Blog For A Beer: Should A Series Die When The Author Does?
K. Tempest Bradford
Welcome to Fantasy Friday, everyone! It’s time, once again, to Blog For A Beer. (click here for the rules.)
A couple of days ago the Guardian reported that Eoin Colfer will write a sixth Hitchhiker’s Guide book (as most of you are well aware). I’m not a particular fan of that series, and I realize that Adams’ widow definitely wanted and sanctioned the project, so I have nothing against it. But hearing the news did get me thinking about other series that have continued after the original writer died. (Sometimes long after.) I’m not talking about Nancy Drew-type situations where a roster of authors filled in, but more along the lines of the Dune books, which Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson can’t seem to leave alone.
One of the most famous recent examples is Robert Jordon, who passed away last year without having finished the Wheel of Time series. It will be completed, though, by people both he and his family trust and based on his own notes and unpublished material.
Since his father’s death, Christopher Tolkien has published a lot of unfinished or unpublished material, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Even the Unfinished Tales were crack for the avid LOTR fan.
It seemed like long after she died, Marion Zimmer Bradley was still “co-writing” Avalon books, though Diana Paxson had collaborated with her for a long time, so it is possible Bradley left a lot of material in her hands.
I also can’t help but think of all the TV shows by Gene Roddenberry that didn’t hit our screens until after he died.
Do you think it’s appropriate for book series to continue after an author has died? Under what circumstances does it seem more okay than others? Does your need to keep reading about those characters or that world transcend the actual author, or, in the end, is it just not the same without them?
1 • Michael Gordon said:
September 19th, 2008 at 11:58 am, permalink
or, in the end, is it just not the same without them?
In the end? No, that’s just the beginning. The shoulds and shouldn’ts of this issue have to start from the assumption that it’s never going to be quite the same; it just can’t be. While characters can transcend authors, no one else knows them quite as well. Even later books by the same author very often disappoint, because they aren’t as good as (or aren’t as good as we remember) the books we got started on. (I’m looking at you Stephen King, though everyone else is probably eyeing George Lucas.)
Then there’s the issue of need. Does this book need to be written. Ask any Wheel of Time fan whether A Memory of Light needs to be written and you’ll see how dire the necessity. HHGG not as much, but it’s still meant to wrap up a series (which I feel did end badly on book 5). The Dune follow ups? I don’t even want to touch those. There wouldn’t be much need for someone to write more Lord of the Rings books, even if they were well done. The less the need, the less justifiable the risk of tampering with an author’s legacy.
There’s of course a huge difference between a new author writing one book to wrap things up and someone writing a whole new series. I think the former is more appropriate and less likely to suck. The latter I’d steer clear of, because, like comic books, the plot will probably meander, threads picked up and discarded by new authors every few years, with no consistency or development. But that is a whole ‘nother topic.
Anyway, that’s my two cents.
2 • JS Bangs said:
September 19th, 2008 at 12:30 pm, permalink
No. No writing books for death authors, please, with a few very narrow exceptions.
The last book of the Wheel of Time obviously needs to be written, because the series is incomplete without it. This is Exception Number One: the author has died leaving a long-running series actually unfinished, and there are fans who really want to see it finished. I’m not a WoT fan and didn’t read any of the books after the fourth, but even so I think that the series needs its final chapter. (And now that it’s done, I might try to slog through the rest of it.)
It’s definitely debatable whether we needed all of those books of Unfinished Tales, but those, together with the Silmarillion and the Children of Hurin, are Exception Number Two: the author has left behind a significant body of work that can be published with some judicious editing. In this case, we’re still talking about the author’s own work.
But HHGG? The jokes were growing thin by the fourth book, and the last thing we need is a 6th installment by someone other than Douglass Adams. And Brian Herbert needs to put Dune down and back away slowly, before somebody else gets hurt. The same goes for the rest of you who might be thinking of extending a series posthumously.
(Ironically, George Lucas might be a partial exception. He’s abused his own property so horribly that it’s hard to see how anybody else could do worse. If he keeled over and someone competent was tagged to film the Zahn sequels… that could be pretty awesome.)
3 • Wendy Bradley said:
September 19th, 2008 at 1:37 pm, permalink
So should Arthur for ever be Oliver Tobias? Or do we freeze him at The Once and Future King. Or Tennyson. Or Malory. Or the Mabinogion… If a story catches the imagination, then the story wants to be free. That’s why there’s fanfic.
4 • Clint Harris said:
September 19th, 2008 at 1:37 pm, permalink
I have mixed emotions on this. Sure, WoT readers will love to see the saga completed, giving justification for spending hundreds of dollars on the hard-backs on the day they are released, getting Darrell K. Sweet artwork tattooed on their bodies and working phrases like “ta’veran” into their daily conversation. Not finishing the series would be like…
Bobby Joe had enough notes and enough clues throughout the rest of the series to justify a final book. Besides, without the repetition of endless descriptions of bitchy female characters, clueless men, and endless tugging of braids and fingering of sword hilts whenever someone gets nervous–not to mention not inventing a whole bunch of new secondary characters–the final book may actually be better than the last six in the series. Which in my opinion became bloated and pointless. I stopped reading at Path of Daggers or Crossroads of Twilight. I honestly can’t tell the two apart. They are the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of SF.
Hitchhiker’s Guide? I think it could work. The characters aren’t all that complex. The books work because of absurd comedy and the reliable predictability of the characters. They were written as radio serial characters. Like television shows, writers change constantly, but as long as they are outlined well, we the viewers seldom notice these changes. The final book of the Hitchhiker’s trilogy was such a bleak disappointment, I wish I had never read it. This new author can only do better.
Tokien and Frank Herbert are these vast supplies of non-renewable fiction, unique and loved worlds, of which the descendants of those geniuses of genre fiction are bleeding dry for all they are worth. One of the toughest things to do is build a fanbase. There is no better way to do this than inherit one. I’m not saying the books are bad. I’ve never read them. I’m sure they are much better than if William Shatner were to keel over and someone was to pick up the standard of TEK WAR and run brazenly into publishing battle with it. Or if Christopher Paolini were to leave Eregon unfinished. Hell, people might have to rent Return of the Jedi to see how that whole series ended.
Snarky comments aside, it’s not so much a matter of should/will something be completed posthumously, but a matter of “Is this worth my time?” Sure, why not. I’ve talked to people that actually thought the sequel to “Gone with the Wind” was pretty darn good. And look at Battlestar Galactica. The original creator gets his name on the credits, but technically has nothing to do with the show. What we watch every Friday on SciFi is superior to the original. Give a new kid on the block a shot with some dusty old characters. You might find yourself surprised at the results.
5 • veejane said:
September 19th, 2008 at 2:08 pm, permalink
I’m not sure what “not the same” has to do with anything. I don’t read books on basis of the author’s personality; and in some ways I was better able to read a book before I had any inkling that authors were living, breathing people who might be crabby or have bad days or suddenly change political affiliations mid-career. Of course the next book is “not the same” — even if it’s by the same person, it’s by a person who has lived a little longer, and possibly gotten her foot run over by a garbage truck. Or whatever happened to George Lucas.
Having somebody else’s name on the book is kind of refreshing: the ghostwriter comes to the fore! We knew So-and-so hasn’t been primary writer so much as idea-man for the last decade or more! Look, professional fanfic!
Done well and interestingly, an extension of the universe can be exciting, new, enlightening. Done crappily, it can suck rocks. This is true both of universes authored by a dead person and universes authored by a living person; but the living person can be accused of “betraying the characters.”
Which is what all those people angry about how the Harry Potter series ended (the Twilight series, name your series) do, all the time.
6 • The Duncan said:
September 19th, 2008 at 2:14 pm, permalink
I’m with JS Bangs. Ultimately, anyone can write in the universe of any dead author and I can choose not to read it. Dune is the only story that I’ve had a crack-like attachment to, where I had to check it out. I was gravely disappointed and have stopped reading Herbert Jrs tripe.
Overall I think there are few occasions where continuing the story of another author is ever going to result in something that matches, even closely, the original. Perhaps the Tolkien thing is an exception, I don’t know, since I never really delved much into Christopher’s work.
Would anybody record and album called Sgt Pepper II? Would anybody write a sequel to a Dickens book or a Steinbeck? I think not. So why even go there, unless there are some underlying psychological issues, or if you can’t come up with a good story or characters on your own.
7 • Michael Gordon said:
September 19th, 2008 at 2:24 pm, permalink
Would anybody write a sequel to a Dickens book or a Steinbeck? I think not.
But a lot of authors these days take characters from classic works (i.e. the Victorian literary tradition in the case of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or Anno Dracula), so it’s not so strange to imagine someone writing a sequel to such books. Jane Austen, for instance, has an unfinished novel, so it’s conceivable that someone would be able to write a new Jane Austen book.
8 • Randy Henderson said:
September 19th, 2008 at 2:38 pm, permalink
Ditto everyone above.
Also, since whether we like it or not there will always be estates of famous authors trying to suck a bit more golden marrow from the corpse of their cash cow, another exception (and new trend) might be to do what so many directors of Shakespeare have done and re-envision the existing work in an entirely different era and culture. Rewrite Lord of the Rings in an entirely Asian or African mythological setting. Re-envision Dune as set in a mythical Egypt or Persia. Rewrite Thomas Covenant as a Victorian woman traveling to a steampunk alternate/inner world.
It would be a nice compromise between the estate milking the legacy for every last drop, and not directly screwing with the original author’s own vision and style, etcetera.
9 • Nick Mamatas said:
September 19th, 2008 at 2:42 pm, permalink
Not sure what fanfic or writing Arthurian fiction has to do with the specific question or examples given above, so I’ll share an anecdote.
Years ago when I was teaching community college, I gave the following assignment: write 500 words about your favorite book explaining why you liked it.
Half the papers came back, at much shorter than 500 words, and these papers explained why and how the writer managed to avoid ever reading a book. Of the remaining half, half of those have only ever read one book — a teen mother read a pregnancy book, one kid was found out by a high school teacher and forced to read a whole book over the course of a semester while the teacher stared at him to make sure the book was being read, a single assignment that couldn’t be “bullshitted around” led a third person to actually read a whole book about the Meadowlands in NJ, etc.
Of the final 25% of the class, most of them declared that the Bible was their favorite book for extraliterary reasons. Only two people actually read with any regularity. Of the two declared that his favorite book was Taltos the Vampire because it was “erotic, without trying.”
The final student declared that her favorite book was “anything by V.C. Andrews”, and that she was pleased that new books would appear so frequently so that she would have more to read. However, she did admit, she had a feeling that the books were getting worse and worse.
I told her that V.C. Andrews is just a trademark — the original author died after the first three books and that everything else had just been ghostwritten. “She’s dead? She’s been dead for a long time? Well, no wonder the books are getting worse each time!” she exclaimed.
10 • Randy Henderson said:
September 19th, 2008 at 2:56 pm, permalink
Ah Ha! Nick and Michael are both wrong. Jane Austen is actually alive writing under the alias VC Andrews. I think you can catch a glimpse of her on set if you watch The Making of “Clueless” – one of her more recent films. But I understand the mistake. You were probably confused by the rumor that she ghostwrote “Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants.”
11 • Randy Henderson said:
September 19th, 2008 at 3:04 pm, permalink
This is the reason that I am writing my epic fantasy series backwards, starting at book 27.
I figure that the more I write, the better I’ll get (up to a peak point, of course, and then I’ll rapidly go downhill faster than David Bowie on methadone). So rather than letting someone else carry on my legacy and write increasingly bad novels, I will write progressively better novels backwards.
I expect the first novel to be finished and hopefully published a few years before my death, so I can enjoy the acclaim and fan worship of the founding trilogy, and maybe sue Parker Bros. for making a Monopoly board game based on it, just for kicks.
12 • Clint Harris said:
September 19th, 2008 at 3:06 pm, permalink
But Randy, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants can’t be V.C. Andrews. Nobody get’s abused by neglect or has sex with their sister in the Pants movies. But Jane Austen did write “Bridget Jones Diary II,” and “Bring it On.” And “Aztec Rex.”
13 • Clint Harris said:
September 19th, 2008 at 5:39 pm, permalink
Now, I just thought of something. There are a series of books that take Jane Austen’s characters from Pride and Prejudice and elaborate on their further adventures. “Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife” is the first of these. According to my wife, who slogged through it after reading the original Austen, it was basically Jane Austen slash-fic.
It took beloved characters from Austen and turned them into total freaks complete with explicit detail and over the top chicka-wocka-bow-bow cliches. According to her, they all but had the pizza guy show up and the bass riffs begin after each scene began.
14 • Becky said:
September 19th, 2008 at 6:07 pm, permalink
“Rewrite Lord of the Rings in an entirely Asian or African mythological setting.”
I’d read that.
15 • Willis Couvillier said:
September 19th, 2008 at 7:03 pm, permalink
There are a couple of older series and worlds I would have liked to have seen completed. One is the Horseclans series. It reached 18 books when Robert Adams died, and apparently it was meant for a 30 book epic. And Zelazny’s Amber (and don’t even go “Dawn of Amber” – ick). He had completed the Chaos quint before he died, but left a huge loose end involving a third scribed pattern that I have always felt had potential to be developed for a series on Neutrality.
Should someone complete these? Or take them further? To me, it would depend on the writer chosen for it. While i would love to see holes filled or a major storyline epic finished, I wouldn’t buy it if the quality blows.
16 • Cat C. said:
September 19th, 2008 at 7:19 pm, permalink
Michael @ 1:
I totally agree with you in regards to whether the book needs to be written. For me, that “need” can be determined by asking a basic question about the series plot: is it a “quest” plot? If so, then heck yes, for crying out loud, finish it! If not…eh…*shrug* not so much.
Quest plots have to come to a proper conclusion. That’s pretty much the whole point of the story. The basic premise of quest-plot books never changes: Character X looks for Thing A, meets lots of interesting people/animals/winged cephalopods (named B, Q, and F respectively) in lots of interesting places and undergoes some sort of personal growth and transformation as a result of the journey. Sometimes you find out that the quest was not really for Thing A, it was purely for this personal transformation and growth all along! How profound! (I kind of always thought was a bait and switch…I mean wtf, Thing A seemed sooooo important, now you’re telling me it’s not?! Bugger off dude!)
Anyway, point being that quest plots have to reach a conclusion. WoT, LotR, etc., those are quest plots. HHGTTG, not so much a quest plot in my mind. I love Douglas Adams to tears and will always wave a towel to fellow hitchhikers in his memory, but I’m not really feeling the need to round out the series like I am with WoT. Arthur, Marvin, et. al. would be just fine chillin at Milliways for the rest of their days I think.
17 • Michael Gordon said:
September 20th, 2008 at 8:05 pm, permalink
Randy’s geo-ethnic reassignation idea is really good and I feel like it should be done with more public domain works, not just Shakespeare. Dracula, Frankenstein, I’m sure there are plenty more possibilities.
Willis @ 15: I hadn’t even remembered those Dawn of Amber books, but it raises an interesting point about new authors writing not sequels but prequels. On the one hand, I feel like it puts the integrity of the series at less risk, but there’s also much less need of it. And as I recall the Dawn of Amber series didn’t even get finished up.