The last couple of years I've gone back to writing SF and I'm enjoying it a heck of a lot. I have been using a consistent universe (tech, company names and some characters carrying over), but I have been switching sub-genres wildly.
What I have so far is basically:
First novel - A disaster story in Earth high orbit
Second novel - A paranormal story on Mars
The third one is almost certainly going to be crime/thriller in future London.
Would any of you put up with that as readers, or would the dramatic shift in sub-genre drive you away even with a consistent voice? I'm having way too much fun to stop, but I am wondering if I'm having completely un-submittable fun =D
If these are three different stand-alone novels then I don't see a problem with the background or world being common, but would you be selling this as "a series?" This seems like less of a series and more of stand-alone novels that have a fictional universe in common. And as Pthom says...
I'd read 'em. And it seems to me, that if you're having fun writing them, that fun will be exported to the reader. By all means, continue. (Someone else who did this very thing for much of his career: Larry Niven.
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I recall that Niven had several universes, the main one being "Known Space" for a lot of his big novels and many short stories, but I see those as all having the same genre of hard SF. He had other stories and series involving fantasy and whatnot, but I haven't made myself read those...
Heinlein likewise has his "future history" and characters that appear in more than one novel. There is often no relation between the chronological orders of the stories and when Heinlen wrote and published them, so it's hard to call any collection of novels he wrote a "series."
If your novels are sellable, I'd think they should be sellable individually, without reference to the commonalities. I think if you call it a "series," the novels should be not just the same background but also a continuation of the same story, and I'd think that also implies the same subgenre.
I don't mind an author writing in several genres (I just might not read everything he writes, as with Niven), but I'm a bit unhappy with Piers Anthony for writing only one true science fiction novel, Macroscope, then writing all that other stuff that I didn't find nearly as enjoyable.
