Narrative Worlds and Future Histories. Models of Serial Expansion from Pulp Magazines to Transmedia Franchises.

Abstract

The forms of modular and transmedia seriality developed in recent years, such as the new TV series or the transmedia franchises, have made central both in the scientific debate about the media and in the mechanisms of media production concepts such as "fictional worlds" and "worldbuilding”. A real aesthetics of worldness connecting movies, television, literature and videogames is emerging.

Using historical, semiotic and narratological methods, my paper aims at highlighting how this kind of seriality, based on the sharing of narrative worlds, is not a new phenomenon. Like other serial mechanisms, we can retrace the origins in the narrative practices of pulp magazines of the first half of the XXth century. In the second part of the paper I will focus on a particular model of serial construction, the so-called "future histories", that made its first appearance during the 1940s and is at the basis of the narrative expansion of science fiction transmedia franchises today.