Sequels and Prequels

[rowyn]

When I think about "seeing more" of my favorite characters or settings, I always want to know: What happens next?

Although I've read, and watched, plenty of prequels, part of me is always a little disappointed by them. I don't want to know what's gone before. I don't want to see the edges of the story filled in, to see what was happening to those characters when the camera was following this character. I want to move forward, to get the answer to And then?

In a similar vein, I dislike it when authors give spoilers for their own works. Diana Wynne Jones, dearly though I love her work, does that way too often. She'll have a first-person narrator who's supposedly writing this book after the fact, and keeps sprinkling in tidbits about how things turn out. Stop that! I don't want to know how it ends until it ends! Oddly, though, flashbacks within a text don't bother me, as long as it's not "three-fourths of the book is one long flashback".

Anyway, I'm curious now: how many other people feel the same way? When you've got a character you like, are you as happy to see a prequel as a sequel? Or do you prefer one over the other? What about the foreshadowing-by-sledgehammer that some authors like? How much do spoilers spoil it for you?

Comments

[sandratayler.livejournal.com]

It depends on how attached I am to a character. If I'm not attached, then I don't care much either way. If I'm thoroughly attached, then I prefer to know what happens next, but I'll take whatever I can get. However the Anne McCaffrey approach of retelling stories two and three times from different viewpoints annoys me because I already know what will happen and the individual character development is rarely interesting enough to offset that.

Foreshadowing-by-sledgehammer also annoys me. It absolutely kills tension.

[level-head.livejournal.com]

Orson Scott Card has done this with Ender's Game as well -- and the more recently published Ender's Shadow has the sad effect of making the FIRST book appear less of an accomplishment. It was GOOD! But my enjoyment of a potential re-read has been interfered with by Bean's bizarre treatment in Shadow.

A pity. Such "re-treatments" are not necessarily bad, though, and the mere fact of knowing the environment and the characters creates a certain kind of comfort; you are part of an "in group" in a sense as you know these people and can make connections that a first exposure reader necessarily cannot.

I am currently reading Steve Perry's "Matador" series -- a gift from some VERY nice people in Utah! ]:-D -- and there is a lot of this cross-fertilization effect. It's a good thing. And I happened to first pick up a book from later in the series (Matadora) and subsequently started over, sort of.

So, overall, a re-telling or pre-telling of a tale can be good and has some built-in advantages. But as you pointed out, caring about the character is a significant force for a reader, and you really want to know what happens next.

An example relevant here -- I'd much prefer to see Silver Scales (a story-in-progress written by our hostess rowyn move forward before it goes backward.

===|==============/ Level Head

[rowyn]

Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead were both interesting books to me. For the most part, I enjoyed them greatly. But there were a few key concepts in each that I could rant about at great length.

The friend who recommended them to me warned me off from reading Xenocide, so I've not read it or any of the other subsequent books. I have to admit, nothing I've heard about the next three has encouraged me to pick any of them up.

But I quite liked the entire "Matador" series. I think the "re-telling" effect in those is mitigated considerably by the way the overall plot continues to move forward. While the time periods covered have some overlap, you're still seeing new events unfold in each novel.

It also doesn't have the "revision" effect that too many prequels and overlapping novels suffer from. "Matador" feels like Perry planned the series in advance and didn't change his mind about details half-way through the second book. From what I've heard of Ender's Shadow, that novel suffers from badly inconsistencies and plot flaws. An author can spoil a work by inserting some "new cool thing" that he hadn't thought of the first time around, but which would (or should) preclude events that happened originally. "Wait, if this character was like that all along, why didn't we see any evidence of it in the first book?"

[level-head.livejournal.com]

You are right about Ender's Shadow. "If Bean was like this, and doing all this, why'd you even write a book about Ender?"

But the movie is going to be about Ender, I understand. I wonder if it will be influenced by Shadow.

===|==============/ Level Head