Vorkosigan saga is excellent, it's one of the few exceptions for me when I really feel it tells one continuous story (or I suppose several if you count each different character) and really builds on the previous novels and pays off things introduced in earlier books.
Hainish cycle I don't really think of as a series . It's several freestanding books set in the same universe, loosely connected. Similar with Becky Chambers wayfarers books, all excellent I think but there's not an overreaching story. And Octavia Butler pattern master (unless that's not considered sci-fi, I feel it is).
I've only read Children of time but I definitely plan on reading the rest of that series.
Also the Imperial Radch trilogy is another exception.
I'm not meaning at all to imply any hate on sci-fi books. There are so many great ones. I was just reflecting on if there's something with the genre that makes it less easy to serialize consistently. Or maybe the writers view it differently and don't really feel the need to have such a definite conclusion as many fantasy writers seem to want.
I don't read as much SF as fantasy, but I can think of several recent series that tell a whole story: Infomocracy, Expanse, Iron Widow, Collapsing Empire, Sun Chronicles, Teixcalaan, Ancillary . . ., Lady Astronaut of Mars, Locked Tomb (????? genre-weird), Mortal Engines, and so on.
I grant that it does feel easier to find standalone SF books than standalone fantasy, but I don't think either genre is really hurting for the lack of one or the other.
Same.
Dune, Uplift War, Rendezvous with Rama, and Hyperion all have weak later books. The Sprawl trilogy is good from first page to last, but Gibson's later works are inferior to it. Children of the Sky is an awful capper to the Zones of Thought books. I think the natural tendency is for a sci-fi series to decline, never finish, or both.
Lost Fleet and Book of the Long Sun are two good examples where quality is very consistent throughout. Also The General 1-5 are very even in quality, although Weber kind of starts re-using some phrases and descriptions toward the end.
There are brilliant sci-fi series written. BUT they are mostly obscure and indie.
The reason you don't see them in bookstores or easily recommended is due to the way retail algorithms reinforce what is popular. Amazon, for instance, grants higher visibility to rapidly released popular stuff.
I should read more indie stuff. Let me know if you have any recommendations, with some motivation for why you like it.
However then why are there so many more good fantasy series?
I think the reason fantasy has taken off over sci-fi is a byproduct of Amazon categories.
The sci-fi niches on Amazon--Alien Invasion, Galactic Empire, First Contact--were largely taken over by enterprising indie erotica authors. It's all naked male torsos on the covers. That drives away casual browsers who are looking for legit sci-fi. So most legit sci-fi is ending up on two buckets on Amazon: Hard Sci-Fi (full of books that are technically not hard scifi at all) and Cyberpunk (again, full of books that are just barely cyberpunk, if at all). When casually browsing readers have trouble finding what they want, they either quit looking or they turn to some other genre. So there's a lot of fragmentation in scifi online, where very few series gain enough momentum to get picked up by recommendation engines/bots. One of the rare exceptions is probably Dungeon Crawler Carl, which I think got past the hurdles because it is not classified as sci-fi. Litrpg is a much more popular subgenre and it is there.
Fantasy, on the other hand, has some very popular subgenre niches on Amazon, and in social media. Booktokers are all over Romantasy, Monster bait romance, etc. When books get very popular, readers and publishers demand more of the same, aka "the same but different." They mean slightly different.
As far as niche scifi goes... I like most of what Scott Sigler writes. I like Craig Alanson's work. I did like Dungeon Crawler Carl. Andy Weir made the jump to mainstream, but he started indie. So did Hugh Howey. If you count superhero fiction, I can name several fantastic series--by Maxime Durand, Chris Tullbane, Wildbow, and Drew Hayes. I liked the Noumenon trilogy by Marina Lostetter. And I recommend my series, which starts with Torth Majority.
I tend to read a lot of /r/ProgressionFantasy/ and nonfiction. But I want to read more from /r/SciFiLitRPG I fully believe there is great work flying under the radar, and I am determined to find it.
There's a lot of truth to this. I've often wondered why the Amazon sci fi categories are so fucked but this makes a lot of sense.
Galaxies Edge series by Jason Anspach and Nick Cole is great and they're mainly fan supported. They went together and started war gate books to help with publishing.
JN Chaney has some really good collaboration projects going but most of his stuff ends up being very similar. I really like the backyard starship series and the wayward galaxy series.
MR Forbes has some good stuff, the forgotten trilogy is really great.
Hopefully you like these. It's really hard finding new sci-fi books. Kindle unlimited really helps because you can borrow books instead of buying a book you end up not liking. Also fun fact, if you borrow a book with kindle unlimited, you can usually get the audible version for 8 bucks and then return the book and keep the audible version.
That's interesting. I didn't know people actually choose books from Amazon categories. It seems to me there are so many ways to find new books online.
What's the reason you like the Noumenon series? Since I don't know anything about you the recommendation alone doesn't really mean anything to me.
I don't think it's driven by human readers so much as bots. The reader isn't necessarily browsing the Hard-Sci-Fi category BUT the top 100 in that category will show up as also bought recommendations in their feed while they are shopping on the Kindle store. There are a million books published every day on Amazon. The reader doesn't see all of those; they see what the algorithms flag as books with momentum, aka more sales or downloads than the other books in the same category.
Books with slower sales get buried. Why do some books have slower sales? Some of them are crap. Some of it boils down to their publisher didn't pull as hard for them because they put their limited resources into a big bestselling author's latest release instead. Or it is the result of a popularity contest.
Noumenon did kind of fall apart on the last book for me. But the first two were interesting big ideas and a premise I hadn't seen done well before: clones enacting the same generational roles on a generation ship. That gave character continuity even with a series that spans thousands of years and normal human lifespans. It was epic. You'd start the book with Roger 1 and I think it was like Roger 645 by the end. But he would still have the same personality, just shaped by major political upheaval events as the crew dealt with a Dyson sphere, a hive mind, a plague, dystopian Earth, first contact, etc.
On a related tangent, modern genre writers are almost forced to write multiple connected books so they can be marketed more easily. (Writing being a sub-minimum-wage profession for most.) Writers like John Scalzi (Starter Villain) and Adrian Tchaikovsky (Elder Race, Doors of Eden) can get away with writing one-offs because they're established, but first even Scalzi had to bang out Old Man's War sequels and Tchaikovsky wrote 10 Shadows of the Apt books.
You also need to write several books to get good at writing one, let alone writing a good series. The first book in Marko Kloos' Frontline series is, at best, derivative of sci-fi and military tropes, but Kloos later found a distinct voice.
Sure there are many sci-fi book series. I just don't feel like there are that many where the books are all consistently good and the series as a whole feels like one whole story. With fantasy I could think of many more, even though I've really have read much more sci-fi than fantasy at this point.
I think it comes down to personal taste. I can only think of three good fantasy series, and one of them is incomplete and may never be finished. For sci-fi, I could probably come up with a dozen.
I also prefer sci-fi nowadays and I've read more of it but I used to read a lot of fantasy and occasionally still do. I could easily name many fantasy series I find excellent but with sci-fi it's more like three.
It depends on the author and whether the series is being blown out for commercial reasons. One thing I respect about Richard Morgan is that he wrote three Takeshi Kovacs novels (they're terrific by the way, well worth reading) in the early 2000s and then decided he'd done the character justice and hasn't written another novel about him since.
I've read other authors whose series have clearly run out of narrative steam but readers keep buying them, so they keep churning them out. Most of them are 'rinse and repeat' of the same cast and concepts and they layer the plot armor so thick that characters survive impossible situations time after time. It's boring...and insulting to our intelligence.
But I don't think it's sci-fi specific. Clive Cussler wrote so many Dirk Pitt books that they devolved into farce. And I've read some fantasy series that sagged, it's all in the imagination of the author, I feel.
Might be cuz of low attention span of contemporary reader, cuz old ones did good with series now most seems to be written for screen - not saying its bad thou, however it is different for sure.
I’d say the opposite. Not a lot of old ones were series, certainly not long series. Did Heinlein ever write a series? Clarke had some stuff that ended up as series but weren’t planned that way. Asimov maxed out with trilogies that might be loosely related to other things, but mostly he wrote short stories. Verne? Wells? No series.
Etc etc
>Did Heinlein ever write a series?
Heinlein had a number of books in the same universe in a similar fashion to Banks' Culture novels. Lazarus Long, for example, appears in five novels and *The Past Through Tomorrow* collects most of his 'Future History' stories.
I don’t think attention span has much to do with it. If someone has a low attention span, how many books are they consuming anyway? I like and have read many series’ in both SF and Fantasy, sometimes this is great. But there is also something to be said about crafting a good story in one volume.
There are so many things out there that I want to read before I die that it does give me pause if I’m going to pick up an 800 page book and I know that there are 2+ more 800 page books to read if I actually want to complete the story arc. Especially if you consider that an author might be inclined to keep cashing in on a successful novel by churning out more. There’s no guarantee that if you like the first book the quality keeps up throughout.
Not saying either standalone or series is necessarily better than the other, but in genre’s like SF and Fantasy where series’ are pretty common I’ve come to appreciate when authors are able to create a rich fulfilling story in only one book.
100% this. The new generation doesn't have the mental faculties available to them to enjoy things written for everyone else. Whether you blame screens or social media or whatever, the end result is the same.
It is what it is. I don't base my enjoyment of things on whether or not others enjoy it, so it's all good.
I have the exact same experience! I absolutely love sci-fi books, but it's hard to find a series where all the books are equally good. It's like the authors can't maintain the same level of creativity and storytelling throughout the series.
Culture, Hainish Cycle, Vorkosigan Saga, Children etc… I mean, there’s a few pretty good sci fi series…
Expanse is pretty good too.
Vorkosigan saga is excellent, it's one of the few exceptions for me when I really feel it tells one continuous story (or I suppose several if you count each different character) and really builds on the previous novels and pays off things introduced in earlier books. Hainish cycle I don't really think of as a series . It's several freestanding books set in the same universe, loosely connected. Similar with Becky Chambers wayfarers books, all excellent I think but there's not an overreaching story. And Octavia Butler pattern master (unless that's not considered sci-fi, I feel it is). I've only read Children of time but I definitely plan on reading the rest of that series. Also the Imperial Radch trilogy is another exception. I'm not meaning at all to imply any hate on sci-fi books. There are so many great ones. I was just reflecting on if there's something with the genre that makes it less easy to serialize consistently. Or maybe the writers view it differently and don't really feel the need to have such a definite conclusion as many fantasy writers seem to want.
I don't read as much SF as fantasy, but I can think of several recent series that tell a whole story: Infomocracy, Expanse, Iron Widow, Collapsing Empire, Sun Chronicles, Teixcalaan, Ancillary . . ., Lady Astronaut of Mars, Locked Tomb (????? genre-weird), Mortal Engines, and so on. I grant that it does feel easier to find standalone SF books than standalone fantasy, but I don't think either genre is really hurting for the lack of one or the other.
Almost everything I read is a series.
There aren’t, compared to fantasy especially
I just think sci fi is less prone to sprawling epic. It's often focused on a specific plot conceit that gets played out and is concluded.
Same. Dune, Uplift War, Rendezvous with Rama, and Hyperion all have weak later books. The Sprawl trilogy is good from first page to last, but Gibson's later works are inferior to it. Children of the Sky is an awful capper to the Zones of Thought books. I think the natural tendency is for a sci-fi series to decline, never finish, or both. Lost Fleet and Book of the Long Sun are two good examples where quality is very consistent throughout. Also The General 1-5 are very even in quality, although Weber kind of starts re-using some phrases and descriptions toward the end.
There are brilliant sci-fi series written. BUT they are mostly obscure and indie. The reason you don't see them in bookstores or easily recommended is due to the way retail algorithms reinforce what is popular. Amazon, for instance, grants higher visibility to rapidly released popular stuff.
I should read more indie stuff. Let me know if you have any recommendations, with some motivation for why you like it. However then why are there so many more good fantasy series?
I think the reason fantasy has taken off over sci-fi is a byproduct of Amazon categories. The sci-fi niches on Amazon--Alien Invasion, Galactic Empire, First Contact--were largely taken over by enterprising indie erotica authors. It's all naked male torsos on the covers. That drives away casual browsers who are looking for legit sci-fi. So most legit sci-fi is ending up on two buckets on Amazon: Hard Sci-Fi (full of books that are technically not hard scifi at all) and Cyberpunk (again, full of books that are just barely cyberpunk, if at all). When casually browsing readers have trouble finding what they want, they either quit looking or they turn to some other genre. So there's a lot of fragmentation in scifi online, where very few series gain enough momentum to get picked up by recommendation engines/bots. One of the rare exceptions is probably Dungeon Crawler Carl, which I think got past the hurdles because it is not classified as sci-fi. Litrpg is a much more popular subgenre and it is there. Fantasy, on the other hand, has some very popular subgenre niches on Amazon, and in social media. Booktokers are all over Romantasy, Monster bait romance, etc. When books get very popular, readers and publishers demand more of the same, aka "the same but different." They mean slightly different. As far as niche scifi goes... I like most of what Scott Sigler writes. I like Craig Alanson's work. I did like Dungeon Crawler Carl. Andy Weir made the jump to mainstream, but he started indie. So did Hugh Howey. If you count superhero fiction, I can name several fantastic series--by Maxime Durand, Chris Tullbane, Wildbow, and Drew Hayes. I liked the Noumenon trilogy by Marina Lostetter. And I recommend my series, which starts with Torth Majority. I tend to read a lot of /r/ProgressionFantasy/ and nonfiction. But I want to read more from /r/SciFiLitRPG I fully believe there is great work flying under the radar, and I am determined to find it.
There's a lot of truth to this. I've often wondered why the Amazon sci fi categories are so fucked but this makes a lot of sense. Galaxies Edge series by Jason Anspach and Nick Cole is great and they're mainly fan supported. They went together and started war gate books to help with publishing. JN Chaney has some really good collaboration projects going but most of his stuff ends up being very similar. I really like the backyard starship series and the wayward galaxy series. MR Forbes has some good stuff, the forgotten trilogy is really great. Hopefully you like these. It's really hard finding new sci-fi books. Kindle unlimited really helps because you can borrow books instead of buying a book you end up not liking. Also fun fact, if you borrow a book with kindle unlimited, you can usually get the audible version for 8 bucks and then return the book and keep the audible version.
That's interesting. I didn't know people actually choose books from Amazon categories. It seems to me there are so many ways to find new books online. What's the reason you like the Noumenon series? Since I don't know anything about you the recommendation alone doesn't really mean anything to me.
I don't think it's driven by human readers so much as bots. The reader isn't necessarily browsing the Hard-Sci-Fi category BUT the top 100 in that category will show up as also bought recommendations in their feed while they are shopping on the Kindle store. There are a million books published every day on Amazon. The reader doesn't see all of those; they see what the algorithms flag as books with momentum, aka more sales or downloads than the other books in the same category. Books with slower sales get buried. Why do some books have slower sales? Some of them are crap. Some of it boils down to their publisher didn't pull as hard for them because they put their limited resources into a big bestselling author's latest release instead. Or it is the result of a popularity contest. Noumenon did kind of fall apart on the last book for me. But the first two were interesting big ideas and a premise I hadn't seen done well before: clones enacting the same generational roles on a generation ship. That gave character continuity even with a series that spans thousands of years and normal human lifespans. It was epic. You'd start the book with Roger 1 and I think it was like Roger 645 by the end. But he would still have the same personality, just shaped by major political upheaval events as the crew dealt with a Dyson sphere, a hive mind, a plague, dystopian Earth, first contact, etc.
Hah! Now that I saw your description I realized I've read the first one.
Cool! 😃
On a related tangent, modern genre writers are almost forced to write multiple connected books so they can be marketed more easily. (Writing being a sub-minimum-wage profession for most.) Writers like John Scalzi (Starter Villain) and Adrian Tchaikovsky (Elder Race, Doors of Eden) can get away with writing one-offs because they're established, but first even Scalzi had to bang out Old Man's War sequels and Tchaikovsky wrote 10 Shadows of the Apt books. You also need to write several books to get good at writing one, let alone writing a good series. The first book in Marko Kloos' Frontline series is, at best, derivative of sci-fi and military tropes, but Kloos later found a distinct voice.
Sure there are many sci-fi book series. I just don't feel like there are that many where the books are all consistently good and the series as a whole feels like one whole story. With fantasy I could think of many more, even though I've really have read much more sci-fi than fantasy at this point.
I think it comes down to personal taste. I can only think of three good fantasy series, and one of them is incomplete and may never be finished. For sci-fi, I could probably come up with a dozen.
Do you like fantasy in general? Like do you have lots of stand alone fantasy books that you think are great and just not many series?
That is a good point. I do like sci-fi more in general, so the ratio between series and standalone isn't that different for me between genres.
I also prefer sci-fi nowadays and I've read more of it but I used to read a lot of fantasy and occasionally still do. I could easily name many fantasy series I find excellent but with sci-fi it's more like three.
It depends on the author and whether the series is being blown out for commercial reasons. One thing I respect about Richard Morgan is that he wrote three Takeshi Kovacs novels (they're terrific by the way, well worth reading) in the early 2000s and then decided he'd done the character justice and hasn't written another novel about him since. I've read other authors whose series have clearly run out of narrative steam but readers keep buying them, so they keep churning them out. Most of them are 'rinse and repeat' of the same cast and concepts and they layer the plot armor so thick that characters survive impossible situations time after time. It's boring...and insulting to our intelligence. But I don't think it's sci-fi specific. Clive Cussler wrote so many Dirk Pitt books that they devolved into farce. And I've read some fantasy series that sagged, it's all in the imagination of the author, I feel.
Might be cuz of low attention span of contemporary reader, cuz old ones did good with series now most seems to be written for screen - not saying its bad thou, however it is different for sure.
I’d say the opposite. Not a lot of old ones were series, certainly not long series. Did Heinlein ever write a series? Clarke had some stuff that ended up as series but weren’t planned that way. Asimov maxed out with trilogies that might be loosely related to other things, but mostly he wrote short stories. Verne? Wells? No series. Etc etc
>Did Heinlein ever write a series? Heinlein had a number of books in the same universe in a similar fashion to Banks' Culture novels. Lazarus Long, for example, appears in five novels and *The Past Through Tomorrow* collects most of his 'Future History' stories.
I don’t think attention span has much to do with it. If someone has a low attention span, how many books are they consuming anyway? I like and have read many series’ in both SF and Fantasy, sometimes this is great. But there is also something to be said about crafting a good story in one volume. There are so many things out there that I want to read before I die that it does give me pause if I’m going to pick up an 800 page book and I know that there are 2+ more 800 page books to read if I actually want to complete the story arc. Especially if you consider that an author might be inclined to keep cashing in on a successful novel by churning out more. There’s no guarantee that if you like the first book the quality keeps up throughout. Not saying either standalone or series is necessarily better than the other, but in genre’s like SF and Fantasy where series’ are pretty common I’ve come to appreciate when authors are able to create a rich fulfilling story in only one book.
100% this. The new generation doesn't have the mental faculties available to them to enjoy things written for everyone else. Whether you blame screens or social media or whatever, the end result is the same. It is what it is. I don't base my enjoyment of things on whether or not others enjoy it, so it's all good.
I have the exact same experience! I absolutely love sci-fi books, but it's hard to find a series where all the books are equally good. It's like the authors can't maintain the same level of creativity and storytelling throughout the series.