Stealth Worldbuilding & the Other Kind of Standalone Fantasy

[cassiphone]

Originally published at tansyrr.com. You can comment here or there.

I have been talking this week about the value of standalone fantasy, and composing a list of my favourite single volume fantasy novels, just to prove that yes they exist, and yes there are good ones. But what came up most commonly in the discussion surrounding those posts is how

Comments

[editormum]

Do you know what some of my favourite "stand alone series" are (other than Vorkosigan!)? Johanna Lindsey's Malory-Anderson historical romances, and the Delaney books by Iris Johansen, Fayrene Preston and Kay Hooper. Why yes, I DID read a lot of historical romance books in my teens... :)

[tillianion]

Oh yea, the Malory books. Fantabulous :)

[jo1967]

Okay, my comment about Charles De Lint really belongs over here...'cos he is awesome at this stuff.

[capnoblivious]

Blue Moon Rising may have been the first time I came across fairy tale subversion. I have a real soft spot for the forest kingdom books - so, you know, I'm pleased to learn there's at least one I haven't read. :)

[cassiphone]

Sorry about the spoiler then, though in fairness it's revealed right at the beginning and also I'm pretty sure other people may have figured it out all on their own without needing a book to tell them about it...

[capnoblivious]

(a) Yes, someone mentioned it a while band and (b) I am remarkably spoiler insensitive. :)

[narrelle]

PG Wodehouse did this a lot. The Jeeves and Wooster books are very well known, as are the Blandings Castle stories, but young men from the Drones Club often moved around between sets. I've just started a Jeeves and Wooster book, Aunts Aren't Gentlemen, which opens with a reference to the love match between Tipton Plimsoll and Veronica, niece of Lord Emsworth - and I read *that* book a very short while ago. And several Mr Mulliner stories feature the antics of young Bobbie Wickham, who gave Bertie Wooster a run for his money in several of his books. I was charmed when I first learned that all these stories really do take place in the one universe.

[cassiphone]

Yes, it's pretty cool how much shared universe stuff is out there that isn't genre at all - or not our genre!

[ashamel]

This can go two ways. It's either charming and consistent, or just indicative of an author running out of ideas and recycling things in different configurations, needlessly. The consensus on Isaac Asimov putting the Robot and Foundation stories together seems to be the latter.

Stephen King is another one who has intricate connections between almost all of his work, from the trivial to the profound. I think it works, in part because he is willing to redefine things along the way, but to others it just makes the scope of the work smaller and less consequential.