story cycles

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 16 May 2002, 15:09 · from urth-v0205.mbox · original

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From: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" <ddanehy at siebel.com>
Subject: RE: (urth) Re: story cycles
Date: Thu, 16 May 2002 08:09:13 -0700
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David Duffy wrote:

> Apropos suites and mosaics, there is a much older model such as the
> stories about Robin Hood etc.  There, they are cycles.  They=20
> may represent episodes in the one narrative, variations on a theme.

... which, as I understand it, is precisely _not_ what a suite or mosaic
is -- you're talking about what in modern commercial writing terms would
simply be called a series, stories which perhaps build up a more complete
picture of a central character or theme, but which don't really interact
beyond that. The point of the pure "story suite" is that the stories=20
actually comment on and, in a sense, revise each other -- that the whole
is not only greater than the sum of the parts, but _different_ from the
sum of the parts; the parts heterodyne or synergize or whatever this
year's term is for things working together to produce effects not clearly
obvious from the two separately.

The mosaic (as I am understanding the term) is somewhere in between --=20
the stories are more separate, like the stories of a "series," but work
together to produce an emergent picture. I picked Mike Resnick's=20
"Birthright" as an amazingly clear (to me) example; better known but=20
perhaps not quite as clear would be Cordwainer Smith's tales of the
Instrumentality of Mankind, the Underpeople, and all that ... where the
point is not just that they share a common future (like, say, Niven's
"Known Space" or Heinlein's "Future History") but that they build a=20
total effect that is, again, greater-than-the-sum but not essentially
different from what's clearly present in the parts. An even less clear
example, because it probably wasn't planned as such but has emerged as
such, would be Le Guin's "Hainish" stories.

I suspect that the various Lupiverse series, taken together, can be
said to constitute something of a mosaic ... I don't think there's
anything emergent from the whole that isn't present in the parts (that
would be almost contradictory to the whole holographic style), but
the parts together imply a much larger and very whole picture of the
universe.

--Blattid

--=20

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