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

[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.