Book Review: With a Little Help - WSJ.com: Sixty years ago stories were the heart of sci-fi (and of fantasy, then a junior partner), along with the magazines that promoted them. The daddy of the magazines was Astounding, with its consciously hard-science bent (reinforced by the name-change to Analog in 1960). Its long-term editor, John Campbell, launched Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, A.E. van Vogt and Lester del Rey—and dozens more. The magazine Galaxy took a lighter tone; one called Fantasy and Science Fiction had a broader remit. There were many others: Worlds of If, Amazing, Fantastic, and on and on. Collectors' guides list more than 200 of them pre-1980, though many lasted but an issue or two. Only a few survived the 1980s.
An issue characteristically held three short stories, a longer novella—maybe 20,000 words—and one part of a three-part serial. The magazines lived or died by their serials and novellas, which almost always got the cover art. This situation had several advantages. The demand for shorts gave wanna-be authors a better statistical chance of breaking in. The novellas meant that authors could try out an idea without too much investment in effort. And a struggling author could hope for multiple paydays: Sell the novella, sell two follow-ups, stick them together and sell the result to a paperback house as a 60,000-word novel. Asimov's "Foundation" series started that way. So did Heinlein's "Future History" sequence and Anne McCaffrey's "Dragonriders of Pern."
If the short story was the quintessential sci-fi format in the genre's infancy, it was eventually displaced by its opposite: the multi-part epic. The success of Tolkien, beginning in the 1950s, showed publishers there was a market for a trilogy that was well over a thousand pages total. Frank Herbert's "Dune" (1965) was another hit: It started in Astounding as a three-part serial but was then continued in an unprecedented five parts to make an eight-part total. It went on to generate five sequels by Herbert himself, with a dozen more co-authored by his son.
Book publishers liked these series. They concluded that what sells books is not new ideas but the familiar. It's the world that sells—Herbert's Dune or McCaffrey's Pern or Tolkien's Middle-earth—and the nice thing about that is, it's predictable. From this idea sprang what one might call the modern shapeless epics, especially the fantasy ones, which just go on and on: Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" sequence, Terry Brooks's "Shannara" stories, Stephen Donaldson's "Covenant" trilogies. But as the market for short stories declined, many aspiring sci-fi authors struggled to publish anything original, simply because they lacked the experience to write the 150,000-word book now preferred.