Tag Archives: short story cycle

How do the Two Chronicles Compare?

Seventy-five years ago, Doubleday published Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (TMC). One month ago, Pole to Pole Publishing released my book, The Seastead Chronicles (TSC). A comparison of similarities and differences follow.

Similarities

Both books (1) contain the word “Chronicles” in their titles, (2) concern colonization, (3) belong in the science fiction genre, and (4) could be classified as fix-ups. I’m hard pressed to think of more similarities. On to the differences.

Creative Intent

Bradbury wrote all the short stories for TMC separately, with no intent of combining them. A publisher suggested the Chronicles idea to him. Bradbury then revised the stories to fit better, and added bridging narratives to form a consistent overall story.

I wrote a seastead short story with no initial plan to write more. After that, my muse suggested other stories and the notion of combining them took over. For that reason, TSC stories required no revision, and no bridging material to get them to mesh. Rather than calling it a fix-up novel, you could call TSC a “short story cycle.”

Plot Structure

Bradbury ordered his stories in a logical sequence and divided them into three sections, each occurring over specific designated years. Stories in the first part concerned exploration and initial contact with Martians, the second part with colonization and war, and the third part with the aftermath of what’s happened to humans on Earth and to Martians on Mars.

Although stories in The Seastead Chronicles appear in sequential order, I didn’t group them into parts, nor mention any specific years. The early stories depict initial seasteads and the search for seabed resources. The middle stories show the spread of aquastates and war between them as colonization proceeds. Later stories portray the blossoming of a new, oceanic culture.

Themes

Any discussion of story themes becomes subjective, since readers interpret tales in individual ways. Bradbury explored many deep themes in TMC, but overall I believe he intended a comparison of the colonization of Mars to the 19th Century conquest of indigenous people in the American West. The stories promote living in harmony with nature and suggest that those who don’t do so end up destroying nature and themselves.

For TSC, readers can draw their own conclusions. However, I intended to focus on humanity’s creative impulses, rather than its destructive ones. Though moving to a new environment introduces dangers, it also promotes new ways of thinking. From those, new cultures can arise, including fresh art, music, language, and religious beliefs. If you’re looking for real-life parallels, consider that all historical colonization efforts have changed the colonizers as they adapted to their new home.

Style

Bradbury wrote in a poetic, lyrical style, rich in imagery and metaphor. You can tell he loved the sound and rhythm of words. Few science fiction authors of his time wrote that way, so his prose stands out. By contrast, I’d characterize mine as plain and unadorned. I strive to make my sentences descriptive and easy to read.

Influences

The Wikipedia article on TMC lists several people whose works inspired Bradbury, including Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sherwood Anderson, and John Steinbeck. Editor Walter Bradbury (no relation) at Doubleday gave him the idea of combining his Martian-themed short stories into a single book.

For TSC, my influences start with Andrew Gudgel, who heard about seasteads and mentioned them to me. As general science fiction influences, I’d cite Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ray Bradbury.

Final Thoughts

In this brief blogpost, I’ve missed some similarities and differences. To perform your own comparison, you’ll have to read both books and decide for yourself. Don’t take the word of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

July 6, 2025Permalink Leave a comment

Cycling Through the World of Short Stories

What do you call a book-length collection of short stories? An anthology, a fix-up novel, or a short story cycle? Let’s explore the terms and see which applies to my recent book.

Definitions

For an anthology, a compiler or editor groups stories, poems, plays, or songs together. Often, they share a common theme, but the pieces need not have been written by the same author.

In a fix-up novel, individual short stories by the same author appear in the same novel. The author may have written them with no thought of grouping them later, so may have to alter (fix them up) to get them to fit well together.

When an author writes short stories intending to combine them later, we call that a short story cycle. In these books, each chapter stands alone as its own story, but fits with the others to tell a larger story.

What About The Seastead Chronicles?

My recent book contains short stories, all written by me. They all involve seasteads—permanent dwellings located at sea. When I began writing them, I did so out of fascination with the concept, hoping to get them published separately. As I wrote more, I dreamed about publishing them together. I began to visualize overall themes and an encompassing story arc. Therefore, I’d classify the book as a short story cycle.

I intended to tell the story of humankind moving to a new home, the sea. People have moved to new places before, and it changed them. When early humans spread across the world tens of thousands of years ago, they settled in various spots and developed different languages and cultures. When European-Americans spread to the western part of the American continent, they created new music and distinct ways of living.

In The Seastead Chronicles, I aimed to tell that story of how, when humans settle in a new place to change it, it also changes them. However, unlike the 19th Century conquering of the West, and unlike Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, those who settled the oceans would not displace people or any sentient beings.

Some might think people who live in the oceans would kill and eat all the fish and other sea creatures. I didn’t see it that way. Modern economics negates the idea of hunting down and killing the last dodo. All animal species benefit if they serve some economic benefit to people, either as a food source, a tourist attraction, a sacred animal, or something else. People strive to preserve valuable animals and prevent their extinction.

Through my stories, I meant to convey the story of colonization, from tentative early attempts, the declaration of owned ocean sectors, the adverse reactions of land countries, the search for seabed mineral resources, the disputes and wars over territory, and the creation of a new culture with its own art, music, and religion.

Completing the Cycle

I’m working on novels now, and later books in the Seastead Chronicles series will take that form. Prior to this, I wrote short stories. I rarely wrote them in the same world or with the same characters as earlier stories. They each stood alone. But while writing the seastead tales, I came to regard them as related and part of a larger whole.

Moreover, I’ve created a world to explore. Each aquastate (nation in the ocean) comes with its own culture, resources, form of government, relations with neighboring aquastates, etc. Each gets populated by people from different land nations, with different motivations. That world gives me plenty of room for my imagination to craft stories of varying lengths, from short stories through novellas to novels.

For now, we begin exploring this world with The Seastead Chronicles, a short story cycle by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

June 1, 2025Permalink 1 Comment