Feature:90045

• 90045 OPEN It would be nice to have serializations of variant titles display in the long works page. See Frederik Pohl's biblio for an example; "Gravy Planet" is serialized but does not show because it is only recorded as a variant of "The Space Merchants". Mike Christie 07:02, 2 Dec 2006 (CST)

Having just read Ahasuerus's comments about serial display on the Bibliographic Rules page, I tend to agree that serial display within Long Works is not that useful, so I'll change this to suggest that either the serials of variant titles should display in Long Works, or the serial display should be restricted to title display. The current halfway situation is not ideal in either direction. Mike Christie 14:30, 2 Dec 2006 (CST)

If we decide that serials should be moved from Long Works to individual Titles' pages and if we decide that Long Works should display the date of the first book publication (as opposed to the date of the first magazine appearance), then the date of the first magazine appearance will no longer be available as part of Long Works. That would be undesirable since it could easily give our users a wrong idea wrt the Title's original appearance. I have seen it happen on rec.arts.sf.written twice in the last 6 months.

One possible solution is to do what Clute/Nicholls et al do for books that had earlier magazine appearances. They give the year of the book publication in bold and then add the year of the first magazine appearance in regular font. We could do the same thing at the time the page is compiled without including any other details of the serialization. For example, Doc Smith's _Triplanetary_ will be displayed as:

1 Triplanetary (1948) [1934]

Also, if we are still unsure what we want to do, we may want to move this discussion to a more discussion-oriented page. Ahasuerus 17:52, 2 Dec 2006 (CST)