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

[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.)