I do not read sagas to find out how they end. I read sagas so as not to have to reach the end. A standalone novel is a date; a saga is moving house, and I have spent half my life moving into houses that are not mine, leaving clothes in wardrobes that belonged to other readers too.
It is not a virtue. It is cowardice with a decent name. We call it loyalty. Lie.
And the market knows it. A reader who finishes a book leaves; a reader hooked on a saga stays, paying the electricity. That is why novels are no longer sold: what is sold is seasons, universes, subscriptions disguised as hardbacks. The industry did not discover literature; it discovered tenancy.
Here you will not find a canon or somebody else’s list. You will find what I would give to someone who asks me for a long saga and does not want me to sell them twenty volumes they are not going to finish. You will also find my contradictions, and there are quite a few.
What turns a series into a saga (and why it hooks you)
Not the number of volumes. I have seen trilogies that are three books and series of twelve that are the same book repeated twelve times with a different colour on the cover. What turns a series into a saga is an open debt: closing a book owing something to the story, and the story knowing it. Two books can be a saga. Fourteen can be one book stretched thin.
Best science fiction sagas
Dune, by Frank Herbert (1965)
It started as a book and became a dynasty. Herbert wrote six novels in that desert between 1965 and 1985, and none of them asks you to love it: it asks you to hold on. The first is still the best-selling and the worst understood.
Foundation, by Isaac Asimov (1951)
Asimov published the stories in magazines through the forties and then stitched them into a book. You can see the stitching, and I like that you can see it. It is the galactic epic without a single exciting battle: an empire falling and a man calculating the fall like weather. Accounting coldness with the fate of ten thousand worlds.
Hyperion, by Dan Simmons (1989)
Seven pilgrims, seven stories, a dying planet and a structure that laughs at linear novels. It reads like a short story collection until you discover it is not, and that you cannot put it down. The Fall of Hyperion closes it and does not lose it.
The Expanse, by James S. A. Corey (2011)
The opening, Leviathan Wakes, is the best proof that the genre knows where the money is: Mars, Earth and the Belt killing each other over the same resources as always. Nine novels and several short stories, closed and finished. The best political space opera of this century, written by two men playing by post.
The Three-Body Problem, by Cixin Liu (2008)
The trilogy that taught the West that Chinese science fiction was coming in through the front door: the universe as a field of snipers and humanity as the neighbour who switches on the light without knowing that the light can be seen from very far away. Sometimes the translation shows. It does not matter.
Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson (1992)
Three novels about what it really costs to colonise a planet: not the physics, the politics of sharing the water. Robinson writes like a geologist in love with a utopia and aware of its cracks.
Best fantasy sagas
The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien (1954-1955)
Tolkien wrote it as one work and the publisher split it in three, and that commercial decision founded the genre as we know it. The Hobbit comes before it and is another thing: a children’s book with a dragon, and a perfectly good way in.
A Song of Ice and Fire, by George R. R. Martin (1996)
Five novels published and two owed for years. Martin writes power the way a domestic crime is written: no clean villains and no heroes who arrive on time. The first three are a perfect machine; after that the machine starts to notice itself.
The Wheel of Time, by Robert Jordan (1990)
Fourteen volumes, started in 1990 and finished by another hand after Jordan died in 2007. Brandon Sanderson wrote the last three from his notes, and the result is proof that a saga can outlive its author. That is a lot to say about a commercial decision.
Earthsea, by Ursula K. Le Guin (1968)
Six books written over more than thirty years, with a silence of almost two decades in the middle. Le Guin started with a boy who learns magic and then came back, already older, to correct herself: to ask about the women she had left out and about the darkness she had named too quickly.
The Broken Earth, by N. K. Jemisin (2015)
Three novels, three consecutive Hugo Awards and a cold rage that never slips, not even in the biggest scenes. A world that breaks every few centuries and a society that has learned to live with the end of the world the way we live with the weather.
The First Law, by Joe Abercrombie (2006)
Abercrombie takes epic fantasy and removes the epic: what is left are scars, debts and people doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. After the original trilogy came several standalones and a second one, so the saga is still a house with doors.
Sagas to start today
Never read a long saga and do not want to ruin yourself: Earthsea. Six short books, three weeks, and you come out knowing whether this is your thing. A closed trilogy with no debts: The Broken Earth. It begins, it ends and it owes you nothing. Pure adventure and a laugh: Old Man’s War, by John Scalzi. Old people enlisting so as not to grow old. Not deep and does not pretend to be. Twenty years ahead of you and an argument to win: The Wheel of Time. Starting something you may not see finished: A Song of Ice and Fire. You know what you are getting into.
How to read them: order, standalones and the right to abandon
Almost always, publication order. It is the order in which the author discovered his world, and there are spoilers that are not spoilers: they are the architecture. Earthsea was written over thirty-five years and reads better in that chronological disorder, watching Le Guin mature and contradict herself. I only change the criterion when the saga was written backwards, with prequels that arrived later and explain what you already knew.
There are sagas that are not a line but a country with many roads. The Culture, by Iain M. Banks, is a dozen novels in the same universe and none of them obliges the previous one. Discworld, by Terry Pratchett, is forty-one novels with several arcs you can start wherever you like. If the word order overwhelms you, those are your country house.
And then there is the matter nobody wants to put in writing: you do not have to finish. Sagas were written to sell, not to oblige you. Abandoning a volume halfway is not a failure, it is damage control. At twenty I finished everything out of dignity, like someone paying a debt they never signed, and now I tell you to leave the book on the bedside table and go out and live. On the other side are the unfinished ones. The Name of the Wind has been waiting for its third part since 2011, and there one has to ask what exactly one is paying when one pays a promise. A saga is a mortgage. Some mortgages are signed with the heart and paid with your life.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best book series to start with?
Earthsea if you want something short and adult, The Broken Earth if you want a closed trilogy. And if you are looking for a single novel before committing, start with the best science fiction books.
How many books does a series need to be a saga?
No number. Two books can be a saga if the debt stays open, and fourteen can be one book stretched thin. The saga begins when the reader accepts waiting.
Is it worth starting an unfinished saga?
It depends on how much you enjoy paying to wait. If the journey is enough for you, go ahead. If you need to arrive, do not start a house that still has scaffolding up.
Science fiction or fantasy sagas?
The division belongs to bookshops, not to literature. Jemisin and Le Guin do both at once, and the rest is an argument about whether magic comes with an explanation. Read what hooks you and let others argue about the label.
And now the part that does not fit well in a guide
I understood recently what I really look for in a saga, and it does not make me look good to say it: I am not looking for a story. I am looking for an excuse not to say goodbye. I have done it with worlds, with cities and with people, and I know that while there is a volume pending nothing has quite ended: not the book, not the conversation, not me. I am writing this with one half-finished on the bedside table. It has been there since March. I could finish it tonight and I do not, and it is not for lack of time, it is because finishing is a way of being left without a house. So here I am, recommending long sagas like someone offering you a place to live, knowing that the problem is not that sagas do not end. The problem is that neither do I.
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