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About fifteen or twenty years ago, I read an article (online, I think) which discussed, among other things, the structure of science fiction "fix-up" novels, which are put together from pre-existing pieces of shorter fiction. Among general facts about the genre, it described some interesting specific examples.

One piece of trivia that was mentioned was that an author had actually used the same piece of short fiction in two different fix-ups! I don't remember any other details; in fact, I think there weren't really any other details given. However, it sounds like a fascinating and strange thing for any author to do. Does anybody know what the author and story invovled were? (From the context in the article, I am pretty sure it was not van Vogt, since he was identified in a different part of the article as the author who coined the term "fix-up.")

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  • This seems really vague.
    – Valorum
    Dec 29, 2017 at 2:27
  • I think Phillip K. Dick might have done this. It's possible that this has happened more than once.
    – Todd Wilcox
    Dec 29, 2017 at 20:57
  • From this list; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fix-up A. E. van Vogt is the first place I'd start looking. It looks like he was a big fan of the style, just because he coined the term doesn't mean he didn't reuse even the fixed up stuff.
    – Jontia
    Apr 23, 2018 at 12:56

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Arthur C. Clarke published "Against the Fall of Night" as a novella in 1948, expanded it into a novel with the same title in 1951, and substantially rewrote it as another novel (The City and the Stars) in 1956.

See also: Help Identifying a story where everyone lives in a city run by machines

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    I thought a "fixup" meant a novel made out of several shorter works. I don't think that expanding a single novella into a novel counts as a fixup.
    – user14111
    Dec 29, 2017 at 3:06
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Could it be Roger Zelazny? I am sorry I can't say for certain at the moment, but he did have, I'd say, tons of stories that were used in his later works.

The Wikipedia bibliography page specifically mentions one of them as fix-up: Dilvish the Damned, but I kinda recall there were others - as far as I think "And Call Me Conrad" was used for fix-up, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if he used one story in two different fix ups.

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  • I was reading a lot of Zelazny around that time, so I suspect that if had been his work, I would have just read both versions right away.
    – Buzz
    Dec 29, 2017 at 20:27

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