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.