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

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

That's something I've struggled with in the past. (Okay, maybe "struggled" is too strong a word.) Back when I was in high school, I was obsessed with reading every science fiction book in the school library. (There weren't all that many, really. It was a small school.) It seemed like I had a really lousy streak; not every book I read had a tragic ending, but the majority of them did. And some of them were really wallowing in the angst, with Shakespearean pile-up-the-bodies endings. More than one of them ended up in the depicted or implied destruction of Earth and/or the human race, despite the best efforts of the heroes. (And, there seemed to be a common theme of "no good deed goes unpunished".) I think it was either just a phenomenal fluke, or else whoever was in charge of stocking the library had a really twisted sense of humor.

I wasn't too happy with those books. I didn't think highly of the author. But, still, it had an unforeseen side effect: When I finally read another book that ended up having a happy ending, it wasn't something I was expecting to be a foregone conclusion. It had been established to me that, yes, it is possible for a novel to have an unhappy ending, even when there are all the cliches that seem to point to the final confrontation in which the hero will at last prevail.

I didn't like the books with these particular unhappy endings, for various reasons (beyond just the fact that they ended unhappily) ... but they served a perhaps unintended purpose of making me appreciate a book with a happy ending as a little more special for the contrast.

Hmm.

For some reason, my logic reminds me of the stupid joke about the man who keeps hitting himself in the head with a hammer. When asked why he's doing it, he says, "Because it feels so good when I stop!"