Hey Paul: I’m with you. I also don’t like it when writers (usually toward the end of their lives) start making all their novels into one series, either. Also, my feet kind of hurt right now (since I seem to be whining about everything and its cousin).

Hey Erik: One of the reasons the term “fix-up” bothers me is that people tend to use it inconsistently–for collections that dare not speak their name, or actual in-your-face collections, or a novelized series, or a booklength fiction, part of which was published as an independent story. So someone telling me “This book is a fix-up” doesn’t tell me all that much until they tell me more.

My experience with fix-ups has been almost universally negative. Eando Binder’s Adam Link stories are great fun when read in their original form, but he changed the tense and dropped a few of them when he collected the stories into a 1960s paperback. Bad.

On the other hand, “Robert Cham Gilman” (Alfred Coppel) actually improved the old Planet Stories tale “The Rebel of Valkyr” when he turned it into “The Rebel of Rhada.”

It seems he’s on a larger journey than the short story suggests and that it continues in other tales. It would fit nicely into an episodic book if conscious care is taken from the onset.

When they are cobbled together stories with changes to the originals to string them together, they don’t work so well. And the changes upset the purists, as you’ve noted.

There are a few exceptions, of course. Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles comes to mind.

More Than Human I’d call a collection, myself, despite whatever the marketing suggests, as you say.

Baby Is Three is the best story, sure, but as a whole, it comes out better than that, for me.

I wouldn’t say all the evidence on your list points in the same direction, though. Some of these books aren’t presenting themselves as novels (e.g. Dreadful Skin, Agent of the Terran Empire). Some are really just collections of magazine series in chronological order, no matter what the cover copy says (e.g. Jirel of Joiry, Foundation). Some are expansions from a shorter piece (like Dreamsnake). And some have been carefully written, rewritten and rerewritten into a coherent larger narrative (e.g. Imaro).

To be clear: I’m not against episodic novels; I’m in the finishing stages of writing one. I’m trying to sort out what works and what doesn’t. In general, what I think works is adapting the source material as little as possible.

Having said that much, I’ll go further out on a limb here, and say that “Baby Is Three” is a better story than More Than Human is a novel.

How about this list, then? Other than those you have mentioned, without adding more Moorcock, Howard, Leiber or Vance.

Agent Of the Terran Empire - Poul Anderson
Foundation - Isaac Asimov
Resplendent - Stephen Baxter
New Amsterdam - Elizabeth Bear
Rynosseros - Terry Dowling
The Gunslinger - Stephen King
The Forever War - Joe Haldeman
Jirel Of Joiry - C. L. Moore
Dreamsnake - Vonda N. McIntyre
Emergence - David R. Palmer
Dreadful Skin - Cherie Priest
Sister Alice - Robert Reed
Kirinyaga - Mike Resnick
Imaro - Charles R. Saunders
The Lion Game - James H. Schmitz
Quest Of the Three Worls - Cordwainer Smith
Coyote and Coyote Rising - Allen M. Steele
More Than Human - Theodore Sturgeon
The War Against the Rull - A. E. Van Vogt