Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
There are fix-ups and then there are fix-ups. As the Wikipedia article notes, some are obviously short-story "cycles" rather than novels, such as Asimov's I, Robot. Others - not mentioned in Wikipedia but relevant to my point - like Asimov's Foundation come together to form a natural and consistent chronology; it's still arguable whether it forms a distinct novel, as such, but at least everything fits together.
Dandelion Wine was obviously "fixed-up" to try and turn it into novel form - and for my tastes that was a mistake. I'd rather have read it as a collection of separate but related stories rather than being tantalised with links that don't hold up for a novel. That is: trying to pretend there is a novel where there isn't just gives the reader the wrong idea and sets them up for disappointment. Keep it as obviously distinct stories and the reader doesn't go looking for links that are not there.
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Even in fix-ups, there are different styles.
I, Robot used the framing style. In science fiction, there is the "Future History" style, of which the Foundation stories are an example of. (Atypical, perhaps, about the failing and not the rising of the future.), which is a interconnecting series of stories against a common background.
Then there is the multi-viewpoint chain of stories, often about an organization, following its historic flow over time. This style is not limited to short stories made into novels, it can be a series of novels. Think of the Stainless Steel Rat stories. Or Fritz Leiber's
Change Wind stories.
The simplest is simply a string of short stories about a single character, or a group of characters, strung together. Lots of those sorts.
Bradbury seemed to create a different form, the mosaic novel. Look at
The Martian Chronicles. Virtually nothing interconnected in character or organization, no particular flow of time, just a massive cluster of vignettes placed together to create prismatic whole. A very different form from the above. . .
Just my 2 cents worth. . .