tetralogy
I'm finally reading Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker series, 20 years after all my friends did. So far, it's fun: it avoids being nothing but a huge pile of clever showing-off by occasionally offering wonderful little commentaries on the human condition.
My edition contains all four books. The cover's subtitle says: "The Trilogy of Four." Which leads me to ask, publicly and loudly, What the doohickey is wrong with the word tetralogy?
After all, "trilogy" isn't considered off-limits. Tons of books and movies come in threes and are called trilogies. But tons of them come in fours, and they're never ever called tetralogies. Why not? Lord of the Rings gets around it by being considered a trilogy, with The Hobbit as a sort of optional introduction, even though of course the four books together fit the classical model, from Aeschylus to Wagner, of a four-parter consisting of three beefy stories plus a light-hearted cosmic set-up.
Speaking of Wagner, we never refer to the "Ring Tetralogy," even though that's what it is: we call it the "Ring Cycle." It's a cycle. How about the Time Tetralogy by Madeleine l'Engle? A Wrinkle in Time and all that? Nope, it's officially called the "Time Quartet." Quartet? Yep, they're all over: the Raj Quartet, the Earthsea Quartet. Science-fiction/fantasy is apparently overrun with Quartets.
I dare someone to write a tetralogy.
My edition contains all four books. The cover's subtitle says: "The Trilogy of Four." Which leads me to ask, publicly and loudly, What the doohickey is wrong with the word tetralogy?
After all, "trilogy" isn't considered off-limits. Tons of books and movies come in threes and are called trilogies. But tons of them come in fours, and they're never ever called tetralogies. Why not? Lord of the Rings gets around it by being considered a trilogy, with The Hobbit as a sort of optional introduction, even though of course the four books together fit the classical model, from Aeschylus to Wagner, of a four-parter consisting of three beefy stories plus a light-hearted cosmic set-up.
Speaking of Wagner, we never refer to the "Ring Tetralogy," even though that's what it is: we call it the "Ring Cycle." It's a cycle. How about the Time Tetralogy by Madeleine l'Engle? A Wrinkle in Time and all that? Nope, it's officially called the "Time Quartet." Quartet? Yep, they're all over: the Raj Quartet, the Earthsea Quartet. Science-fiction/fantasy is apparently overrun with Quartets.
I dare someone to write a tetralogy.
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