven’t read City in many years, so I’m not sure how I would regard it now. Only way to find out is to do it!
Mirabile is available in ebook format.
As is her other novel Hellspark, and a collection, The Collected Kagan.
Fred Saberhagen’s Empire of the East comes to mind also.
A more modern Fantasy fix up I happily recommend is Seanan McGuire‘s Sparrow Hill Road, about a hitchhiking ghost named Rose Marshall, aka The Girl in the Green Silk Gown, aka The Phantom Prom Date, aka The Girl in the Diner.
It’s fix-up nature actually makes it a stronger novel, as the repetition of information in slightly different ways from story to story makes the entire novel song-like, with choruses, and variations that provide pace and rhythm to the story telling. If you haven’t read this, and you like ghost stories, I highly recommend it.
“Supernatural” hit the ghost of a dead woman on the road plot a couple of times. The best one starts with a couple who are taking a trip and run off the road, going down an embankment and crashing into a tree. Sam and Dean are driving on the same road and see the woman.
She asks for help and leads them to the crash site, but the car and her husband are gone.
Eventually they figure out that the woman died in the crash years ago, her husband survived. She’s been haunting that stretch of road ever since, “reliving” the crash over and over.
After learning that, her spirit is able to move on.
Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonflight.
I guess that Tuf Voyaging belongs to the category.
Is there a distinction between a fix-up and an episodic novel. Is Crucible of Time one or the other or something else.
I so wanted to see a sequel to Crucible of Time. New John Brunner books were among my favorites in the 1980’s.
As Wikipedia has it (with a note requesting a re-write of the article lead): “A fix-up (or fixup) is a novel created from several short fiction stories that may or may not have been initially related or previously published. The stories may be edited for consistency, and sometimes new connecting material, such as a frame story or other interstitial narration, is written for the new work.”
So the difference that counts, I think, is between “several short fiction stories” and one novel. Back to Wikipedia: “A novel is an extended work of narrative fiction usually written in prose and published as a book.”. If we ignore from “usually”, a novel is one thing, and is in some sense incomplete until you get to the end… although many notable novels are known to have had entire chapters cut out without being so much less complete as a result. Perhaps the wound was carefully repaired. Perhaps when a novel is sufficiently episodic, pieces don’t join up craftily like a jigsaw puzzle, but just as one after another.
So a difference between a novel in instalments and a fix-up, or rather, a set of short stories which become a fix-up, is the self-sufficiency of each story, even if part of a larger whole at the same time. An episode from a novel is liable to have loose ends that connect to the rest of that story, and which a short story editor will cut out. On the other hand, it may have little to say as introduction or characters and concepts that have appeared already. This isn’t absolute, as prose can be written so that pieces are satisfying individually and satisfying as a whole, but it must be easier to write short stories as short stories and then also write more or delete words to glue them together as a novel. And it forces fans to buy both versions! One with conspicuous errors corrected that the fans noticed first time…
Wikipedia has an interesting article about “The Mixed Men”, as a novel. Considering what people say about Van Vogt’s writing anyway, this was always a series if not a serial, and the article refers to minor alterations but they seem substantial to me, and there I don’t mean large sections which are, initially, only in the novel.
And apparently it isn’t much good.
My affection is with James White’s “Sector General” series, the Galactic Federation space hospital (of the 1950s) which firmly started as a series of separate stories in the setting, published as connected episodes – I don’t know if connecting text was in the original publication – and the late novels in the setting tend to be episodic but I’m not aware that those episodes were published as individual stories or as a serial publication, which would work either way, or only in the novel form?
“So a difference between a novel in instalments and a fix-up, or rather, a set of short stories which become a fix-up, is the self-sufficiency of each story, even if part of a larger whole at the same time.”
I’d say that’s overthinking it. The difference is simply that the segments of a fix-up were previously published separately. One could easily write an episodic novel that was structurally no different from a fix-up, but if all its contents were published for the first time in that form, then it would not be a fix-up.
After all, “fixing up” implies putting things together (like fixing a meal, or fixing up two people on a date) or reworking it in some way. The term doesn’t describe the format of the final work, but the process of its creation. If it’s an entirely new book, you simply write it; if it’s made of pre-existing pieces, you fix those pieces up into a composite work.
“it must be easier to write short stories as short stories and then also write more or delete words to glue them together as a novel.”
I’d say it’s probably harder to do that, since you’re trying to make them work in two separate ways. Also, I find short stories harder to write in general than novels, but that’s just me.
“And it forces fans to buy both versions!”
I’d rather see it as giving them an incentive to do so, or giving people who own the originals something extra to make it worth their while.
That simplifies it too much – plenty of novels were serialized as separate chapters published individually.
Including Finnegans Wake…
The Traveler in Black qualifies, if you want one by Brunner.
The distinction is that a fix-up is a compilation of previously published stories. If its contents are new, then it’s not a fix-up.
The Wikipedia “definition” includes a series of stories that may have not actually been sold in short story form, but they were written . ;-)
Of course a story can be rewritten to please an editor anyway. Apparently there were many drafts of “The Cold Equations”, and many tellings of who decided what should be changed.
“The Mixed Men”, the “definitive” fix-up, has a “middle” section that was only separately published after the novel was. So, clearly that’s allowed.
It’s just classification, but I think the minimum fix-up substantially incorporates at least two previously independently created prose texts, whether originally related or not. So I’m ruling out the latter “Star Trek Log” books (7 to 10) by Alan Dean Foster – edit: oh, you’ve “done” them – containing an adapted Star Trek animated episode followed (?) by two more episodes’ worth of new plot – that’s not a fix-up. The rest of that series… yes? As those mostly are three animated episodes, knitted together – I think?
Okay, so prior publication isn’t necessary, but yeah, what defines it is that it’s “fixing up” (combining/revising) works that were originally intended as separate into a single whole.
Which I suppose would make my own Crimes of the Hub a borderline case. It’s a fix-up of three novelettes published in Analog, with bridging material added to expand and unify it into a short novel, but I wrote the three stories back-to-back and plotted them to work as a single story arc for their eventual collection, “writing for the trade” in comics parlance. So I intended them to start out as separate, but end up together. (Which was a gamble that almost didn’t pay off, since there was no guarantee Trevor Quachri would buy all three stories.)
A few fixups on my bookshelf include:
The Expediter by J. Brian Clarke. Consisting of stories published in Analog in the mid-1980s, this was a tale of contact and reluctant cooperation between humanity and the Phuili, a species so inflexible that to accept new ideas was to literally go insane (J. Brian Clarke justified this by claiming the Phuili had had a stable civilization for millions of years, and as a result, much of what they knew was inherited through some kind of genetic memory. The top caste had the most flexible minds, and even they risked catatonia by considering the idea that humans could be sentient beings instead of clever animals).
The Listeners by James E. Gunn. These stories were mostly published in Galaxy (the second one was published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction) in the late 60s and early 70s, and told the tale of a SETI project when it finally detected a message from the star Capella. Only one tale (“Robert MacDonald – 2058”) has no prior publication.
Ship of Strangers by Bob Shaw. According to a note in the copy I have (published by Ace in 1979), parts of the novel previously appeared in Analog, If, and Universe, but I don’t have independent confirmation. Mostly, this a collection of adventures in the vein of Star Trek (or perhaps Space 1999) of the crew of the Geological Survey Ship Sarafand and its computerized captain Aesop.
Lifeboat Earth by Stanley Schmidt. This sequel to Sins of the Fathers was first published as a bunch of shorter tales in Analog between 1976 and 1978, and detail the voyage of Earth, transformed into a world-ship by the alien Kyyra, from the doomed Milky Way to the Andromeda Galaxy. The basic concept behind this series (that galactic cores can explode and irradiate the galaxy as a whole) has since been disproven. A number of Interludes were written to make this a unified narrative.
RE Bob Shaw’s *Ship of Strangers* its model is more AE van Vogt’s *Voyage of the Space Beagle* than *Star Trek*. It’s only the similarity between *Space Beagle* and *Star Trek* that makes it easy to assume the TV series was the template.
Like the other examples of fix-ups you provided.
Perhaps something is owed to Charles Darwin’s “The Voyage of the Beagle” :-)
Well, I never had the chance to read Voyage of the Space Beagle; it was never in the local libraries, was out of print before I started browsing the bookstores, and never showed up in the dwindling number of used bookstores I could reach.
Thomas Disch’s 334, besides being a book I love, is unusual as fix-ups go in that Disch not only made no attempt to hide the seams – this is very obviously an assembly of related stories in a shared setting, they would all work well on their own, they’re pretty different from each other, the chronology doesn’t really matter, and there’s almost no through-line plot – but also deliberately made it look even less like a standard novel by having the final section, a novella also titled “334”, be in a collage style with dozens of smaller sections. And yet IMO it benefits greatly from being collected and is definitely is a novel.
334 is a lot of wonderful things, but I can’t really call it a novel.
And it’s long past time for me to reread a bit of Disch. Damn, I miss his voice.
The Vorkosigan book Borders of Infinity , now out of print as far as I know, is a stitch up of several short stories with a framework of Miles testifying about various past incidents. All of the stories are reprinted in the various omnibus collections, but the a connecting bits aren’t.
Borders of Infinity is in print in Kindle format for $6.99 USD on Amazon and also as an audiobook from Audible.
Ah cool, that’s a new edition. I couldn’t find a copy last time I looked, but that was some years ago and I got a used one and stopped looking
You might be able to find an ISO of the Baen Books CD with all the Vorkosigan stories through “Cryoburn”. IIRC it was the CD-ROM included with the hardcover edition of “Cryoburn”.
It’s the only Baen CD-ROM ISO that’s officially been withdrawn by author request.
If you don’t want to download an ISO, search for a physical copy of the CD-ROM.
I have that ISO (on my backup hard drive, somewhere), but it doesn’t have the skeleton plot bits. It also doesn’t include Memory, or at any rate I had to get a copy separately.
Wole Talabi’s excellent first novel Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obolafun fleshes out story line and characters from his short stories “Nneoma” and “I, Shigidi”.
Accelerando is most definitely up to the author’s usual standards, but also deeply depressing. The last section brings to mind a Dean Koontz novel that is also partly about post-humanity built on a foundation of human foibles: “Immortal freaks at play.”
Glasshouse, possibly set in the same universe (much much later), is if anything even more disturbing. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything else with quite such terrible things done with the twinned concepts of nanoassemblers and mind uploading. (Wil McCarthy’s Queendom of Sol series doesn’t count: the disaster there is a) predictable b) exceedingly terminal. In my view the terrible thing about the events of Glasshouse is that the bad stuff doesn’t stop: the victims, i.e. more or less everyone, have to keep on fighting it off more or less forever.)
A wonderful book. I wish it had been much more popular, and I have to reread it. But.. not at night and not when I want a good night’s sleep.
Pauline Ashwell’s Unwillingly to Earth, from 1993, is a fix-up of stories whose publication dates range from 1858 to 1988
Here’s a thought: Would Alan Dean Foster’s Star Trek Logs adapting the 1973 animated series count as fix-up novels? Structurally, they’re akin to fix-ups, in that the first six volumes adapt three separate episodes each, but expand them and add bridging material to transition between them and make them read like a continuous narrative. (The last four volumes adapted one episode each followed by an original “sequel” adventure by Foster, or in the case of Log Ten, three original Foster subplots depicting events before, during, and after the episode respectively.) However, none of the separate episodes had been published before in prose, only aired on television. So if a fix-up novel is a compilation of previously published parts, does it count if the previous release was not print publication, but broadcast?
Janet Kagan died far too young. She wrote SF with interesting ideas.
However, Mirabile (and her other novel Hellspark and a short story collection) are all available in ebook format through Baen Books (although I think they are the intermediary).
Loved Canticle and Pavane. Have a hard time with Stross’s books. Brian Aldiss’s Hothouse is another great fix up.
Mirabile! Someone knows about Mirabile! It’s one of my favorite books (Kagan managed to be one of my all-time favorite authors with only three published novels, including Mirabile) and I didn’t think anyone else knew about it! So happy to know it’s not completely forgotten.
I wish her books would come back into print, but they are absolutely worth tracking down secondhand.
Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light !!!!!
Zen a Henderson’s The People paperbacks from Avon books come to mind
In Mirabile, “Jason” is not her middle name. “Jason” is title given to genetics experts in on Mirabile.
And it is available on Kindle. Though I still have my paperback.
Not yet mentioned: Blish’s Cities in Flight, which has the wonderful concept of turning the entirety of the island of Manhattan into a space ship. Haven’t read it in decades, so not sure how well it holds up.
I read the series back in 2011 and was very underwhelmed. The prologue novel They Shall Have Stars was pretty good and surprisingly subversive for a McCarthy-era novel, but none of the books that were actually about the Cities in Flight were all that good. A Life for the Stars was basically a juvenile novel about a young protagonist who stumbles his way to progressively higher status, and who only hears about action happening offstage instead of actually experiencing any. Earthman, Come Home put me off with the callous amorality of the characters and the truly horrific sexism of the “He” section (wherein the protagonists accept a “gift” of hundreds of naked slave women from a misogynist culture, have no apparent problem with the women’s subjugation, then casually abandon them all to be killed as a direct result of the protagonists’ actions in escaping a band of pirates). And The Triumph of Time feels like an afterthought and an implausible escalation of the stakes to a fate-of-the-universe level.
Overall, throughout the series, Blish never really puts any effort into depicting aliens. A few alien species, mainly the Vegans, are discussed here and there and occasionally emerge as actors in the story, but they’re always unseen, off-camera, and never developed in any degree. One thing I have to give Blish credit for, though, is his futurism. He even seems to have predicted nanotechnology, because he writes about drugs and materials engineered on a molecular level. And the telepresence system used on the Bridge in They Shall Have Stars presages virtual reality. (Yet on the other hand, the super-advanced technology of two millennia hence is still based on vacuum tubes.)
There’s a first contact short story where the alien ship is massive yet only has room for a few of the aliens because all its computer and space drive tech uses vacuum tubes. The aliens are amazed by human semiconductor technology.
But that’s a side plot. The main one is the friendship between a human boy and a young alien. The alien youth removes a tube critical to the ship’s operation. He doesn’t want to leave Earth and his new friend. Then he accidentally breaks the tube!
The story ends with a “What? You thought we didn’t have spares?” bit where an adult alien installs a spare tube so the ship can leave.
I adore Mirabile! I would read more stories from that world anytime.
Other books that may fit the category from my shelves include Flatlander by Larry Niven, the collected tales of Gil the Arm Hamilton. I also think that Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon and Time Travelers Strictly Cash by Spider Robinson fit.
“The Catholic Church remains the Church and technological and social innovation is discouraged.”
That trope is a lot of fiction. Into the early 19th Century, much advancement in science and technology was pursued and researched by clerics, monks, priests, and other religious men.
Why? Because those guys were the most literate of their time. They also owned (and wrote) most of the books, especially the books about nature, geology etc.
The list of Catholic clergy-scientists puts paid to the “religion held back science” baloney. Then there’s all the ones who weren’t Catholic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Catholic_clergy_scientists
Keith Laumer was a king of the fix-up novel, especially in his later years. He’d often make major alterations to his short stories and novellas to better fit them into the same narrative.
One of the fix-ups takes the end of one post-apocalyptic story that ends with the launching of a spacecraft and changes the ending of it in the novel to activating the spacecraft’s powerplant to jumpstart the rebuilding of civilization on Earth. There’s several other alterations made to that story as part of the novel.