With the Middle East crises and the three stooges, Michele, Sarah, and Christine, the last few blog posts have been a little on the heavy side, so today let me sail into smooth seas and soft breezes to discuss a trivial thing that sometimes irks the hell out of me:  series in fiction.  It’s a criticism of my own writing profession—a self-criticism, in a way.  We all have our favorite characters and we tend to look for sequels where they appear again and again.  However, what I’m complaining about is when writers’ do it just for the almighty dollar.

Fictional characters become famous largely due to series, of course.  Sherlock Holmes would not be as famous if Conan Doyle had only written one Holmes mystery.  Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot would not be as famous if Christie had only written one of their mysteries.  John Carter, nearly forgotten by now, I suppose, would not be as famous if Rice Burroughs had written only one Martian story—and probably Star Wars would never have been made for lack of all those names lifted from them.  We readers love our series because we love the characters in them.

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