connected groups: universe spin-offs

This is the first of either three or four entries on personal favorite and not-so-favorite connected groups that I promised to post in response to a discussion going on in Maili’s blog about series fatigue. Take it all with a grain of salt as being the observations of a long time romance reader and let me know what you think. I’m willing to have my mind changed but I give you fair warning that you’re going to have to work at it.

Universe spin-offs have long been the mainstay of romance for many years and with good reason. I will also admit that I originally started out calling these character spin-offs several years ago but a comment by Jo Beverley on the RRA list I believe made me change it to universe spin-offs. Basically what she said, paraphrased, was that in her mind all her books in any particular historical era take place in the same universe. That it kept things neat and clean for her and she loved reusing characters over and over as needed. Makes sense to me.

Basically, universe spin-offs are books connected by an author creating or using an existing “world” wherein multiple stories can happen that aren’t necessarily sequential. The same characters populate this world so they can show up in any story the author wishes to use them in. They can be sequential but normally aren’t, meaning that on occasion they might have to be read in a certain order but most of the time they honestly don’t have to be. What’s new nowadays is that many of them begin as “named” series in romance-land when a decade or more ago that only happened occasionally within category romances.

Personally, I believe that the marketing of these as named series has led to quite a lot of the reader frustration we’re been talking about. Put it this way, before this began happening, an author could’ve linked the same number of books within a shared universe over a period of years and readers might not have even noticed. What I’m going to try to do here is show a couple of my reasons for believing this by talking about a couple of my favorite examples of universe spin-offs, the first one being.

Stephanie Laurens’s Cynster books are a collection of spin-offs and only spin-offs. There is no plotline in any of the books that carries over to any other book. If someone wants to claim there is they’re going to have to show me line and verse because, heck, I’ve practically got some of these books memorized and I’ve never found it. Okay, I’m not quite that bad, at least about most of them. There are a couple of them, however, that I may have come close to memorizing. (G)

Anyway, the only thing linking them together is the family tree of the Cynsters found in each book with the possible exception of Chillingworth’s. It may even be in his. Each book stands alone and technically could be read in any order. What’s really interesting is that initially Laurens started out writing the stories of the Bar Cynsters, the main six male cousins shown on the family tree, and had a great deal of fun with the way these very similar yet strikingly different males tried to avoid the altar. She could’ve stopped after their stories were told. She didn’t. Was it her and her publisher’s intention to see how well those books sold before doing more or was the decision to do more made well before the first six did so well? I mean, she could’ve decided to wait ten years and then decide revisit the family. Doesn’t matter. They’re all still only spin-offs set in the same universe so nothing is missing and nothing taken away. Personally, I’m glad she didn’t have to wait because my all-time favorite Cynster book is about one of the younger cousins, Simon in The Perfect Lover.

The second “named” series she started, The Bastion Club, is very interesting to me with regards to this topic because it’s set in the same universe. I forget which book in that group it is but in at least one of them the hero runs across one of the Cynsters. She also loops back to one of her earlier books, Captain Jack’s Woman, by making one of the Bastion Club heroes a character from that earlier book. This is exactly what using a shared universe for spin-offs is about. There is one thing I find disconcerting, though, and that’s the fact that The Bastion Club books do have a thread running through them about a mysterious villain. Does this make them fall into the story arc category rather than spin-off? Maybe, maybe not. It all depends on how she eventually uses this thread. Personally, I don’t see it as being strong enough to make them part of an overall story arc but it could very well hint at a possible seventh spin-off book involving their mysterious former boss. We’ll just have to wait and see.

I could give more examples of authors using this technique but it’s really so prevalent in romance it would almost be pointless to do so. I would like to mention one author and group, though, which always come up in these discussions, Julia Quinn’s Bridgertons. I don’t know how many times I’ve read individuals complain about how long this one has gone on and it always puzzles me. She set out to do a group of spin-offs about the eight Bridgerton children. Why does it surprise people that it’s going to take at least eight books to do that? As far as I can tell, even though planned for in advance, these are true spin-offs just like the Cynsters so they don’t have to be read in order. I, myself, have skipped books in the group without missing a thing chronologically so if there’s something I am missing that makes it mandatory to read them in a certain order, somebody is going to have to clue me in.

In case anyone is curious, the one I somehow skipped and didn’t realize it until later was Eloise’s story. I do plan to eventually get it.

However, I also believe it is important to note that Quinn has always used the same universe even when she wasn’t doing a “named” set. Characters were always popping up in her books that have appeared in others and sometimes the new books come after the older ones chronologically and sometimes they don’t, so reading them in “order” is definitely not always an option. To me this “networking” is very characteristic of a group of stories spun-off within the same universe.

So this is the question I’ll leave you all with after this entry, if your favorite romance author used the basic same universe for a lot their books but didn’t push it into your face by “naming” any of them as a series and instead simply allowed the books to come naturally, would the complaint that they’ve done too many books in the same “group” still be valid?