"prequel" rant

I wish people wouldn't label things "prequels" in series when the "prequel" was written before the non-prequels. That's not a prequel. The word "prequel" was made up in the 1970s to specifically mean a book that was written later but comes before the other books in the series.

Rant over.

Also, I've typed "prequel" so many times that it looks weird...

If it is written before the other books, it should be in the numbering already. So how can you even have a prequel written before anything else?...

Just thinking aloud.

I was thinking the same thing, yet I know I've seen it. For example, the Aria manga series from Kozue Amano - the series is "Aria" and it's counted from Aria, vol. 1, but there is a prequel "Aqua" that is Aqua, vol. 1 & 2 - the comic switched magazine publishers after two volumes and got a new name, so even though "Aqua" came first, it's usually listed as a "prequel", since it has a separate numbering system and title, though it's all ultimately the same series.

(In the animated adaptation, "Aqua" wasn't given a strict by-the-book treatment like some of the "Aria" chapters, but was sort of wedged in with flashbacks, and then a special OAD was created to cover the rest of it shortly before the third & final season, but it was treated as an extended flashback/prequel.)

This might be an edge case where it's more or less two series merged together, because of the different publishers... And you don't strictly need to read "Aqua" to follow "Aria", since Amano knew that not all the readers would have read the first two volumes. The first American publisher didn't even bother to import "Aqua" but went straight into "Aria".

http://www.librarything.com/series/Aria+-+Kozue+Amano

Then call them Aqua 1 and Aqua 2 and give them numbers of 0.1 and 0.2 - I had done such things in similar cases when a series flows into another one...

Typing while you editing so did not see the last paragraph . I would have still called them Aqua 1 and Aqua 2 and used the series description to explain their addition to the series :)

#2 by AnnieMod> That's what should be the case, yes. The one that keeps coming up again and again is The Lord of the Rings series having The Hobbit listed as a prequel. Of course, this is a whole other rant in that (in my opinion) the LotR series should be just those books that actually compose (shockingly enough) The Lord of the Rings and all the rest of the Middle Earth stuff could exist under a separate Middle Earth series.

I've ran across other examples but they don't spring to mind at the moment.

Yes, that's probably the way I'd do it if I were messing with the series now. It's been a couple years since I did the CK on it, and the publisher at the time was calling "Aqua" a prequel in the marketing blurbs - I think it's even on the back of the book that it's a prequel.

So it's not a prequel because it came first, but it's treated as one everywhere I've seen, I guess is what I'm saying? So it made sense that even though I numbered them 0.1 and 0.2, they should be named that way to follow convention and indicate it's an included series that is a little bit separate (which is how "prequel" reads to me).

>7 keristars:

Yeah - I know what you mean :) But then publishers tend to call things the way they want so they can sell them.

>6 brightcopy:
I refuse to participate in this conversation - if LOTR is a series, then so is Don Quixote - there is no difference between the 3 books in LOTR and the 2 in Don Quixote. But then I cannot win this argument so... I refuse to participate in the conversation:)
LOTR should be a part of a Middle Earth series eventually - together with the different books that were published later and are part of the world... But then they are probably not strictly a series...

PS: Just looked at that series. Silmarillion a prequel in the LOTR series? Uhm... ok...

And the reason why it matters to me is that prequels are written with spoilers for other books in the series. The prime example (in movie terms) is the Star Wars prequel. It's fairly important to know that if you watch the prequels before the original trilogy, you're going to spoil some aspects of the originals (of course, no one should watch those dreadful things anyway).

#8 by AnnieMod> Just looked at that series. Silmarillion a prequel in the LOTR series? Uhm... ok...

Strangely enough, that ones more plausible than The Hobbit example. The reason being that The Silmarillion was fully written after LoTR, even though parts of it predated both Hobbit and LoTR. Plus it's a bit of a special case, anyway, as it's a bit of a Frankenstein's monster partly sewn together by Christopher Tolkein after his father's death.

Now as far as LoTR as a series: I'm completely fine with a Don Quixote series, if those books were actually published separately.

>10 brightcopy:

Book 2 of Don Quixote is published years after Book 1 and a lot of publishers are doing 2 volume editions... But I still think that it is not a series, nor is LOTR.

Well - a lot of books were written after LOTR for the Middle Earth, it does not make them prequels. :)

#11 by AnnieMod> If that's not a series (a book and its sequel), then heaven help us.

As far as your last paragraph, I don't actually argue that The Silmarillion should be treated as a prequel. I'm just saying that it's more understandable than to treat The Hobbit that way, due to it's creation and publication history. It's more of an edge case.

In my ideal world, LT Series allow you to independently set the internal chronology order and the publication chronology order for a book (or derive publication from the Original Publication Date CK data). Oh, and they also hide omnibuses from the Series page by default and use the Contained in/by data to let you expand it out if you want to.

Ah, to dream.

#12 Yes, that would be marvellous. I have several omnibus editions of two or three-volume series and if I've got the omnibus I don't need to have it as a series!

>12 brightcopy: Agree on your last paragraph :)

For the DQ and LOTR - they are long novels, just split in "books" for one or another reason. But as I said - won't argue :)

#14 by AnnieMod> You sure are "not arguing" a lot. ;)

LT Series is a flexible term. One of the things it encompasses are multi-volume/multi-book megaworks that are published separately. This is especially true in the case of DQ where they're published separately a decade apart. Otherwise, you use a lot of information by throwing out books just because their creators intended them to be one long story. LT Series are meant to capture this information and personally I'm glad of it.

Yeah... occasionally. Despite my best intention just to say what I think and go away :) Must be the moon or something ;)

:) And that is why I am not deleting someone else's series or "fix" them in such cases. I would not make a series out of LOTR or DQ but I would not remove one that already exists. There are a lot of "correct" ways to do things in LT - and this is what makes it the site it is.

Of course, before contains/contained in, Series was basically the only way to show that Don Quixote Vol 2 was linked to Don Quixote Vol 1 and are the same as Don Quixote (Vol 1+2)... though that's perhaps common sense with these titles, plenty of individual volumes might have different titles and later be published more commonly in a single work... or the individual volumes might have a different title than the combined one. (Thinking of LOTR here, and the Illuminatus! trilogy and so on.)

In theory, Contained in/by could free us from these types of series. That falls apart when you consider that it doesn't have a tick box for "omnibus". So you can't distinguish, say, the single volume LoTR from a book club omnibus that includes several of Asimov's books.

#13: That's far from the end-all and be-all of omnibuses, though; Royal Flush is an omnibus of Nero Wolfe books that contains books 1, 19 and 27, and not because those form a subseries in any way.

If we're going to get off on a "these books are a series?" rant, then I'm not sure anything beats the various Discworld series.

Actually the Discworld ones are as clear series as any that I can think of :)

I don't know, I think Discworld: City Watch, Discworld: Death, Discworld: Gods, Discworld: Industrial, Discworld: Rincewind, Discworld: Tiffany Aching, Discworld: Witches, Discworld: Gods and Discworld: Young Adult might be a tad much.

Not really - the story inside of each of them is progressing on its own... while the whole series is more a "Books set in the world" than a real series :)

Disagree. Those sub series are generally "books with the same characters." Sometimes that's not even all that true. Discworld: Industrial, for example, contains (among others) Moving Pictures, Monstrous Regiment and Making Money. Having read all those, I have to say to call them a related story isn't really cutting it for me.

Discworld books are incredibly standalone. That's the thing they have most in common with each other. As such, the plain Discworld series makes FAR more sense to me than almost all of these subseries.

#19 Oh yes. I have other omnibuses like that. It's just when the omnibus covers the whole series that I find it irritating, but as AnnieMod says there are lots of ways to do things on LT so I ceratinly don't make such CK changes. It's just an "If I ruled LT" wish!

If I ruled LT, I'd blast all the book entries people have where they make their OWN "omnibuses" by just cataloging multiple books as one entry.

I'd also make the color scheme lime green. Because I like the color green and limes are tasty.

#24 the disworld ones are thematic series. pTerry is exploring different ideas in each of the sub-series and even if no/few characters are shared the ideas in the books of the subseries share more with each other than they do with any of the other Discworld books. Besides they're all listed in the offical DW reading order guide.

That for me is the key in any series. In what order should I read the books? If the series info doesn't help then I wouldn't want it in the series field.

#27: If the series info doesn't tell you want order to read the books, you don't want it? A lot of series I'm familiar with, non-fiction & gaming, don't really have a natural order. We could add publication order, but it's not incredibly important to use who are tagging these series, and may actually be less functional than just leaving them in alphabetical order.

Discworld happens to be an example of a "series" where I wouldn't recommend a newcomer to to start with the first one: as brightcopy says, the books are quite standalone, and The Colour of Magic is too different, and (IMMO) too inferior, to most of what came later to be a good starting point.

Series order is also of limited interest with many young adult series (eg. The Three Investigators) where events of previous books have even less impact on later ones.

So in addition to what prosfilaes said, I'd argue there's lots of fiction series where order is less than very important too. Yet these are surely perfectly legitimate series.

(Unlike LotR. A single work is not a series. That's my story and I'm sticking to it!)