Why are there so many Trilogies written?

JunkMonkey said:
Personally if I see the words 'First of a new trilogy' on a book these days I'll put it down unread. I just haven't got the time. I'll be more inclined to read something that evolved into a trilogy or series. The author wrote a self-contained complete book then later went back and added a second volume when they realised they hadn't finished with that world... then maybe a third as the ideas came. I can dig that. But when a writer starts off with the intention of dragging me around the same universe for thousands of pages... sorry, include me out.
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Personally, I'd never write one book then bolt two more on. What happens if the events of volumes two and three make the author want to change volume one? That way lies madness. A trilogy has to be completed and consistent, like one book. My 'Factory Girl' trilogy couldn't have been written any other way.
 
Stephen Palmer said:
Personally, I'd never write one book then bolt two more on. What happens if the events of volumes two and three make the author want to change volume one? That way lies madness. A trilogy has to be completed and consistent, like one book. My 'Factory Girl' trilogy couldn't have been written any other way.
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What if two and three don't make the author want to change volume one? Why would an author look at a published book as something amenable to change?

Your post suggests that follow on books have to be part of a single tightly woven and interconnected plot line. Why is that necessary? I can think of many sequel novels that have largely independent plots, themes and even style. But they still employ the strength of being connected to the original in some way. Dune, Fall Revolution, Marrow, Heechee, etc.
 
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'Many' is a name. Saying 'Many' isn't a number in this counting system would be like saying 'f' isn't the name of a number in hexadecimal.

Zero as a concept (a number) wasn't invented till the 5th century or so. So your prehistoric counting system has four numbers.

:)
 
JunkMonkey said:
'Many' is a name. Saying 'Many' isn't a number in this counting system would be like saying 'f' isn't the name of a number in hexadecimal.

Zero as a concept (a number) wasn't invented till the 5th century or so. So your prehistoric counting system has four numbers.
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In fact adults can recognise four items without counting, though with practice it's maybe six. Hence the ancient notch systems used a new symbol for five. See Georges Ifrah, either "From One to Zero" or "The Universal History of Numbers" Vol 1, a trilogy!
Cultures without counting numbers had /have various strategies a bit more clever than 1, 2, 3, 4, many. See the book.
He also points out that Babylonians 4000 years ago had place numbering system so realised they needed a symbol for the empty place to avoid copy or reading errors. The genuine Zero was about the Seleucid era, about 2500 years ago. So maybe 4th C BC, not 5th in the current era. They managed the place number system just with gaps and written comments and context for over a 1000 years.

Experiments show that cats probably can't count but recognise an upper limit of items, such as kittens, but that rooks can somehow count, but they've not explained how they do it.
 
Stanley Steamboy said:
What if two and three don't make the author want to change volume one? Why would an author look at a published book as something amenable to change?

Your post suggests that follow on books have to be part of a single tightly woven and interconnected plot line. Why is that necessary? I can think of many sequel novels that have largely independent plots, themes and even style. But they still employ the strength of being connected to the original in some way. Dune, Fall Revolution, Marrow, Heechee, etc.
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I agree it's not always a necessity, but my experience of reading trilogies is that I can usually spot the bolt-on... which is a bit of a turn off. I think the best example is Gene Wolfe's TBOTNS set. My personal exemplar for the trilogy is LOTR... I myself wrote a thematic trilogy after a single volume work... Not the best decision of my career as an author. :/
 
Well again, trilogy just means a three book series. It doesn't tell you what kind of trilogy it is. Serial trilogies are one big story carved into chunks. LOTR is one story and they divvied it up. Other authors plan a serial trilogy as a three act story with more designed breaks.

But if you're writing an episodic trilogy (which often get turned into longer series,) you're not writing one big series. There are sub-categories like urban fantasy and military SF where episodic series work really well as stories. Anything more mystery thrillerish is probably going to lean towards the episodic even if it has some over-arching plot elements. And quite often episodic standalones that happen to be in the same story universe will be bundled together under the label of a trilogy, whether that was the original plan, in part because three books works really well for an omnibus edition or a boxed set. (Such as again Joe Abercrombie's three sequelish standalones in the First Law story world.) You can also have something like the Indiana Jones film trilogy where there's a first one, a second that's a prequel and a third that takes place later than the other two. (And then years later they add on.)

So having something episodic be presented as a trilogy group isn't really tacking volumes on. It's just a different story format. We get used to the idea that a trilogy is one three act story but quite often they aren't. Again, authors are like cats.
 
Stephen Palmer said:
I agree it's not always a necessity, but my experience of reading trilogies is that I can usually spot the bolt-on... which is a bit of a turn off. I think the best example is Gene Wolfe's TBOTNS set. My personal exemplar for the trilogy is LOTR... I myself wrote a thematic trilogy after a single volume work... Not the best decision of my career as an author. :/
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But isn't LOTR a single novel that was broken up for publishing? I realize this is a somewhat common practice these days, but runs against the notion of a novel functioning as a stand-alone story within a larger shared universe of related material. If anything, LOTR is the well contained sequel to The Hobbit - which we all treat as separate stories with shared characters.

I can imagine the "bolt on" you're talking about, but I haven't read TBOTNS to feel out that example. My other counter examples would be something like Peter Watts' Blindsight and Echopraxia - two novels with interrelated events and characters but one doesn't really alter the characterization or plot of the other. The six (real) Dune novels also function as four complete story arcs that are generated from each other but are presented with different characters across large jumps in time and circumstance. They are even told from very different perspectives.
 
Stanley Steamboy said:
But isn't LOTR a single novel that was broken up for publishing? I realize this is a somewhat common practice these days, but runs against the notion of a novel functioning as a stand-alone story within a larger shared universe of related material. If anything, LOTR is the well contained sequel to The Hobbit - which we all treat as separate stories with shared characters.

I can imagine the "bolt on" you're talking about, but I haven't read TBOTNS to feel out that example. My other counter examples would be something like Peter Watts' Blindsight and Echopraxia - two novels with interrelated events and characters but one doesn't really alter the characterization or plot of the other. The six (real) Dune novels also function as four complete story arcs that are generated from each other but are presented with different characters across large jumps in time and circumstance. They are even told from very different perspectives.
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Yes, there is certainly scope for novels set in the same world, again, from personal preference, that's rarely something that interests me. As was said above, authors are like cats. My choice as an author is to challenge myself wherever possible, creating new works instead of relying on the old. Growth and progress are really important to me.
 
Yes - legions of all types. The world of publishing is drowning beneath them. Writing a trilogy is hard work, but easy compared with selling one...
 
Yup, there's trilogies and trilogies, or genuine trilogies (one big novel split into three volumes, effectively) and 1+2 trilogies, which are successful single books which then got expanded into a trilogy after the fact due to success, and feel like it.

The ultimate example of the 1+2 trilogy is Star Wars, which was made as an independent story and then expanded to a trilogy with two sequels added after the fact (based on some notes George Lucas had lying around, although the degree of pre-planning he had for 3, 6, 9 or even 12 Star Wars films changes depending on the day of the week).

A recent example of that is Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice, a very fine standalone SF novel which had two sequels (Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy) bolted on which are nowhere near as tightly plotted or well-written and seem to be floundering for a purpose.

The reverse, the 2+1 trilogy, is much rarer, though Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy may count (he actually planned 10 books in total after the first two were well-received, but did not get further than a rough draft of the third book and a very rough first chapter of the fourth).

The ultimate example of the one big story split in three is naturally Lord of the Rings. Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun almost counts, but he couldn't manage a graceful split into three so split it in four instead.
 
Werthead said:
A recent example of that is Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice, a very fine standalone SF novel which had two sequels (Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy) bolted on which are nowhere near as tightly plotted or well-written and seem to be floundering for a purpose.
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Well I'm going to argue with you about that one. The Ancillary trilogy was planned as a trilogy story from the beginning. The two sequels are not bolted on. While the trilogy is episodic, a three act film like Star Wars, rather than one big war saga split into three, it is one over-arching story told in three different types of adventures. It is a Singularity story. The first story is Breq discovering that its consciousness and identity is much more complicated and in depth than its past existence had understood it, as well as uncovering a secret war that also centers on the meaning of consciousness. Those threads are framed within the more episodic Count of Monte Cristo revenge story. In the second book, Breq discovers other AI consciousness are experiencing similar understandings to what it did. The episodic story is the events, including sabotage, in a border colony that are related to the over-arching war and Breq's struggle with the Emperor, and Breq becomes a leader. It's a political thriller rather than a revenge adventure one. In the third book (spoilers,) all the over-arching plotlines come together -- Breq and the other emerging AI's rebel, along with a contingent of human and alien allies, and seek diplomatic negotiations at the same time. It's an insurgent story with the full possibility of the singularity realized in a The Moon is a Harsh Mistress sort of story. Each book is another stage in Breq coming to terms with its consciousness and finally taking control of its own destiny.

There are a lot of ways to tell a three act story -- or a four act story as often happens as well. Take for instance Jim C. Hines' contemporary fantasy quartet series Magic Ex Libris. When you read the first book, Libromancer, it seems to be a pretty standard (and fun) first installment of an episodic contemporary/urban fantasy thriller series, the kind of series that may run for 15 or 20 books, about book magic wizards working in secret as a society and various types of creatures they police. But it's really just a complete first story in a bigger over-arching story about how the book magic of the series has affected the world, is then being changed in a secret war(s) and will become a very different situation in the world at the end. It's the story about how the main character and other key supporting characters figure out who they are going to be and what they are going to stand for, with the protagonist taking the role of sort of screw up to major leader by the end of the quartet. So it's four stories, but it's all one big saga with a finale.

So, again, authors have a lot more creativity, planning and thematic consistency than a lot of them seem to get credit for. But they are also still like cats -- they will all do what they want to do, what works for their writer brains.
 
Werthead said:
The reverse, the 2+1 trilogy, is much rarer, though Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy may count (he actually planned 10 books in total after the first two were well-received, but did not get further than a rough draft of the third book and a very rough first chapter of the fourth).
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The first two Dune books were one story, then Children was added.
 
Werthead said:
The ultimate example of the one big story split in three is naturally Lord of the Rings. Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun almost counts, but he couldn't manage a graceful split into three so split it in four instead.
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Four is as good as three, I reckon - TBOTNS is one long book, happens to be in four volumes. Actually, of course, it's five, as The Urth Of The New Sun does follow on to complete Severian's full tale.
 
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