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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

Read everything in publication order. That is the only way it will make any sense; later books always assume that you've read the earlier ones, even if editors do their best to try to avoid this, but earlier books never assume you've read the later ones.

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I can give you a concrete example of where this is not true because the author went to a lot of effort to give both books open questions which are answered by the other: Vernor Vinge’s “A Fire Upon the Deep” and “A Deepness in the Sky”.

He made sure that the second book answers the open question(s) left by the first, but also that it had open question(s) which are answered by the first book. It really doesn’t matter which one you read first, because the other one closes the loop, as it were.

In fairness, Verner Vinge is an amazing author and this is probably a skill unique to very few writers.

I've found his books to be repeatedly re-readable.

MAROONED IN REALTIME, A FIRE UPON THE DEEP and A DEEPNESS IN THE SKY are excellent. I could re-read them. THE PEACE WAR and RAINBOWS END are just average and I would only read them once. CHILDREN OF THE SKY is awful and I wish I hadn't bothered reading it at all.

Yea, even the best authors can’t consistently write excellent books. And “Children of the Sky” lacks many of the advantages that “A Fire Upon the Deep” and “A Deepness in the Sky” had, such as space travel. That alone makes it less memorable and contributes a lot to reader disappointment.

That just proves what should be obvious: there are always exceptions. In general, I still think production order tends to work best for most works.

Unless a series is explicitly conceived from the beginning as something to be experienced in any order and written concurrently, e.g. the episodes of the Netflix show Kaleidoscope, you should read in publication order if you intend to read the series completely.

It’s not just about making sense. A flashback will often make complete sense when viewed at its chronological time. But all sorts of dramatic weight and subtleties can be lost on a reader who does not have knowledge material that was published prior, and it can further alter your perception of events that happen later on that assume you don’t have that knowledge.

Each book was written with a unique frame of reference. It’s almost always a mistake to leave that frame of reference.

Not every story is written that way. Also, it's not necessary that everything make sense; sometimes there are higher priorities. Sometimes, it's just not worth the time to read it all.

It may not be exactly 100.000% true, but it's close enough that you can just stop thinking about it and read in publication order unless you're given a very strong reason. The author, editors, and publishers would have to screw up very hard for publication order to not be viable, and for something else to be optimal either requires extraordinary writing ability (it's hard to refer to books that aren't written yet, the arrow of time being how it is), or for the series not to have been very good to start. The major exception I can think of is something like Discworld where they're all pretty independent, i.e. barely a series at all in the sense we're talking about, but once you start talking about one of the sequential sub-series, you're back to publication order mattering.

I agree with you on this. Chronological, or chronological with omissions (perhaps with later backfill), is always a good choice. With Discworld I can see people choosing to read just subseries. (I read Discworld completely out of order and it was fine, but I'm not going to argue that it was _better_.)

There may be some odd exceptions. If someone came to me and said "I want to see if Star Trek is something I'm interested in" I wouldn't tell them to start at the beginning of the original series, nor would I recommend viewing any single series from the start. I could see a "tasting flight" approach to the franchise where you bounce back and forth between the series... but even then I feel like you'd want to keep some degree of production-order structure within the individual series.

People say these things with such confidence; where does that confidence come from? It's amazing, but not confidence-inspiring.

I've read/seen much art, in books and other mediums, that don't match your description. I find some things are much better if I skip the beginning and come back to it later, if I still think it's worthwhile.

> you can just stop thinking about it and read in publication order unless you're given a very strong reason

How can you advise - maybe even instruct - people so confidently, without at all knowning them, their purposes, and also what they are reading - which could be anything in the world! Must I read the collected works of Milton in order? The Bible? The Art of Computer Programming? History? Literary porn - can I skip to the good part or do I need to read it all in order?

When I see such certainty, I don't think 'who could know that much?' but 'who could think they know that much?'

You want to compare "the collected works of Milton", the Bible, and TAoCP to the Chronicles of Narnia? We're not talking about arbitrary collections of books, we're talking about fictional works with strong continuity between them in setting and events, among other criteria.

But if it's not that good, yeah, go ahead and skip some parts. I did account for that case, but whatever. This is entertainment, not deep moral truth.

> We're not talking about

You're not talking about it and assuming others are the same. That's the risk of giving advice, especially with certainty - you never know the other people, their priorities, needs, or what they are thinking about.

Mods, how much of this shit do I have to flag before you take action.

Just being a dumbass is not really flag-worthy. That's what downvotes are for.

Dismissing people as dumbass is flag-worthy - and actually dumbass. :)

Nobody is "dismissing" you as anything. You have self-identified.

>> later books always assume that you've read the earlier ones, even if editors do their best to try to avoid this, but earlier books never assume you've read the later ones.

> Not every story is written that way.

This is... clearly untrue?

Is it? I mean, are you willing to assert that literally every single multi-work story was written with successive works assuming the reader has read previous works?

Sure, I'd expect that to be the most common case, by far, but asserting that's the only case would seem to be impossible, unless you've read (or at least are familiar with) literally every multi-work story ever written in all of time. I don't think anyone can claim that.

Of course. That is the only possibility. What the author intended to do is not in question; the question is what actually happened.

I don't know about you, but there's much more to the world than what I know.

Sure, but even so I’m reasonably sure we can rely on the linear nature of time. Whether or not the publication of prequels was premeditated, it still rings true that the cultural artefact is always publication order.

But you are not at all required to follow some prior linear order in the linear order of your own time. If I want to smelt steel, I don't need to learn to smelt bronze first. What rings true is the eternal best advice: think for yourself.

I don't really buy that. An author may have planned out the entire story, but later decides to write and release later parts of the story first, and earlier parts later, as prequels, but not include an assumption in the prequels that the reader has already read the earlier-published works.

I don't know how common this is, but I don't think I'd be willing to assume this has never happened.

I wouldn’t be surprised if I learned that a majority of books in series have been written with the idea in mind that some readers are coming in fresh. That does not mean that a book is free from having followed the prior works. An author cannot change the frame of reference they were operating within when they authored a work. That’s the reason the “cultural artifact” is the publication order.

If we set aside books in a series that were written and edited to completion concurrently and published staggered, then i don’t see how an author could possibly publish a book while managing to entirely circumvent the reality that they have knowledge of the previous books they have written and do not have full knowledge of the ones they have not, no matter how hard they may try.

> An author may have planned out the entire story, but later decides to write and release later parts of the story first, and earlier parts later, as prequels, but not include an assumption in the prequels that the reader has already read the earlier-published works.

Still untrue. The author is going to include whatever information they possess in whatever work they create. If the prequels are written later, they will rely on information from the earlier works, whether the author wanted them to do that or not.

>I’m reasonably sure we can rely on the linear nature of time.

I'm not even sure about that, perhaps we can rely on our linear _experience_ of time, but we can't determine which is the correct version of two billiard balls colliding if we're shown the forwards and the backwards versions.

Assuming time is linear is convenient, but I don't think its provable or outright definite.

Firefly might be the classic counter example

The TV show? In that case the DVD set order is the canonical one and is plot/story order. That they were originally aired out of order back in 2003 was a one-off aberration due to studio leadership not understanding or being on board with what the show was about.

Let's call it "production order" then. Firefly was famously broadcast out of order.

I wouldn't call that a counterexample; if you watch Firefly in production order (not broadcast order; the broadcaster was moronic in reordering things), then you get the best experience.

I think it's more fair to call Firefly an edge case, instead.

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