This weekend at BookCon, Veronica Roth announced two new books set in her Divergent universe, beginning with the publication of The Sixth Faction this fall. These books are not sequels, prequels or “interquels,” but rather set in an alternative universe in which Tris Prior, the series’ protagonist, experiences an alternate history from the original series. 

This is not the first time Roth has dipped back into her blockbuster series. More than a decade ago, Roth released Four, a collection of stories about the earlier life of Tobias (Tris Prior’s love interest in the Divergent series). While that book came out just one year after the final book in the Divergent series, The Sixth Faction comes a full dozen years later.

Roth has continued to publish regularly in the intervening years, with several new series and a handful of standalone works. But none of them have approached the success of Divergent, and the sputtering out of the filmed version of that series has left the franchise in a strange cultural position. 

What do we call these post-peak works that return to the original story, but don’t advance it? At this point, we have a mini-library’s worth of examples: E.L. James, Stephanie Meyer, Suzanne Collins, not to mention Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and on and on. Creating one breakout series is hard enough, but it seems harder still to figure out what to do next.

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