Weird. I bounced off Foundation immediately because it felt like a series of short stories instead of a novel (and also I couldn't take psychohistory the least bit seriously). I'm kind of kicking myself for not predicting that it actually did start that way.

Didn’t Verne also serialize his stories? This has been going on for a long long time but for sure Clark and Asimov have books that were serials in periodicals.

Edit: looked it up. Dickens and Dumas preceded Jules Verne in serials being turned into novels.

Another even more modern example is The Martian. Weir published it chapter by chapter on his website, even updating previous chapters based on (mostly technical) feedback from his readers. Once completed, his readers encouraged him to publish an eBook, it took off on Amazon, and the rest is history.

> some grace for when it was written

I reread it last year and I needed to give it a lot of grace, mostly from it's treatment of women. To Asimov's credit, there's no overt sexism - he manages to bypass that by having almost no female characters at all. There's a single female character who has no agency, every other character is white and male. I understand it's a product of it's time, and avoid judgment. However, the lack of women feels weird and makes it hard to enjoy.

To be fair, the later books in the series which were written in the 70s are much better in this regard.

"it still holds up incredibly well"

Can't confirm. I couldn't get through the first 100 pages.

I think you've got it backwards.

That was the hallmark of old TV, on networks. Since the start of TV in the 50's.

There are tons of modern TV shows that don't do anything you're talking about because they're made for streamers or paid TV without ads.

It sounds like you watch different shows than I do, but I watch a lot of TV and haven't seen what you're talking about in many, many years. Not with Squid Game or Stranger Things on Netflix, or Andor on Disney+, or White Lotus on HBO, or Severance on Apple TV+, or even something like Alien: Earth currently on FX/Hulu.

You might want to find better places for watching TV...

Modern tv shows are more often than not released in a single go on a streaming service, intended to be binged in a single go. Often the episodes form a single narrative and a single episode cannot stand alone. The MOTD format is all but dead.

Do you have an example of a modern show that has the dramatic-music-and-cliffhanger ad-break?

I agree with your feeling that those mini cliff-hangers break the immersion, especially when watching without ad-breaks, although I can mostly deal with it. I agree with some of the other replies though, that it is more prevalent in older shows.

I find that laugh-tracks are the aspect of older shows which I find harder to ignore. Still worth bearing with for some old shows though, especially as I gradually stop hearing them.

>One thing I hate about modern TV shows is that they have been further sliced into ~5-10min sequences between ad breaks,

If it is on a broadcast tv network, it's not really worth watching. Sure, there are the one or two exceptional shows, but with so much premium content, why would you want to watch that?

If you eschew chapters, it can have a pretty distinctive effect on your prose. Prominent examples that come to mind are Finnegan’s Wake, The Waves, and On The Road, and all make for an intense read. The absence of pause gives you no place to put it down, you are ensnared within the inescapable flow.

Seems to fit stream of consciousness stuff better.

Although this does remind me of sitting on a plane as a kid with finnegan’s wake, and an older American leans over and reassures me that I’ll be able to move on to “chapter books” soon. To this day I remain unsure if he was being ironic or if he thought I was reading “Spot The Dog”.

Most writers kinda skip chapters. Instead, on early drafts, they focus on scenes, which might be 1:1 with a chapter, but are often 2:1 or even 3:1 with a chapter. The relationship between paragraphs, scenes, and chapters, is one way of thinking about and manipulating pace in a story.

Nah, as a writer who talks to other writers with wildly different processes, I don't think that's how it works for anyone. Time spent writing is almost unrelated to visible time markers in the text. It's not a big deal to stop writing in the middle of a scene or stop one and start another in the same session (assuming we're writing linearly at all). Scene and chapter boundaries are something we specifically think about in their own right to optimize the reading experience.