Quote:
Originally Posted by sufue
(As only an occasional sci-fi reader, much more of a mystery reader, where series can be really long, I sometimes wonder why do so many sci-fi books come in threes? Granted there are also some long sci-fi and fantasy series, but a lot of threes...)
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I’m not at all an SF reader, but I’ll take a stab at this.
Mystery series tend to be self-contained books. There may be, probably are, elements in the personal arc of the protagonist that develop over the series, but each book is a fully developed story. Back in the day, before ebooks, it wasn’t at all unlikely that depending on availability at the bookstore and the library, that you might miss out a title or two; at that, you might have picked it up in the middle of the series and then backtracked. No harm done, and the books worked perfectly well.
I suspect, especially with the world-building in SF&F, that you can’t read later books in a series as satisfactorily without reading the earlier ones. Moreover, I think they’re more likely to be telling an over-arcing story that’s broken down into chunks. Hence the trilogies. With a trilogy, you don’t have later books in a long series held hostage to the availability of earlier books (not much of a problem now), but also and IMO very importantly, three books is about the right number to tell an over-arcing story. The setup, the ramp-up, the final confrontation. Longer series and there’s too much wheel-spinning going on before the final confrontation.
But what do I know? I mean that seriously. Not my genre.