Theory of the series

My vision isn’t just for a book, but a series. The oppor­tu­nity to keep going will be con­tin­gent on the suc­cess of this ini­tial offering, so I will need your sup­port to probe the farthest reaches of scale. Moon­bound begins in a village; my des­ti­na­tion is the cosmos, with mean­ingful stops at every zoom level in between.

But why write a series?

Because series are fun.

Okay. Why are series fun?

In my estimation, it has almost nothing to do with capacity. You don’t write a series merely to obtain access to more pages. You write a series to write a series.

What I mean is that the series is a genre unto itself, and its genre prop­er­ties are mainly temporal. The series is a work-in-time: THAT is what makes it fun.

Let’s back up, and begin with the case of a stand­alone novel. It is def­i­n­i­tion­ally true that, by the time a reader encoun­ters a stand­alone novel, the writer has exited its world, and prob­ably moved on to another project.

By contrast, the series, read in real­time, as it is being produced, puts writer and reader fully “in it together”.

I don’t think there’s any­thing else in pub­lishing quite like the buzz of a multi­book project underway, shared and anticipated. It’s wonderful. Who wouldn’t want to play in that sandbox?

There are other ways to do it, of course. Tolkien didn’t con­sider The Lord of the Rings a trilogy; for him, it was a single book, one that was sub­stan­tially fin­ished by the time The Fel­low­ship of the Ring was pub­lished. The next two vol­umes appeared over the course of just one year: a stand­alone novel on an install­ment plan. (The Return of the King arrived a bit late because Tolkien was still fin­ishing the appendix. See, that’s why I’m pub­lishing my appendix — this mini-site — first.)

Likewise, Jeff VanderMeer’s path­breaking Area X trilogy arrived in the space of just eigh­teen months — more like a TV show than a series of books. A pace like that is nearly perfect, gen­er­ating antic­i­pa­tion without risking impatience. Area X remains one of the great pub­lishing feats of the 21st century.

Yet I can also remember the plea­sure of waiting for the Harry Potter books as they arrived, one every summer or so, over the course of ten years. What a way to spend a decade!

You might object that you can still read and enjoy a series many years after it’s been completed. That’s true, but remember: the series would not have succeeded — would not have cir­cu­lated and found its way, eventually, to you — without that ini­tial flux of real­time energy, which you might imagine as the pillar of flame beneath a booster rocket, lofting a lit­erary pay­load into a stable cul­tural orbit.

Of course, we also have to con­sider the series that linger … and stretch … and slow … and stop. These are the great cau­tionary tales. Returning to my premise above, I think these series are so disappointing — so deflating — precisely because the writer has betrayed that elec­tric sense of “in it together”. The writer is, in fact, hardly “in it” at all. What a bummer.

The novel titled Moon­bound is fin­ished, but the larger project is only beginning. This mini-site is my way of showing the degree to which this story and this world occupy all my thoughts.

I am in it, and I can’t wait for you to join me here.

First published:  October 2023
Last updated: December 2024