The Problem of Expanding a Short Story into a Novel
Science fiction caught on in the mass market through the pulp magazines. As a result, early science fiction was almost entirely a short-story genre, and the novel market developed only after there was an established stable of short-story writers. The idea that one started in short stories and only then moved into novels would persist for many decades. Even as late as the first decade of the millennium editors at conventions would encourage aspiring authors to focus on short stories for periodical markets until they had made a name for themselves and only start writing novels at a point when they would find a more welcoming reception for their novels at the publishing house.
Many well-known early science fiction novels started as short stories. The Dragonriders of Pern 'verse had its start as a short story, "Weyr Search," which was published in Analog by John W. Campbell. It and a subsequent story, "Dragon Rider," were combined with material from an unpublished third story to create Dragonflight. Similarly, The Ship Who Sang was a fix-up of several different stories about Helva the brainship and her various brawns (normal-human partners), and spawned so much fan interest that Jim Baen arranged for a number of collaborations set in the same universe but dealing with other brainships, based upon his prior success with the Man-Kzin Wars series, which opened a very specific part of Larry Niven's Known Space 'verse to collaborators.
However, not every expansion of short story to novel works so well. In the wake of Jim Baen's success with the Man-Kzin Wars series and Brainships series, other publishing houses decided to try the waters. One of the things they tried was taking classic science fiction short stories and expanding them into novels -- but this didn't always work as well as anticipated, partly because not every short story lends itself to such expansion, however well-loved it may be.
One big example from that era was the expansion of Isaac Asimov's classic short story "Nightfall" from the early John W. Campbell Astounding era into a novel, with Robert Silverberg as a collaborator. In theory the novel version of Nightfall was supposed to give the reader a richer and more in-depth view of the world where night comes but once every thousand years. Instead, many readers found it tedious, even repetitive in its scenes of mass panic as the setting of the world's multiple suns allowed the people to see the stars.
Furthermore, many people found that the longer format only gave the reader more time to notice just how thin the worldbuilding was. Of course one must remember that the original short story was written at at time when meticulous worldbuilding wasn't a big thing in science fiction. It was a time when one of the major principles of writing science fiction was to change one element of one's world and see how the consequences worked out. Given that mindset, perhaps it should not be so astonishing that the society portrayed in the short story version was pretty much the society of the story's present except for being on a far distant planet in a system with six suns, and the people having numbers instead of family names.
When you're reading the short story, you're so riveted on the approaching menace of darkness that you really don't have any time to think about why a culture in a world of perpetual light should even develop electric lights, or how they could develop mining, subways, railroad tunnels, and a whole lot of other underground construction without ever having to confront their responses to the unfamiliar sensation of darkness. Or even how the supposed astronomical phenomenon that exposes their world to darkness shows that the author hasn't thought about the scale of a planet, and is treating their entire civilization as if it were a city comparable to New York. If you think of it at all, it's only after you've finished reading the story, and are thinking yeah, but....
When it's expanded to novel length, you're reading it over a longer span of time, which gives your mind more time to pick at the edges of the setting. This is especially true when you can't read it at a single sitting, but have to read it a few chapters at a time, in and around the various obligations of your life. Every time you put it aside to do something else, it's an opportunity to think about it, and consider the weak points, the spots where one or another detail makes the whole world feel flimsy.
Recently I've been reading Joe Steele, Harry Turtledove's novelization of the short story by the same title. Unlike "Nightfall," I've never read the short story, which was printed in an anthology, Stars: Original Stories in Honor of Janis Ian. However, I'm wondering if some of the elements that jar in the novel may have worked better in the short version, especially if it read more as social commentary than alternate history.
In particular, I find that the presence of three of his henchmen -- Molotov (under his birth name, Scriabin, although his given name is Americanized as "Vince), Kaganovich (shortened to Kagan), and Mikoian -- makes me wonder about the likelihood of all three of their families immigrating to the US and winding up in places where they could gravitate to this alternate Stalin who, as the line in "God and the FBI" has it, was a Democrat. It makes me want to know more about the backstory, to tease apart the social forces that led to not just one change, but several.
And then I get to the scene of the trial of the Supreme Court Four, and see several famous World War II generals as military judges, with Ray Spruance (one of the leading admirals in the Pacific) as chairman of the tribunal, and I realize just how effective this scene is in showing us how an alternate Stalin in America would draw actual Americans in leadership roles into his orbit -- and how the story would've been so much more effective at novel length if his henchmen had been people we knew in slightly different roles in our own timeline. Not necessarily actual gangsters like Al Capone, but perhaps some politicians who are just shady enough to have some ties to the mob.
Similarly, at novel length there's so much more time to wonder why American-born Joe Steele should have such a ferocious animus against Trotsky. Yes, Trotsky lived in the US briefly before the Bolshevik Revolution, but he was in New York City, while this alternate Stalin is supposed to have been born and raised in California (having immigrated with his parents as a "bun in the oven"). Given that Trotsky is supposed to have been involved in the production of a motion picture during his time in the US, it's possible that some butterfly effect led to him going to Hollywood for a while, and thus crossing Joe Steele's path -- but if this is the case, I'd sure like to know more about it. As it stands, it really feels more like either transtemporal crosstalk (which gets into the Many Interacting Worlds Interpretation in quantum mechanics) or the author just not thinking through the implications of the change and treating "Trotsky is Stalin's bete noir" as a given to his character.
So far, they haven't been so severe that I'd want to throw the book at the wall, but they do sort of jar here and there. Someone who's more sensitive to such things (especially someone who didn't grow up in a literary desert, where one couldn't afford to be picky because books were so terribly scarce) might find it simply too much of a strain on their disbelief suspenders.
Many well-known early science fiction novels started as short stories. The Dragonriders of Pern 'verse had its start as a short story, "Weyr Search," which was published in Analog by John W. Campbell. It and a subsequent story, "Dragon Rider," were combined with material from an unpublished third story to create Dragonflight. Similarly, The Ship Who Sang was a fix-up of several different stories about Helva the brainship and her various brawns (normal-human partners), and spawned so much fan interest that Jim Baen arranged for a number of collaborations set in the same universe but dealing with other brainships, based upon his prior success with the Man-Kzin Wars series, which opened a very specific part of Larry Niven's Known Space 'verse to collaborators.
However, not every expansion of short story to novel works so well. In the wake of Jim Baen's success with the Man-Kzin Wars series and Brainships series, other publishing houses decided to try the waters. One of the things they tried was taking classic science fiction short stories and expanding them into novels -- but this didn't always work as well as anticipated, partly because not every short story lends itself to such expansion, however well-loved it may be.
One big example from that era was the expansion of Isaac Asimov's classic short story "Nightfall" from the early John W. Campbell Astounding era into a novel, with Robert Silverberg as a collaborator. In theory the novel version of Nightfall was supposed to give the reader a richer and more in-depth view of the world where night comes but once every thousand years. Instead, many readers found it tedious, even repetitive in its scenes of mass panic as the setting of the world's multiple suns allowed the people to see the stars.
Furthermore, many people found that the longer format only gave the reader more time to notice just how thin the worldbuilding was. Of course one must remember that the original short story was written at at time when meticulous worldbuilding wasn't a big thing in science fiction. It was a time when one of the major principles of writing science fiction was to change one element of one's world and see how the consequences worked out. Given that mindset, perhaps it should not be so astonishing that the society portrayed in the short story version was pretty much the society of the story's present except for being on a far distant planet in a system with six suns, and the people having numbers instead of family names.
When you're reading the short story, you're so riveted on the approaching menace of darkness that you really don't have any time to think about why a culture in a world of perpetual light should even develop electric lights, or how they could develop mining, subways, railroad tunnels, and a whole lot of other underground construction without ever having to confront their responses to the unfamiliar sensation of darkness. Or even how the supposed astronomical phenomenon that exposes their world to darkness shows that the author hasn't thought about the scale of a planet, and is treating their entire civilization as if it were a city comparable to New York. If you think of it at all, it's only after you've finished reading the story, and are thinking yeah, but....
When it's expanded to novel length, you're reading it over a longer span of time, which gives your mind more time to pick at the edges of the setting. This is especially true when you can't read it at a single sitting, but have to read it a few chapters at a time, in and around the various obligations of your life. Every time you put it aside to do something else, it's an opportunity to think about it, and consider the weak points, the spots where one or another detail makes the whole world feel flimsy.
Recently I've been reading Joe Steele, Harry Turtledove's novelization of the short story by the same title. Unlike "Nightfall," I've never read the short story, which was printed in an anthology, Stars: Original Stories in Honor of Janis Ian. However, I'm wondering if some of the elements that jar in the novel may have worked better in the short version, especially if it read more as social commentary than alternate history.
In particular, I find that the presence of three of his henchmen -- Molotov (under his birth name, Scriabin, although his given name is Americanized as "Vince), Kaganovich (shortened to Kagan), and Mikoian -- makes me wonder about the likelihood of all three of their families immigrating to the US and winding up in places where they could gravitate to this alternate Stalin who, as the line in "God and the FBI" has it, was a Democrat. It makes me want to know more about the backstory, to tease apart the social forces that led to not just one change, but several.
And then I get to the scene of the trial of the Supreme Court Four, and see several famous World War II generals as military judges, with Ray Spruance (one of the leading admirals in the Pacific) as chairman of the tribunal, and I realize just how effective this scene is in showing us how an alternate Stalin in America would draw actual Americans in leadership roles into his orbit -- and how the story would've been so much more effective at novel length if his henchmen had been people we knew in slightly different roles in our own timeline. Not necessarily actual gangsters like Al Capone, but perhaps some politicians who are just shady enough to have some ties to the mob.
Similarly, at novel length there's so much more time to wonder why American-born Joe Steele should have such a ferocious animus against Trotsky. Yes, Trotsky lived in the US briefly before the Bolshevik Revolution, but he was in New York City, while this alternate Stalin is supposed to have been born and raised in California (having immigrated with his parents as a "bun in the oven"). Given that Trotsky is supposed to have been involved in the production of a motion picture during his time in the US, it's possible that some butterfly effect led to him going to Hollywood for a while, and thus crossing Joe Steele's path -- but if this is the case, I'd sure like to know more about it. As it stands, it really feels more like either transtemporal crosstalk (which gets into the Many Interacting Worlds Interpretation in quantum mechanics) or the author just not thinking through the implications of the change and treating "Trotsky is Stalin's bete noir" as a given to his character.
So far, they haven't been so severe that I'd want to throw the book at the wall, but they do sort of jar here and there. Someone who's more sensitive to such things (especially someone who didn't grow up in a literary desert, where one couldn't afford to be picky because books were so terribly scarce) might find it simply too much of a strain on their disbelief suspenders.