That may all be true. But many authors of that era (e.g. Dickens and Dostoevsky) published their work mainly in monthly installments. Chapters are then, exactly like TV show episodes, simply a technical necessity.
In the preface to the 4th or 5th book (which were written 30+ years after the “original” trilogy) he discussed how the originals parts of the trilogy were published as a set of short stories in a SciFi publication over 8 years, and later compiled into the books.
I was astonished.
Perhaps everyone else already knew this. But such a clear narrative through line to be written in discrete short stories. Very impressive.
It sounds like this may have been common prior to this era as well.
Regarding psychohistory: It's worth considering the era in which the books where written. The 1st half of the 20th century saw massive innovations in economic theory, physics, and information theory. It was not a big leap to predict that in 500 years time, humans would further advance macro economics. Personally I felt the books did a great job setting limits in the capabilities of the theory, and using its inherit flaws to drive interesting plot lines.
Edit: looked it up. Dickens and Dumas preceded Jules Verne in serials being turned into novels.
I reread it last year and I needed to give it a lot of grace, mostly from it's treatment of women. To Asimov's credit, there's no overt sexism - he manages to bypass that by having almost no female characters at all. There's a single female character who has no agency, every other character is white and male. I understand it's a product of it's time, and avoid judgment. However, the lack of women feels weird and makes it hard to enjoy.
To be fair, the later books in the series which were written in the 70s are much better in this regard.
> there's no overt sexism - he manages to bypass that by having almost no female characters at all.
Much of it do have women in it. As I go through them in my head, almost everything has some women in it, at least existing in larger world. Except "Old Man and the Sea" one character against the world kind of things. Hemingway has women in other books tho.
I suggest that you notice the word "almost" in the text I quoted in my original comment.
It is not, in fact.
https://blog.chrislansdown.com/2022/02/07/isaac-asimov-creep...
Can't confirm. I couldn't get through the first 100 pages.
The wiki was awesome. Some of the best world building I've ever seen.
The novels, however, were atrocious.
You're constantly yanked out of the narrative in service of ads even if you never see them, which has disfigured the medium.
That was the hallmark of old TV, on networks. Since the start of TV in the 50's.
There are tons of modern TV shows that don't do anything you're talking about because they're made for streamers or paid TV without ads.
It sounds like you watch different shows than I do, but I watch a lot of TV and haven't seen what you're talking about in many, many years. Not with Squid Game or Stranger Things on Netflix, or Andor on Disney+, or White Lotus on HBO, or Severance on Apple TV+, or even something like Alien: Earth currently on FX/Hulu.
You might want to find better places for watching TV...
One thing I do notice more and appreciate from streaming (sense8 in particular) is that shows are more varied in their runtime. Episodes being 40 minutes to 75 in length just depending on the needs of the plot, not even finale related or anything
Do you have an example of a modern show that has the dramatic-music-and-cliffhanger ad-break?
I find that laugh-tracks are the aspect of older shows which I find harder to ignore. Still worth bearing with for some old shows though, especially as I gradually stop hearing them.
If it is on a broadcast tv network, it's not really worth watching. Sure, there are the one or two exceptional shows, but with so much premium content, why would you want to watch that?
Surely there's a huge list of old broadcast TV network shows that are worth watching, and that still suffer from the ad-break problem to various degrees.
Obviously I'm pulling from a wide time-period, and I'll probably get some of these wrong because I'm not in the the US and don't quite grok the network/cable divide, but off the top of my head, I think these are/were all worth watching: Seinfeld, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Freaks and Geeks, Arrested Development, 30 Rock, Community, Schitt's Creek, The Office, The X-Files, various Star Trek series, Cheers
That list could be easily improved on, but I assume it's missing your point anyway if you were only talking about current broadcast network TV (if it exists :) )
Almost all of those are broadcast shows. I strongly suspect that all of them are, but I don't have personal knowledge of the entire list.
As far as I can tell, the divide is pretty straightforward:
Cable: nudity
Broadcast: everything else
In theory there's no requirement for a cable show to have nudity, but since they're allowed to, they all do.
> Cable: nudity
> Broadcast: everything else
This is almost entirely wrong; non-premium cable (which is and was always the vast majority of cable) had and observed essentially the same structure and content rules as broadcast, with ad breaks and no swearing or nudity. Premium cable where each channel or later small branded group of channels is a separate surcharge on top of the broad package tended to have no ad breaks and looser content rules.
Deadliest Catch (Discovery Channel, 2005-)
Monk (USA Network. 2002-2009)
Mad Men (AMC, 2007-2015)
The Shield (FX, 2002-2008)
Beavis and Butt-Head (MTV, 1993-1997 & 2011)
Breaking Bad isn't the same format. No obvious commercial breaks, no saccharine Hays-Code-like bullshit.
Others mentioned The Shield, which is FX, and I tend to think of FX shows as not being of the broadcast mold. Monk was USA, I think, which as a network was borderline, but seems like a few of their original programming shows were not-horrible. Then someone said Deadliest Catch, but that's just cheap reality tv sludge and I feel dirty having typed out its title. Even the worst 1980s NBC sitcom was better than reality tv shows.
It's come to my attention that you're all, every last one of you, watching tv wrong.
Breaking Bad (like Mad Men, also on AMC) was presented with commercial breaks on AMC in its original run, and is structured around those breaks.
I tried not writing in chapters, but I find that the chapters helped me compartmentalize different times and places and specific subjects. It may be that I'm simply used to chapters from reading other books, but no matter what the book I find that some sort of compartmentalization is beneficial and often necessary.
Seems to fit stream of consciousness stuff better.
Although this does remind me of sitting on a plane as a kid with finnegan’s wake, and an older American leans over and reassures me that I’ll be able to move on to “chapter books” soon. To this day I remain unsure if he was being ironic or if he thought I was reading “Spot The Dog”.
This scene is pitch-perfect. A two sentence Wes Anderson film novelization.
Maybe its only now that we are less constrained by technology that we have to really focus on our mental faculties as the limiting factor for writing.
With all the colonization and cultural exchange going on during that period, they should've been familiar with it.
There is a rhythm. We live one day at a time. We tell one story at a time. We post one HN post at a time. :-)
This comes across as sloppy work from someone in an English department who didn't have the language skills to work outside English but decided to try anyway.
I'm not sure why "language skills" are necessary for this piece - these questions are fundamentally about what the words inscribed on a document are, not what those words mean. It could easily be true that Latin scrolls started labeling something "capitulum" while Greek scrolls called the same thing "kephalaia".
Again, later Christian Greek texts (probably codices rather than scrolls) could have called "kephalaion" the thing Latin marked as "caput" (not in the article, but very common in Latin; Cicero uses it in _De Inventione_) or "capitulum," and in fact Greek texts did so in imitation of the Latin, but "kephalaia" is plural, and the author, despite writing about the history of terms, doesn't seem to know that.
It's also odd that he discusses Aulus Gellius' _Attic Nights_ without talking about Pliny the Elder's _Natural History,_ on which Gellius likely based his concept of an index and chapter headings. In Pliny, the chapter headings proceed logically through thematically related groups in a taxonomy, so you can drill down through the index to the chapter you want by looking for the larger genus to which it might be a species. If you're looking for a particular rock, for example, you start in the index under rocks and then look for a more specific type of rock, rather than looking under plants or geography. Gellius turns this on its head, quite possibly intentionally: none of his chapters fall into any sort of order that anyone has ever been able to discern, so you have to read the entire index of chapter headings (itself a book in length) in order to locate one you might be seeking. Besides being the first, to my knowledge, openly user-hostile interface, I think that makes it harder to believe what the author says about the Attic Nights being "only something to be consulted partially, and on occasion, rather than read and absorbed line-by-line." It's actually really hard to use the Attic Nights as a reference book in that way, not only because of how Gellius set up the index and disordered the chapters but also because it was originally published in linear-access scrolls rather than a random-access codex, making quick reference even more difficult. So, it's odd that the author skips from headings that organize a legal treatise straight to Gellius' chapter headings summarizing, but not organizing, his random miscellany without some mention in between of someone like Pliny, who organizes chapters into a taxonomy.
There's already a lot of scholarship about chapter markings and other paratextual devices in ancient literature: Butler (2009) "Cicero's Capita" in _The Roman Paratext_ shows that Cicero's speeches were capitulated in antiquity without written rubrics or headings, marking new units of text on the same argument instead by extending the first line into the left margin; surely this is a step that should have been considered on the road from legal text rubrics to chapters without headings as a temporal organizational device in novels.
Maybe the book did the topic more justice than the review.
The book is "Grande Sertão Veredas" (it has an ongoing translation to english which is going on for over 10+ years). Rosa is an educated diplomat, and he choose to explore the culture, language, landscapes and subjectivness of the place he grew, in some rural area of a small city in Minas Gerais.
At the beginning both "features" usually cause some frustration. It is really hard to understand some expressions or know who is speaking, or if its just a thought, or even when or where something is happening. And that goes on in an never ending continuum.
Nevertheless, if you keep going, you're rewarded with a incredible immersive experience. The unusual and becomes playful, the continum becomes the flown of a river (the Sao Francisco river!). And on top of all that, an epic sertanejo's Fausto slowly unfolds towards one of the best endings of brazilian literature.
Even though DITA pays my checks, I've always been apprehensive about functionality like `conref`[1] in a general-purpose document. You can only fuss with natural language for so long before you're not a document anymore, and if you're not a document . . well, what are you doing? Why are we here? You've built a conceptual box that's better done in an actual programming language.
But no one's going to argue about the utility of headings (hmm except for the DITA architects, who have disposed of it in favor of a nested transclusion of `topicrefs`). This sort of article is always fascinating, although it is just as concerned with fiction prose.
Off topic, the following would prove darkly prophetic:
Early modern intellectuals like Robert Boyle and John Locke would even rail against Biblical chaptering: Boyle complained of its ‘inconvenient Distinction’, which ‘hath sometimes Sever’d Matters that should have been left United’; Locke for his part despaired that the system of chapter-and-verse left scripture ‘so chop’d and minc’d […] so broken and divided’ that not only do the ‘Common People take the Verses usually for distinct aphorisms’, but even the educated have their powers of memory enfeebled.
[1] I'm calling out DITA but it's also mechanisms in S1000D and DocBook, and you can do the same in Asciidoc (include directive to region) or ReStructuredText (same). The XML specs are clunkier, but the basic concept is the same.
I don't get the problem. You never hear them, and when you read them yourself, you also just ignore them. When your starting at a chapter, just read the last few verses of the previous to get the context.
How else could I deep-link to a total banger line like Matthew 25:40?
What would you use as the indexing system to refer to specific elements in the whole work across various languages?
I strongly disagree. There are many counterexamples, some authors are still widely read. Besides Shakespeare, it's Defoe, his Robinson Crusoe is one of defining books for me, later I also enjoyed Journal of the Plague Year and Moll Flanders. Swift's Gulliver's Travels is in top ten list all of the books I ever read.
On the other hand, if I hadn't done Shakespeare at school and someone were to hand me a First Folio (1623) I don't think I'd make much progress with it. Of course most people don't read plays anyway.