#serialised fiction

[machineofreality]

Wirrin and the Fiends: Difference in perspective

Previously: Wirrin and the Fiends: Church Types The rest of the week passed quite pleasantly. Ketla and her mage did not, at any point, try to kill Wirrin. Wirrin did not, at any point, let up on taking in the scenery. But as they walked, Ketla pulled ahead less, and even deigned to look at the scenery with Wirrin. ‘Not much for the natural world?’ Wirrin had asked, as Ketla fidgeted and…

[keyboard-squared]

You're Missing One Thing from Your Serialised Story

Before you write that new serialised fiction story, don't miss this one crucial element!

Have you ever felt the breathless anticipation of seeing the next chapter from your new favourite story drop? There’s nothing quite like serial fiction. No other kind of story causes such eagerness and intense expectation, so it’s no wonder the medium has been around so long! Many of today’s beloved classics like Little Women and Great Expectations were originally serialised before being…

[voidtreader]

Depart 01

A planet looms into view, dimly lit by a smoldering red star: a pinprick of wavering light in the velvet void. From this small, backwater planet, with its small, dim star, a grand departure is underway. Its people are fleeing.

But the courier does not notice this speck outside in space. She is looking at the cargo bay, at the place where there should be cargo—her most important cargo yet in fact, the delivery that would prove her worth, the ancient artwork that should, by all accounts, be in a museum (and certainly is, in some fairer parallel universe)—but the bay does not contain it. The bay is, in fact, almost empty. Almost empty, except for the scattered crumbs of packing material, leading across the bay and to an ill-fitting panel on the back left wall.

Solas Vega is a tall, imposing woman: her broad right arm is covered in dark, thick tattooed tendrils; her left arm is an equally broad mechanical prosthetic fitted with menacing silver tools. Her face, now, looks somewhat serene, or calm—but she cannot completely hide her emotions, and her right knuckles grow pale and her fist clenches and releases, clenches and releases. She has learned to ground herself, in the past years: it’s a lifetime since she earned her callsign Havoc. Many of the younger couriers only know the new her; they assume the name is perhaps ironic, a joke. As if Havoc tells jokes, or lets them be told about her.

A man tried, once. To laugh at her. She was less forgiving then; hadn’t yet learned to control her rage. He had not joked again. Ever. The lights in the cargo bay flicker. The infestation must be big, Solas thinks. She doesn’t have room to worry about the possible dangers that entails, not with the empty cargo bay in front of her. You might think her priorities are questionable, considering the dangers of an energy-sapping swarm of jellyfish-like fungi living, floating, devouring, inside the electronic-stuffed panels of your space vessel, a space vessel currently drifting through the cold dead chasm of open space, where everything—life support systems, propulsion, communication—everything was dependent on said electronics functioning properly. If you do think this, if you think that maybe she should consider the present peril a more pressing issue than the missing (eaten? Probably eaten. Almost definitely eaten) cargo, then count yourself lucky you have not encountered the type of people Solas has to answer to.

[lokh]

oh my god. a manga where everyones actually wearing masks???

edit: NEVERMIND jumped the gun here it was just for one scene cos they were at a nail salon 😭

edit 2: hmm actually. depending on how recently this manga was drawn it could just be reflective of how not everyone wears masks. the customers are wearing masks in the salon but outside usually not but Sometimes. they are

edit 3: I WAS RIGHT??

[youlackconviction]

[above quote by chris odinson hemsworth about thor ragnarok]

stuff that happens in our LOKI discord server when we remember bullshit like that exists:

[adelidae]

i need to write.

[pochapal]

So, there was actually an aborted subplot of Natsuhi having an affair with Gohda. My understanding is that that was removed very early, but there are still some weird lines in EP1 that kinda sorta hint at that.

yeah this is actually weirdly fascinating to me. like, obviously don't say if it would be a detriment to my experience, but i wonder if there are other outlines of aborted plots/elements in this story of a similar vein

[deepspaceclawstation]

I genuinely don't understand starting on a piece of media from the middle like what do people get out of that

[joncronshawauthor]

Announcing: Wyvern Rider (A story in the Ravenglass Universe)

Good news, everyone! I am thrilled to announce that my new serialised story, “Wyvern Rider”, will be releasing weekly chapters every Saturday at 2pm UK time, starting May 25, exclusively in my Ream community. Set in the Ravenglass Universe, “Wyvern Rider” follows the journey of Irina, a young village girl who forms a profound bond with an injured wyvern hatchling named Nim. Under the guidance…

[xisadorapurlowx]

I'VE been thinking about doing a chapter serialisation for my new book. It would be completely free of course, but I want to know what you guys thought.

[machineofreality]

Wirrin and the Fiends: A great deal of digging

Previously: Wirrin and the Fiends: A meeting of explorers Ayan was true to his word, and the digging continued to be leisurely. Even Veyoc got puffed fairly quickly compared to Wirrin. She didn’t mind, though, she was still in no hurry. They had to pause most of the next morning to cut some saplings for supports to keep the walls of the emerging tunnel from flooding in on the excavation. The…

[prokopetz]

Do you happen to know the origin of the fantasy trope in which a deity's power directly corresponds to the number of their believers / the strength of their believers' faith?

I only know it from places like Discworld and DnD that I'm fairly confident are referencing some earlier source, but outside of Tinkerbell in Peter Pan, I can't think of of any specific work it might've come from, 20th-c fantasy really not being my wheelhouse.

Thank you!

That's an interesting question. In terms of immediate sources, I suspect, but cannot prove, that the trope's early appearances in both Dungeons & Dragons and Discworld are most immediately influenced by the oeuvre of Harlan Ellison – his best-known work on the topic, the short story collection Deathbird Stories, was published in 1975, which places it very slightly into the post-D&D era, though most of the stories it contains were published individually earlier – but Ellison certainly isn't the trope's originator. L Sprague de Camp and Fritz Leiber also play with the idea in various forms, as does Roger Zelazny, though only Zelazny's earliest work is properly pre-D&D.

Hm. Off the top of my head, the earliest piece of fantasy fiction I can think of that makes substantial use of the trope in its recognisably modern form is A E van Vogt's The Book of Ptath; it was first serialised in 1943, though no collected edition was published until 1947. I'm confident that someone who's more versed in early 20th Century speculative fiction than I am could push it back even earlier, though. Maybe one of this blog's better-read followers will chime in!

(Non-experts are welcome to offer examples as well, of course, but please double-check the publication date and make sure the work you have in mind was actually published prior to 1974.)

[mxcottonsocks]

Reading Like A Victorian

A while ago, I discovered the website 'Reading Like a Victorian', a digital humanities project from The Ohio State University and collaborators.

Since tumblr's been going through a bit of a serial-literature revival, I thought I would share...

Here are some extracts from the website's 'About Us':

RLV is an interactive timeline of the Victorian period. It focuses on serialized novels [...] and adds volume-format publications for context. 

When we read Victorian novels today, we do not read them in the form in which they originally came out. Most Victorian novels appeared either as “triple deckers,” three volumes released at one time, or as serials published monthly or weekly in periodicals or in pamphlet form. Serialized novels’ regularly timed, intermittent appearance made for a reading experience resembling what we do when we are awaiting the next weekly episode of Game of Thrones, watching installments of other TV serials in the meantime. Whenever we pick up a Penguin or Oxford paperback of a Victorian novel today, we are engaged in the equivalent of binge-watching a series that has already reached its broadcast ending [and is] a very different experience from what Victorian audiences were doing with novels. Reading Like a Victorian reproduces the “serial moment” experienced by Victorian readers [...]

More info and screenshots and so on below the cut:

[...] if reading serial installments at their original pace is valuable, it is even more valuable to read them alongside parts of novels and of other kinds of texts that Victorian readers could have been following at the same time [...] [...] a reader who, in 1847, had been following the part issues of both Dickens’s Dombey and Son and Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and then picked up Jane Eyre, published in volume form in October of that year, might notice in Florence Dombey, Becky Sharp, and Jane Eyre a pattern of motherless or orphaned girls trying to negotiate a hostile world on their own. While this figure is well known to be a character type in Victorian fiction perfectly embodied by Jane Eyre and Florence Dombey, Becky Sharp does not often emerge among the heroines who fit that type; reading the novels simultaneously foregrounds parallels between Becky, Florence, and Jane that are not at all obvious if their storylines are experienced separately

I find that, for browsing, the website is easier to use on a computer or tablet than a phone, but it's ok on phone to search for something specific.

The timeline:

Here's what the timeline looks like:

It shows 12 months at a time, and using the left and right arrows will move you back or forward by a month. You can use the 'Jump To Date' function to navigate to a different twelve-month period. Or you can use the 'Author Search' function to navigate to particular works if you know the author's name.

In the above screenshot of the timeline, which shows the period January to December 1852, there are several works shown, including:

ongoing serialised works which had at least one installment published prior to 1852;

works which began serialisation during 1852;

works published in three-volume format during 1852;

other works published during 1852

Details about each work:

You can click on the bar that represents a book's publication to get a drop-down that provides information about that book, its publication, and links to help you read the relevant serial parts.

Here's what happens if you click on Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford:

On the left of the drop-down, there's some general information about the work, its publication history, and how to use the links.

On the right, there's information and links to help you experience the book in its serial parts: it separates out the parts, indicates the month and the year they were published, and what chapters of the work were published in that part. It also provides notes on each part where helpful. There is a scroll-bar at the right of the drop-down, so you can scroll down to the later installments of the work.

[I chose Cranford as an example as it helps demonstrate the value of the Reading Like a Victorian website... From what I understand, Gaskell initially wrote 'Our Society at Cranford' as a standalone piece of short fiction, but was encouraged to write more, so further pieces also set in the fictional town of Cranford were published intermittently in the same magazine over the next year or so. While a particularly dedicated Gaskell fan who wanted to 'read along' with Cranford following the original publication could probably search 1.5-years-worth of a weekly magazine to find the 9 issues which included the material which would later be published as Cranford, the Reading Like a Victorian website has already done that work for them... and also for anyone else who might be interested, but not quite that interested.]

The links

You can then click on an individual chapter to get links to various places to read it online:

When available / where possible, the website tends to include links to:

a facsimile copy of either the relevant serial part in the original publication, or in an 'annual' or similar volume collecting together the content of that publication, or a volume-form edition of that work if the work was not published serially or if facsimile copies of the original serialised publication are not available. [Most of the facsimiles are hosted by either the Internet Archive or the Hathi Trust Digital Library, but some are hosted as part of smaller, more specific collections, such as - in the case of Cranford - Dickens Journals Online which provides online access to the journals/magazines edited by Charles Dickens);

the text, usually on Project Gutenberg (this is usually the volume-form text, so the exact content and chapter breaks and so on may be different than originally published in serial parts; the Reading Like A Victorian website will generally explain when this is the case);

audio recordings, usually volunteer recordings from Librivox (again, the recordings are usually based on the volume-form text, so the exact content and chapter breaks and so on may be slightly different than originally published in the serial parts).

So yeah, I just thought it was a cool website and worth sharing. I believe the website is already used as a resource by some University courses and for academic research, but it can also be used by book clubs and to aid personal reading, etc. I'm using it to inform a personal reading project for 2024-26 where I follow along with six or seven novels serialised in 1864-66.

To save a scroll to the top, here's the link to the RLV website again: Reading Like A Victorian (osu.edu)

[If you want to join an already-planned read-along based on the original serialisation schedule, @dickensdaily will be doing Charles Dickens's historical novel Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty from mid-February 2024 to late-November 2024, to follow along with the original weekly publication of the novel in Master Humphreys Clock from February 1841 to November 1841. I personally found Barnaby Rudge a really engaging, thought-provoking read, and I'm really looking forward to reading it again. (Anyone with particular triggers or other reasons to be wary of the content or language used in older books may find it helpful to look up content warnings for the book before making a decision to read it.)]

[boombox-fuckboy]

🌻?

The etymology of the pod in podcast comes from ipod, which is attributed to scifi "pod bay" terminology, which of course comes from pod as a space (like, capsule). You keep stuff in it. This, as far as I can tell, comes from the concept of plant pods, most famous of which are from family fabaceae, the legumes (beans and peas).

While the word podcast dates back to ~2004, serialised audio fiction is much older, with radio plays dating to the 1920s. Legume consumption has that beat by at least 58,000 years. But verbal storytelling? Who's to say.

[fanonical]

i love that fanfic is continuing the tradition of serialised fiction. there's something nice about being able to get this episodic fiction dripfed to me by some internet rando, you know?