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These days they call it sharecropping—someone writing a book set in a world created by another author. There are quite a lot of them around—Thieves’ World, Heroes from Hell, the Wild Cards series, Bill, the Galactic Hero.
At least these books are honest about what they are. Much more dishonest are the books which proclaim in very large letters ISAAC ASIMOV (or ARTHUR C. CLARKE, or whatever other big name you care to substitute) and then underneath in minuscule print that merges into the cover because it’s almost the same colour you get a phrase that says something like “presents a novel by Bert Brown”.
It’s all marketing of course. You, the reading public have never heard of Bert Brown, but you have heard of Isaac Asimov, therefore, so the theory goes, you will buy the book. However I strongly suspect that the SF book buying public is not that gullible since the Isaac Asimov line is no longer being published and the Arthur C. Clarke line is moribund. I suspect only E. E. “Doc” Smith will go on for ever.
There has always been a certain amount of this sort of thing. The Oz books, for example, were so enormously popular that even after L. Frank Baum was dead they continued to be published. Written by other hands, it is true; but Oz books nonetheless. (Philip Jose Farmer wrote one not so very long ago. It’s called A Barnstormer in Oz and it is well worth looking out for.)
I remember as a child finding a book on the library shelves called The Adventures of Ben Gunn by R. F. Delderfield. It was a companion piece to Stevenson’s Treasure Island and detailed the circumstances by which the castaway Ben Gunn had arrived on the island. I enjoyed it immensely. Ben Gunn had always been one of the more interesting characters in Treasure Island, much more fun than the rather wimpish Jim Hawkins (indeed, virtually everybody in the book was more interesting than Jim Hawkins) and I thought the book was much better than Treasure Island. I must have read it at least a dozen times. Just a few months ago, I found a copy in a local second hand bookshop and I fell upon it with glad cries of glee and brought it home and reread it immediately. I am happy to say that I still think it’s better than Treasure Island.
Just after the First World War, the pseudonymous “Sapper” made a big name for himself with his thrilling stories about Bulldog Drummond. So popular were these books that a friend of Sapper’s continued to write about Bulldog Drummond long after Sapper himself had died. One critic once sourly remarked that Sapper published far more books after his death than he ever had when he was alive. There are some cultural icons who, it seems, just will not lie down and die.
Typical of these is James Bond. This phenomenon reached its peak of popularity in the 1960s. Partly it was the Saltzman and Broccoli films (those names always make me think of well seasoned vegetables), and partly it was the fact that President Kennedy once remarked in an aside that they were his favourite reading. Whatever the reason, Ian Fleming was promoted to superduper mega-stardom and the public just could not get enough of “spy” novels in general and James Bond in particular. One of the best of the subBonds was Adam Diment’s Dolly Dolly Spy books. You still see them occasionally in book exchanges. Try them—they’re not at all bad.
Fleming never really knew how to cope with the adulation. He produced two or three more increasingly despairing Bond books and then died at the height of his fame. (According to his biographer, Fleming had an inordinate fondness for curried goat. It probably explains an awful lot about his life and his death.) Almost immediately “Robert Markham” (who was really Kingsley Amis in a skin) wrote and published a new James Bond novel called Colonel Sun. John Gardner is still writing James Bond books today. And the films just keep on coming, of course.
Another phenomenon of the sinful 1960s was the emergence of a genre of sex and slavery stories set in America’s deep south before the Civil War. They were written by Kyle Onstott and novels like Mandingo and Drum titillated a whole generation of teenagers. Actually, Onstott’s books weren’t at all bad and they can still be read with pleasure. However after Onstott died, his “friend” Lance Horner continued the series and dragged it down into the genre gutter where it languishes today, a sort of pornographic soap opera with whips. (It was very interesting to see just how closely Alex Haley’s blockbuster Roots mirrored the world that Onstott created in his novels. This is a pointer, I think, to Onstott’s not inconsiderable skill.) These days, however, the whole thing is unreadably bad.
C. S. Forester was perfectly well aware of the phenomenon of writers jumping on another’s creation (and, as he saw it, cheapening the original vision). In Horatio Hornblower, he had created one of the most popular and original characters of contemporary fiction, and he was determined not to let Hornblower out of his control. He took legal steps to ensure that after his death nobody else would be able to write Hornblower books; and he was eminently successful in his aim. Nobody ever has. There are some people who may regret this, but I think he made the right decision. If he hadn’t set things up that way, we would probably have seen somebody like Alexander Kent playing Lance Horner to Forester’s Kyle Onstott, and Hornblower would have vanished into soap opera. As it is, we have seen a whole slew of pseudo-Hornblowers (from Richard Bolitho on downwards), but none of the writers have ever even come close to matching Forester and Hornblower still rates as the best. (Patrick O’Brien has probably come closest to taking Forester’s crown, and the major reason for that is that he was not even trying for it. Stephen Maturin and the other heroes of his naval adventure books are totally original creations. They owe nothing whatsoever to Hornblower.)
One reason for the whole phenomenon is the lure of the sequel. It was said of Edgar Rice Burroughs that he could resist anything except temptation. Hence the seemingly neverending stream of Tarzan books. (Burroughs, incidentally, would seem to be a prime candidate as a bandwagon for other writers to jump on and start sharecropping like crazy, but it never happened because the Burroughs family kept very tight control over the rights to Burroughs’ creations.) At the moment, this particular mania is manifesting itself as trilogies (or greater). It is a very short step from there to sharecropping proper, and it is easy to see how it all happened. What is not so easy to evaluate is how successful the whole thing is (in artistic rather than monetary terms). The phenomenon itself may be slightly suspect because it can be regarded purely as a cynical ploy to milk capital out of big names, but despite that, there is no question that it has produced some excellent books. Surely it can’t be all bad?
Well, yes and no. It is rather like salt in your stew. Just because a pinch makes it taste good, you can’t extrapolate and say that a couple of shovels full will make it taste better. The whole thing is growing out of control and is in danger of swamping us.
Within the SF field, it has been going on for quite some time. Sharecropping is not new—only the name is new. It happens much more frequently now than it used to because the publishers are actively encouraging it, but it was always there.
Fred Saberhagen has written several vampire books based directly on Bram Stoker’s work. Of these the best is almost certainly The Dracula Tapes which shamelessly retells Stoker’s original story incident for incident—but from Dracula’s point of view instead of Jonathan Harker’s. It is a brilliant piece of work, and if you go back and reread Stoker’s original after reading the Saberhagen, it throws a completely different light on things. He attempted a similar exercise with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (called, I believe, The Frankenstein Papers) but it was less successful. Brian Aldiss did it much better with Frankenstein Unbound.
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle got into the act with Inferno, which just has to be one of the oddest books ever written. Does anybody outside of university literature classes still read Dante? Niven and Pournelle seem to think so, and it has to be admitted; Inferno is a superb book. But terribly strange.
I gave up reading the Heroes in Hell series after four reasonably enjoyable novels when I realised that despite there having been a lot of incidents, nothing of any lasting significance had happened. Julius Caesar did a lot of marching and fighting but at the end of four books he was no further forward than he had been at the start of the first. Contrast this with Wild Cards (which is seven books old as I write) where lots of very significant things have happened and the characters have learned and grown, changed and died. Every Heroes in Hell book is utterly indistinguishable from every other Heroes in Hell book. Since I have read four of them, I’ve probably really read them all—even the ones I’ve not read.
In an article called Science Fiction: The Crisis of its Growth, published in Partisan Review in 1967, the French critic Michel Butor wrote:
…let us imagine that a certain number of authors instead of describing at random and quite rapidly certain more or less interchangeable cities were to take as the setting of their stories a single city named and situated with some precision in space and in future time; that each author were to take into account the descriptions given by the others in order to introduce his new ideas. This city would become a common possession to the same degree as an ancient city that has vanished; gradually all readers would give its name to the city of their dreams and would model that city in its image.
Here, it seems to me, Butor is using his science fictional city as a metaphor for a shared world. He describes the sharecropping process and suggests that it is a good thing. He goes on to say:
SF, if it could limit and unify itself would be capable of acquiring over the individual imagination a constraining power comparable to that of any classical mythology. Soon all authors would be obliged to take this predicted city into account, readers would organise their actions in relation to its imminent existence, ultimately they would find themselves obliged to build it. Then SF would be veracious, to the very degree that it realised itself.
Butor’s suggestions are largely coming true. The bookshelves are inundated with books that share a common premise (and which are all but indistinguishable from each other as a result). Far from liberating SF and making it grow into a powerful mythology, as Butor would have us believe, the recipe seems to lead inexorably to stagnation, dullness and open-ended books with no resolution.
In 1968, in Riverside Quarterly, James Blish published a rebuttal of Butor’s ideas in which he said:
The prescription would freeze the very worst elements of routine commercial science fiction—its paucity of imagination and its tendency to conventionalise the future—into a set of dogmas much like thirteenth century canon law.
There is little doubt, I think, that Blish was right and Butor was wrong. The sooner the SF world stops sharing worlds the better. I am bored with sameness. One reason for reading SF is a liking for change, for difference, for originality. Sharing worlds destroys all of that. We have seen other genres outside of SF ruined by the crass commercialism of sharecropping. We don’t want it to happen to SF.
Let’s make a middle-of-the-year resolution. Let’s all stop buying sharecropped and shared world books.
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