I'd heard about this...there are a lot of questions.
The fact is, no matter who writes it or how well, it won't be Douglas Adams -- so, in my heart, it won't be real Hitchhiker's. It'll be paid, published fanfic.
An author in this position has two pressures: one, to write the story he's told to write, and two, to make that story and writing his own. Unless the author is utterly without self-respect or at least a sense of identity -- I'm looking at you, Chris Tolkein -- that second pressure can never go away. An author can change voice but it's still his heart, his ideas, or else we'd just finally give up and build Adams-Bot 3000 to write us infinite automatic reams of what it's like to be English in spaaaaaaaace.
Overall I think it does authors a disservice to try to create "official" continuations like this. Sure, give unfinished notes to scholars. And I agree that some of literature's greatest works are continuations -- but those continuations were the work of the subsequent author, borrowing a character, but free for the inspired following author to do whatever they like. They were unconstrained, writing only what they loved and discarding the rest. Shakespeare can borrow from wherever he likes and write Hamlet; Tom Stoppard can write Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead; but nobody should write Hamlet II: Horatio's Revenge.
And hell, DNA didn't hold himself too closely to his own continuity, so why should anyone else?
And the other thing, the thing about series is -- stories end, even if they're written by Roger Zelazny. They're supposed to. It's part of their humanity; people end. Sometimes abruptly. Sometimes unexpectedly. Often imperfectly, without complete resolution.
It's natural to want to round them off and to think about what might have happened.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2008-09-17 12:15 am (UTC)The fact is, no matter who writes it or how well, it won't be Douglas Adams -- so, in my heart, it won't be real Hitchhiker's. It'll be paid, published fanfic.
An author in this position has two pressures: one, to write the story he's told to write, and two, to make that story and writing his own. Unless the author is utterly without self-respect or at least a sense of identity -- I'm looking at you, Chris Tolkein -- that second pressure can never go away. An author can change voice but it's still his heart, his ideas, or else we'd just finally give up and build Adams-Bot 3000 to write us infinite automatic reams of what it's like to be English in spaaaaaaaace.
Overall I think it does authors a disservice to try to create "official" continuations like this. Sure, give unfinished notes to scholars. And I agree that some of literature's greatest works are continuations -- but those continuations were the work of the subsequent author, borrowing a character, but free for the inspired following author to do whatever they like. They were unconstrained, writing only what they loved and discarding the rest. Shakespeare can borrow from wherever he likes and write Hamlet; Tom Stoppard can write Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead; but nobody should write Hamlet II: Horatio's Revenge.
And hell, DNA didn't hold himself too closely to his own continuity, so why should anyone else?
And the other thing, the thing about series is -- stories end, even if they're written by Roger Zelazny. They're supposed to. It's part of their humanity; people end. Sometimes abruptly. Sometimes unexpectedly. Often imperfectly, without complete resolution.
It's natural to want to round them off and to think about what might have happened.
But all you can do is think about it.
And that's life.