So both KSR's Icehenge and Wolfe's Fifth Head are novels made up of interrelated novellas. KSR was, presumably, inspired by Wolfe (being a Wolfe fan, Wolfe's student at Clarion, a fellow contributor to Orbit, and so on and so forth.)
My question: can anyone think of any other novels written this way? It seems like a neat form, somehow.
The closest I can think of is Joe Haldeman's Forever War, which was made up of, I dunno, maybe five novellas. But of course novels (or at any rate unified works) made up of many short stories are common.
Then there's Asimov's Foundation trilogy, where the first volume is composed of short stories, the second & third of two novellas each.
Maybe this is a distinction without a difference here, but somehow the three novella structure strikes me as special, just as poems can be written of any length but there's something special about 14 lines (or chamber music for any number of instruments, but something special about 4). So: are there any others?
Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human
Oh, of course, how could I forget The Gods Themselves! Pamela Sargent even compares Fifth Head to it in her afterward to the latter (in the Ace edition).
I recently read Asimov's The Gods Themselves, and it is three separate novellas; two of which appeared first in magazines. And it won the Hugo the same year The Fifth Head of Cerberus was published.
A Canticle for Leibowitz is a great example. It's been a while since I read A Case of Conscience, but wasn't that only two? Maybe I'm misremembering. The other four I don't know.
Thanks for adding examples!
I think it was quite common for SF writers to try to make as much money out of an idea as possible by publishing a series of connected novellas (and 3 seem to be about the right length to make up a paperback original when collected) in the SF magazines and then bundle them together as a paperback (although this was not the actual origin of the book Fifth Head, of course). Some books that originated in this way (off the top of my head): A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.; A Case of Conscience by James Blish; The Tactics of Mistake by Gordon Dickson; The Burning and The Immortals, both by James Gunn; Some Will Not Die by Algis Budrys; Operation Chaos by Poul Anderson - I'm sure there are many others.