Stealth Worldbuilding & the Other Kind of Standalone Fantasy

I have been talking this week about the value of standalone fantasy, and composing a list of my favourite single volume fantasy novels, just to prove that yes they exist, and yes there are good ones. But what came up most commonly in the discussion surrounding those posts is how many standalone fantasy novels actually are less standalone than they appear – once you start reading the other works in that author's backlist, you may discover that you have in fact been subject to Stealth...