In What Order Should You Read the Series?

June 12, 2008 @ 11:00 am

My recent blog post about the Dune prequels brought up an interesting point about series order. Said commenter Secher Nbiw in his comment:

As you pointed out, there are soon to be twelve novels written by Brian and Kevin, while there are only six novels written by the original author. For someone who is new to Dune, that means you will have to worm your way through perhaps six novels that are inferior in every which way to the originals, before you reach the originals.

It took me a minute to figure out what Secher was talking about. What do you mean, you have to worm your way through the Brian Herbert/Kevin Anderson prequels before tackling the original Dune? And then it hit me that there are plenty of readers out there whose natural inclination is to read a series in fictive chronological order. Under that scheme, Secher’s right: The Butlerian Jihad comes first, and then The Machine Crusade, and then more BH/KA subpar-ness, and finally you hit the original Dune several thousand pages later.

So the question is: in what order should you read an SF/F series, and why?

It’s an especially pertinent question to genre fiction, because serial storytelling is so much a part of what we do. I don’t recall anyone ever arguing or much caring whether you should read Richard Ford’s Independence Day before The Sportswriter, or God forbid skip straight to The Lay of the Land. Even most genre fiction besides science fiction doesn’t have this problem; I don’t think Sue Grafton gives a bloody razor whether you read E Is for Evidence before G Is for Gingivitis or P Is for Pterodactyl. (What, those aren’t the actual titles? Fine, you go look them up.)

But in science fiction and fantasy, it matters deeply whether the Empire struck back before or after the clones attacked. When I sit my children down to watch the Star Wars movies, you can be damn sure that I will make sure they’re properly shocked and surprised to see (spoiler alert!) Darth Vader reveal himself as Luke Skywalker’s father. And I will continue to send anonymous nastygrams to HarperCollins editors insisting that The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe comes before The Magician’s Nephew until they pry those old editions from my cold, dead hands.

This peculiarity of science fiction and fantasy and related genres is a weakness related, I think, to the overemphasis we often place on the plot in such stories. The obsession with “spoilers” is a related weakness. It reduces stories to a hollow enterprise of surface tension and mechanical plot twists. As if an SF/F story is nothing more than manipulative melodrama + funky SFnal idea.

But it’s a weakness I share with so many others. Believe me, if someone had told me ahead of time what happens at the Red Wedding in book 3 of George R.R. Martin’s “Song of Ice and Fire,” I would have been pissed.

So back to the question. What order should you read the books in? The easy answer, of course, is that you should read the series in whatever order the author believes you should read it in. It’s the author’s world, after all, and the author’s decision.

But can we always trust an author to know what’s right for his/her series? George Lucas would have you believe that you’ll get the most out of the Star Wars series if your first exposure to it is through the lens of a mercantile dispute between the Trade Federation and the planet of Naboo. And yet the number of people who would prefer to have seen episodes I-III of Star Wars before episodes IV-VI could probably fit into Yoda’s jockstrap. C.S. Lewis is on record telling readers to start the Narnia series with the somewhat-lacking sixth book, The Magician’s Nephew, instead of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Isaac Asimov suggested that you should read Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation before actually tackling Foundation, which is kind of, well, dumb.

I can think of a number of authors whose judgment grew somewhat… suspect, I guess you could say, as they grew older. Robert Heinlein didn’t hesitate to start trotting out old characters and planting seeds in long-fallow fields as he grumbled his way towards the grave. Orson Scott Card seems hell-bent on creating alternate storylines in the Ender universe, creating great consternation for borderline OCD sufferers like me who can’t decide whether to file Ender’s Shadow before Speaker for the Dead (where it belongs chronologically) or after Children of the Mind (where it belongs in order of publication). (Honestly, I think he would have been better off stopping after Speaker for the Dead.)

So let me answer the fucking question already. Personally, my feeling is that, when presented with a series of interconnected SF novels, it’s best to follow order of publication. I find that there’s a fascinating progression in the way authors gradually develop and unveil their imaginary universes which is part of the fun. One of the oldest and most satisfying traditions of Western literature is to begin stories in medias res, just like Homer did in The Odyssey. This lets the reader develop a sense of the characters, the setting, and the conflict; it gives us a viewpoint for the background that’s to follow. And it taps into that Western cultural drive for discovery. Give us something to explore! Show us the map, point out that blank area on the edge where Thar Be Dragons, and then let us get on over there and explore the sucker. Only textbooks start off by explaining everything outright. Where’s the fun in that?

Of course, there are exceptions where the first published work shouldn’t necessarily be read first. I’m thinking of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, which was begun decades before The Lord of the Rings ever saw the light of day — in the trenches during World War I, if I’m not mistaken — but only hit the shelves posthumously in 1977. Even had he completed the book back before LOTR hit the shelves, The Silmarillion would have been, frankly, unpublishable. And yet… if you crack open The Fellowship of the Ring without knowing anything about the First Age and the struggle against Morgoth for the Silmarils, you’re missing crucial context that Tolkien clearly intended to put there all along.

But to Secher Nbiw and all those neophyte Dune readers out there, I say: you’ll get the most bang for your buck if you pick up Dune and work your way through all six Frank Herbert books before you tackle the BH/KA books.