overripe fruit

[psocoptera]

So apparently Gaiman is writing a new Sandman story. Is this actually good news? I feel like creators going back to their most well-known early universes rarely produces anything up to the quality of their early works - in fact, I can't offhand think of an exception to this. Anyone?

Here are some of the cases I've already thought about:
Orson Scott Card's "Shadow" books revisiting the Ender universe
Asimov's later Foundation books vs the original trilogy
Vinge's recent Tines book
David Brin's later Uplift trilogy vs Startide Rising and Uplift War
George Lucas's Star Wars prequels
Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull

The only counterexample I've come up with so far, after more thinking, is Jo's Boys, which was published fifteen years after Little Men. And I guess one could count the Lord of the Rings vs the Hobbit, although honestly, though it borders on blasphemy, I think a certain amount of Tolkien's later History of Middle-Earth work fits the pattern of "bloated and unnecessary".

Comments

[q10.livejournal.com]

it seems painfully obvious to me that the most recent Tines book is setup for a book 3, and that my assessment of it depends on what the things that i disliked turn out to be setup for, and how awsome that is.

as for Middle-Earth, there's a complication that a lot of the stuff that was published later was actually written (or at least conceived) earlier, so sorting out the creative chronology is complicated.

that said, even if we grant Tolkien as a partial exception, overall we've got a pretty strong trend here.

um... Le Guin intermittently turned out what I thought was really good stuff in the Ekumen/Hainish universe over a period between (about) 1969 and 1995. but that worked in part because it's a huge universe with lots of room to spread out and not step on old material, and in part because she didn't even try to maintain serious continuity: there was telepathy in some earlier work, but at some point she lost her ability to take it seriously so it disappeared from later stories without explanation, and one FAQ contains the helpful clarification that ‘I have to warn you that the planet Werel in Four Ways is not the planet Werel in Planet of Exile. In between novels, I forget planets. Sorry.’

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

I haven't read enough of the more recent Hainish stuff to have an opinion. I did briefly think about LeGuin's original Earthsea trilogy vs the later three, but - I don't know. I feel like LeGuin is doing something very different there, in that she's not just, like, elaborating her universe, she's actually *criticizing* it, she's interrogating it from new perspectives and actually rebuilding parts of it in more complicated and nuanced ways. Uh, which is not to say I love all those changes, the later three are very *hard*, in a lot of ways, compared with the trilogy - but I feel like it's a different caliber of thing than Card saying "no really this other guy was the really bestest, please buy six more books", or Asimov saying "the robots were in the Foundation, all along I've been writing one giant series and here's how it all links up!".

[q10.livejournal.com]

i was avoiding the later Earthsea material because it's complicated in roughly the ways you say.

the thing is, in some ways, the Ender's Shadow was a criticism of Ender's Game, and George Lucas's second-most-hated act in revisiting Star Wars (Gredo shooting first) was likewise a criticism of what had come before. i think mainly it's that, as an artist and as a thinker generally, Le Guin has aged way the fuck more gracefully than Card and Lucas have.

[q10.livejournal.com]

as for late Ekumen stuff, i thought the short stories The Matter of Segri and Solitude (collected in The Birthday of the World), were both pretty interesting, and some of the other Ekumen stories in the same volume were okay.

i thought that The Telling (the last Ekumen novel, published in 2000), was too preachy and not really competitive with the earlier stuff, although it had its moments.

[q10.livejournal.com]

does either of the first two 24th-century Star Trek series count? both were uneven, but taken as a whole i think either is pretty competitive with the original series (which, to be fair, was also pretty uneven).

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

Hrm. It's been awhile since I gave any thought to the who's who of Trek - I feel like once upon a time I was quite interested in who was producing and writing and directing and all that, but that was, um, more than half my life ago now - but my impression is that TNG was much more about a new influx of talent into the Trek universe, rather than Roddenberry personally having a resurgence of Trek ideas. I think new people reigniting a shared universe is a different thing. (Although sometimes a related thing - I haven't read any of the non-Asimov Foundation novels, nor the non-Herbert Dune novels, but I doubt they'd exist if Asimov and Herbert hadn't been extending those universes past their original main works.)

[q10.livejournal.com]

my understanding is that TNG starting to get good and Gene Roddenberry agreeing to take a less active role in the creative work of the show went hand in hand, so, yeah, fair enough.

[q10.livejournal.com]

and how do you feel about Robots of Dawn? it's been long enough since i read any of the Robot novels that i can't really make a comparison, but my sense is that it was reasonably well-received.

[irilyth]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_series_%28Asimov%29#Robot_novels says "The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun are both considered classics of the genre, but the later novels were also well received, with The Robots of Dawn nominated for both the Hugo and Locus Awards in 1984, and Robots and Empire shortlisted for the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel in 1986."

(I also haven't read them in a while; I don't recall being aware at the time that they weren't written in more or less the same time period.)

[q10.livejournal.com]

the tip-offs are that Robots of Dawn is significantly longer than the first two and is more explicit about sex.

also Robots of Dawn contains a reference to Bicentennial Man, and more generally does a lot of work to retroactively situate the Robot novels in some kind of continuity with the other Robot work, all of which is more of a late-Asimov thing to do (cf. the various not-so-great revisitations of the Foundation series).

Robots and Empire of course devotes a lot more time to continuity-merging and associated retconning. (and, i would be inclined to argue, is a worse book for it, although again my memory is rusty.)

[antimony.livejournal.com]

Personally, I go back and reread the first two occasionally; I have reread Robots of Dawn maybe once? It always felt like a retread plus continuity hack to me (less so than Robots and Empire, but Robots and Empire is sort of about the continuity merge and thus it doesn't feel shoehorned in. Clunky, in places, but it has the same charm IMHO as a lot of crossover fanfic. Whereas Robots of Dawn feels like it should just be part of the original series but it doesn't quite fit.)

[aryky.livejournal.com]

You know, it's not necessarily the most popular DWJ fandom opinion, but I personally like The Crown of Dalemark a lot better than Cart and Cwidder and Drowned Ammet (albeit it's about equal in my taste with Spellcoats). I mean, so much Navis! And so much Duck! And how can you not like a book where. . . ummm, have you read it? At any rate, I certainly think that going back to Dalemark worked out well for DWJ. OTOH, Chrestomanci and Howl, not so much.

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

I still have not read the Dalemark books. They're on my list. But my list is long.

[aryky.livejournal.com]

Aren't lists always long? Sigh.

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

I kind of like having a long to-read list, like, I know that I will have interesting things to do for a long long time. The idea of running out of books I wanted to read sounds much bleaker.

[aryky.livejournal.com]

I suppose. I just wish it were more likely to stay stable over long periods of time rather than to consistently get longer and longer throughout.

But, of course, I'm in a less reading stage of my life at this point, which always make me more depressed about the list. I wouldn't mind it always growing all the time constantly if it weren't for the fact that I feel I'm making no progress at all.

[antimony.livejournal.com]

I think the Darkover books got better and better, including the ones that were rewrites of previous stories, at least until the point where they were written by people not MZB. (She co-wrote a bunch near the end of her life, which as far as I could tell were basically her outlines and someone else's writing, because they didn't sound like her at all.)

Part of this was because the original ones were So Dated, and the updates not as much, but I also think she continued to have a consistent vision while her writing skills improved (and she never had the obvious no-one-is-editing-this issue).

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

So... what is up with the editing problem? I mean, I can see how if you're an editor, and you know that a book that says "Asimov" and "Foundation" on it is going to sell enough to cover your department budget this year and it only has to be good enough that people will still buy the next one too, you don't want to say anything critical to Asimov that might offend him and make him take his next bestseller to someone else. But if you're Asimov, once upon a time you must have known that good editing improves books - do you just forget that? Do all the awards go to your head? And how does someone like MZB apparently avoid falling into that trap?

[irilyth]

> if you're Asimov, once upon a time you must have known that good editing improves books - do you just forget that?

If you're Asimov, and are like a hundred and fifty years old, maybe. :^)

If you're Brin, maybe you believe that your early success was in spite of those pesky editors, rather than thanks to them. Or maybe you think you needed their advice when you were a newbie, but don't any more now that you're the best of the best, or some such? In the way that superstar athletes can be hard to coach, or top-notch actors can be hard to direct, or whatever.

(And maybe MZB is just less dumb. Or aged. :^)

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

Asimov was actually only 72 when he died (in 1992), you may be thinking of Arthur C Clarke who was 90 when he died in 2008. (Almost all of whose work after the mid 1980s was co-written.) MZB was 69 when she died in 1999, and was thus somewhat younger than Asimov in the 80s when she was writing reportedly good Darkover novels and he was writing not so good Foundation novels, but not like hugely younger.

[irilyth]

Sure, although it's presumably not actually age per se, but something more like "senility" or "curmudgeonliness" or whatnot, which is harder to measure. (I have no idea if any of these folks seemed sharp up through their deaths, or if they were clearly fading mentally, or what.)

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

There is a fascinating and sort of heartbreaking story on Wikipedia about Arthur C. Clarke's last novel:

"the late Sir Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik Pohl collaborated for the first time on The Last Theorem. The novel initially was Clarke's, and he began working on it in early 2004.[6] But in 2006, at the age of 88, ill health brought on by complications from post-polio syndrome, and writer's block, impeded his progress, and he asked Pohl for help.[7] Pohl explained: "Arthur said to me that he woke up one morning and didn't know how to write any of the books he had contracted. The stories had just gone out of his head."[7] Clarke gave Pohl a 40–50 page manuscript plus roughly 50 pages of notes,[8] and over the next two years, Pohl wrote the book. Pohl said that "Everything in the novel is something he either suggested or wrote or I discussed with him."[7] Some of Clarke's notes were so obscure that even Clarke himself could not understand them.[8] Pohl, only two years younger than Clarke, had health problems of his own: he could no longer type and wrote the book out in longhand, leaving it up to his wife to translate his "indecipherable scribbles".[8] Clarke reviewed and approved the final manuscript of The Last Theorem in early March 2008, just days before he died.[9][10]"

There's something about these two ancient guys, just trying to finish this one last book, dang.

[antimony.livejournal.com]

I wonder if the fact that she mentored a lot of young authors and did a lot of anthology work (and a lot of co-writing even before she started co-writing stuff that she couldn't finish due to her own illness.) And thus maybe kept seeing what editing could do? Or possibly was just better at editing her own stuff? (Or continued to want to, rather than being happy to churn out novels -- sometimes it's clearly ego, like Anne Rice, but sometimes maybe it's laziness and the knowledge that something will be a commercial success anyway? Either on the author's part or the publishing house. IDK.)