Posted by Jeremy Kriewaldt on 01/21/00 from bdw.netcomuk.co.uk:
In Reply to: Re: Sequels posted by Rebecca on January 17, 2000 at 00:09:24:
I think that I may find myself being burned at the stake with Prue and Andy. If it is permissible to speculate, then it must equally be permissible to write down those speculations (subject, of course to copyright issues). So far, everyone who has contributed their "pet" speculation to this thread must agree.
If it is permissible to write it down, then it must equally be permissible to adopt whichever form of written communication, including fiction, that the author may choose - subject to the same copyright issue.
The real question is whether it is done well (ie Dr Johnson on walking dogs and preaching women does not apply). I share the fear that it will not be, particularly if someone tries not only to write fiction, but also to write in the style of AR. In this regard, however, I make the following observations:
· AR envisaged at least one more work (see Coots in the North) which may well have answered the Nancy/Tom speculation, so the suggestion that there is a fixed canon which ended with GN seems difficult to support.
· The literary executors of Dorothy L Sayers recently allowed her incomplete Lord Peter Wimsey novel, Thrones, Dominations, to be completed. Wimsey fans have debated whether it was well done, but no-one has suggested that it shouldn't have been alolowed.
· It is possible to take the characters of fiction and to write very good works in a different style - I think that C. Northcote Parkinson's The Life and Times of Horatio Hornblower is wonderful, it uses Forester's characters and turns them into biography and because of the contrast between history and fiction, it also contains humour of a very sophisticated kind (as befits the author of Parkinson's Law). I actually believed in this work as biography for several years!!!
· My views should not be understood as supporting unrestricted licence - but if someone's creative urge (what Dorothy Sayers would call the Mind of the Maker) would take AR's characters and make a good piece of literature in its own right, I think it would be churlish to say it is a bad thing in itself. It is, however, fair to suggest that such an enterprise is even more difficult than ordinary fiction, in part because many people already have strong views and clear ideas about these characters and also care about them as if they were either human or history.