Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
Can you come up with an example of a series with standalone books? And can you prove they really are standalone?
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Many Discworld books, though many are roughly sequential.
Some Niven Known space
Some Pern stories
Some Shanarra books
Dune first book works standalone, arguably best place to stop.
Famous Five
Hardy Boys
Nancy Drew
The so called Noel Stretfeld Shoe books are not a series at all, and some didn't originally have shoe in the title.
Maybe many Sherlock Holmes.
Book Series at opposite end, that are really serial volumes:
Wheel of Time.
Harry Harrison's To The Stars Trilogy.
Some book series are not so serial:
The Recluse books by Modsett. They jump about in time anyway.
The Narnia books now have a different reading order to the original, which was possibly Lewis's order. I read Prince Caspian first, which isn't first in any order.
The Chalet School series hardly needs to be read in order even though it's fairly chronological and was near contemporary. It's very historical now. About 62 books.
The Harrison Stainless Steel Rat books work fine standalone.
There are books best read in order:
The Enid Blyton school stories, two series.
A series may have ANY of:
1) The same characters. If they have an endless supply of holidays and hardly age, it's a floating timeline. Hardy Boys, Famous Five, Bobbsey Twins seem to stop ageing.
2) The same fantasy / SF world universe etc. Some Ursula Le Guin, Asimov (before 1970s and later retcon), Niven.
3) There are the same characters but they and the world change. There can be some overall story arcs resolved in later books, but are not important.
4) There are the same characters and they develop. There is a strong overall story arc, but each volume has some sort of decent ending. The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. Though the 2nd series didn't seem so good and I've never finished the third series. The Harry Potter series is partly like this.
A serial, OTH doesn't have a complete story per book and typically has a cliff hanger. Notorious being the Wheel of Time. I have all of it but gave up in book twelve. I don't think it's Sanderson's fault. It should have been a 5 or 6 book serial / Series.
Harry Potter Series is more a Serial than Narnia because there is the unresolved tension of Snape and Voldemort etc. It's got a stronger overall story arc than Babylon 5. Likely Babylon 5 would have had a stronger overall arc and a better later season only for cowardice of Holywood.
Some Series have serial books within them.