fruit from another angle

[psocoptera]

I want to try to think about the question of authors revisiting their early great works from another angle, namely, is it the revisitation that's the problem, or is it just that late output is *generally* bloated and not so good compared with early creative works?

To go through some of my examples from the previous post:

David Brin wrote Startide Rising in 1983, Uplift War in '87, and the Brightness Reef/Infinity's Shore/Heaven's Reach trilogy in '95, 96, and 98. Brin's original fiction works immediately before and after were Glory Season in 93 and Kiln People in 2002. Glory Season I vaguely recall being kind of dull, Kiln People on the other hand I recall having a much more creative and original premise than the trilogy.

I haven't read any of Orson Scott Card's post-2000 work other than Shadow books, so no clue there. Pastwatch was just 1996, though.

Lucas wasn't doing anything non-Star Wars during the prequel era.

Asimov's late career (80s and 90s) seems to feature a lot of expanding on his earlier works and tying them together, and nothing totally new with which I'm familiar.

Diana Wynne Jones (brought up in the comments) was writing high-quality memorable books in the '90s - Hexwood in 93, Deep Secret in 97. And then in the 2000s she wrote a bunch of sequels - Merlin Conspiracy, Conrad's Fate, Pinhoe Egg, House of Many Ways, none of which I thought were all that great - but nor was I that into her non-sequel works from the same time period, The Game or Enchanted Glass.

To take this back to Gaiman, he wrote Anansi Boys in 06, Graveyard Book in 08, both of which are tight and excellent, I don't at all feel like he *should* be approaching the "bloated rehash" portion of his career yet. So maybe the new Sandman will actually be good?

Comments

[irilyth]

From a theoretical point of view, any ideas about why we might expect an author's latter-day sequels to be less good? The "I'm an established brilliant genius, so I don't have to listen to some damn editor telling me what to do" issue seems pretty clear, but seems like it would apply to latter-day sequels as well as new stuff. So if we think latter-day sequels would be different, what do we think might be the cause?

One obvious possibility is motivation: The original work was great because the author wanted to write about a great idea they had; the latter-day sequel is not as great because the author wanted to write something familiar, comfortable, and/or commercially successful, and may not necessarily have had any great ideas. In fact, they might return to an earlier work specifically because they *don't* have any new great ideas. (And the exceptions are the ones where, twenty years later, the author thought of another great idea in the same universe, and that motivated them to write a latter-day sequel.)

[aryky.livejournal.com]

I think, even if you leave motivation out of it, that the idea of not having any new ideas is probably quite relevant. Whenever I do read large swathes of an author's body of work, it becomes very obvious that most authors have particular themes that they are pretty obsessed with and keep returning to in one way or another. And I do think that the reason why most authors ultimately end up declining is because they still really care about the same themes and want to write about them, but they don't have anything new to say about them so that the new work doesn't necessarily add anything to the old. At the very least, I certainly suspect that this is what happened to DWJ.

On the other hand, there's Henry James, who is one of my other favorite authors, and who one could arguably say did his best work in his late career (I am probably of that opinion myself, even if not everyone is). Interesting to think about one factors went into that. While he was always a good writer, his style in the later works is much more original and distinctive (albeit obviously a real turn-off for many readers). That's because he could no longer write his own books and had to dictate them to an secretary, which made a clear difference in his style. But I also think that, even though he returned at the end of his career to the "international theme" of Americans encountering and misunderstanding Europe, and even though throughout his career he was deeply inspired by his short-lived cousin Minnie Temple and used her as a template for characters in some of his earliest and some of his latest books, that he had developed his themes. In particular, his later texts are far more focused on issues of knowledge, what we do know and don't know about other people, and the benefits and flaws of both knowing and not knowing, than his earlier works, which tend to be more narrowly focused on the differences between American and European culture and how this leads to misunderstanding rather than interpersonal knowledge in general. To me, this is an exception rather than a rule - I find that most authors whose careers I am aware of don't really manage to come up with an exciting new theme like that. But perhaps that's a limitation of my reading rather than of authors on the whole?

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, in my original post I mostly meant to be thinking about authors who had had a work/series achieve great commercial success and/or widespread recognition, and their decision to go back to that. I don't know much about Henry James, but I feel like Major Literary Figures are maybe another sort of category. (And yes, you'd think my Swat education would have done me out of any sort of belief in "the canon", and that's not quite what I mean, but, okay, it's close.)

[aryky.livejournal.com]

Well, I got that about the original post, but wasn't this post more about whether "late output is *generally* bloated and not so good compared with early creative works?" That's where I thought "canonical" works might be relevant, since while most literary writers don't necessarily go back to the same series, there are plenty who lived and worked long enough to have late output. And when I do think about exceptions to the idea that late output is generally bloated and not so good compared with early works, it's literary writers who come to mind rather than SF/fantasy ones (don't know enough about other genres to say). I mean, in addition to James, who's my personal favorite, there are other examples. OTOH, I suspect Wordsworth fits into the fantasy/SF paradigm.

If it really is true that literary writers are less likely than SF/fantasy ones to have this problem, then I wonder why.

On further thought, the Philip Dick I fell in love with was the late one rather than the early one. But perhaps he just died too young to hit a decline? 53 is not that old.

[motyl.livejournal.com]

When I read your original post this was precisely my thought. Many of the authors I like have trended downhill as they get trendy. With Card, for example. I didn't like the shadow series as much as the original series but I liked it better than his more recent works.