What are you reading?
- Thread starter JackEmerson
- Start date
Now that is a saddening little factoid. I wasn't aware that Lee Child had achieved that stage in his career, i.e. a successful and talented author who apparently is now getting paid per word and who then stoops to this kind of greedy chicanery. How disappointing...
Creating a work of fiction is hard. Creating a fictional character who can then be followed through a series of fictional works...each of which must be just as original and entertaining as the one before...is much harder. It
seems that a lot of writers, having created the goose that lays the golden egg, then insist upon strapping that goose down to a table, force-feeding it to obesity, eventually hooking it up to an iron lung and squeezing every last drop of financial productivity out of it, rather than just allowing it to die a dignified natural death.
Sometimes the authors themselves are complicit in this sabotage of their own works; in other cases I'm sure the handlers of the estate make this choice post mortem.
Doesn't matter which; IMHO it would be far preferable to just kill the character/series off while it's still good...it's better to burn out than to fade away.
Now that is a saddening little factoid. I wasn't aware that Lee Child had achieved that stage in his career, i.e. a successful and talented author who apparently is now getting paid per word and who then stoops to this kind of greedy chicanery. How disappointing...
Creating a work of fiction is hard. Creating a fictional character who can then be followed through a series of fictional works...each of which must be just as original and entertaining as the one before...is much harder. It
seems that a lot of writers, having created the goose that lays the golden egg, then insist upon strapping that goose down to a table, force-feeding it to obesity, eventually hooking it up to an iron lung and squeezing every last drop of financial productivity out of it, rather than just allowing it to die a dignified natural death.
Sometimes the authors themselves are complicit in this sabotage of their own works; in other cases I'm sure the handlers of the estate make this choice post mortem.
Doesn't matter which; IMHO it would be far preferable to just kill the character/series off while it's still good...it's better to burn out than to fade away.
From what i know its pretty much as you described it, Lee Child said it was getting hard to write a book every year and was wearing him down. Apparently he wanted to kill off reacher which i think would have been a good ending but the publishers were against it so he let his brother take over.
The sad truth is his brother isnt as talented and the quality has gone out the window.
If you look at a cover of a new Reacher book in huge letterrs "LEE CHILDs JACK REACHER" then in tiny letters at the bottom "written by andrew child", if they changed the characters name you wouldnt know you were reading a book in the same series as the new books are missing that magic ingredient that made them so entertaining.
Very true. Mind you, not really all that surprising. There are several other authors churning out the adventures of Reacher, or of the people chasing him, or of the people he once worked with, or of the guy that used to live across the street from the mailman who once made deliveries to his parents' house...
Reacher has become a profitable commodity, and the business of publishing will continue to exploit the character until well after the point where it resembles the original creation. Take a peak at how many new James Bond novels were written after Ian Fleming's death...or how many Conan stories appeared decades after Robert Howard's passing. Larry Niven, one of my favourite hard-SF writers, has released numerous books after his heyday, all of which are listed as collaborations between Niven and one or two "other guys"...i.e., guys I would never have heard of and likely would never have read otherwise. Roger Zelazny, whom I referenced earlier, passed away and the novel he was working on at the time was completed by his partner, an apparently-established author in her own right but...nope, not the same. Would have been better left unfinished. I swear that some of those collaborative efforts can be picked up and flipped open to a specific page, where you can point to the middle of a sentence and say "See? Right there! That's where he died, or went on vacation, or just got fed up with it..."
Puts a new spin on the idea of a "ghost writer".
They wouldn't even need to kill him off, what happened to the good old days where the hero rides off into the sunset of eternity and you can imagine he's still out there somewhere fighting the good fight?
I have never read the Reacher books, but I did enjoy the movie with Tom Cruise. However, I did not love the amazon prime series Reacher. Do the books have a pacing more like the Tom Cruise movie, or more like the series? Or something else?
I didn't see the movie, but have read a dozen or so of the books and saw a few of the Amazon shows, the problem with the amazon series is that it takes the whole first novel and stretches it into a full season, making it very slow to watch. May have been better if I hadn't read the books already, but they did a great job of following the story closely. I rarely reread books, so watching the thing i just read a couple years ago was no fun after a bit and I quit watching.
Those good old days came to an end when it became the norm for the Hollywood bean counters to crunch the numbers and decide that a character like Reacher would be a cash cow for many, many sequels. I think that was about the same time that movies and books began to be referred to as "franchises", i.e. a worthwhile idea that is then licenced/co-opted/stolen/re-worked/re-written/reproduced/re-animated ad infinitum for as long as the makers think it can have a few more bucks squeezed out of it. When is the last time you have seen a movie that ended conclusively, with no possibility of a sequel? The sequel doesn't always come to fruition, but there's always that hint, that suggestion that one may happen.
I'd like to see a movie where everybody dies at the end...not in some ambiguous way that allows any of them to miraculously escape the Grim Reaper and sign up for a sequel either, but the way it eventually happens in reality, i.e. everybody dies with finality. It would be a refreshing change...
Abosolutely...and it's another very common problem with movies vs. TV series. I've lost track of the series I've started watching, either because they were based upon a book I enjoyed or simply because they looked interesting to me, only to lose interest due to this problem. An idea which could make a terrific 1.5- or 2-hour movie is dragged out for an entire season of one-hour episodes and turns into a snooze-fest.
I often re-read books I enjoy, sometimes multiple times, so watching a movie adaptation days, weeks, or years later doesn't bother me at all. I also don't find it necessary for movies to cling desperately to every detail and phrase from the original books. Making a movie is an artistic endeavour, just like writing a book, so if the creator decides to take some artistic liberties I will judge them on their own merits, rather than squealing that they are "inaccurate".
Everybody has seen the James Bond movies, probably far more than have read the books. I loved the novels, and thoroughly enjoyed some of the movies, but they often have very little in common with each other than the titles. I haven't yet delved into the post-Fleming books written by any of his hangers-on.
Bradbury is timeless and literary in the truest sense. Lovecraft is entertaining in a funky quasi-classical way...but never, ever watch any of the movies that have so far been based upon his works. They are so bad in every way...without even the saving grace of being silly enough to laugh at...that you are liable to suffer permanent damage...
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"Armageddon" was such a film where it would seem everyone was going to die at the end, including the planet too! Double prizes!
But, as in must apocalyptic films, there's always some do gooders who save the day, and get the girl to boot, lol.
Try the movie "don't look up." Also the Sopranos did a pretty good job of killing everybody off, but that dragged at times too.
Thanks John, that was just the romantic in me, it's just the romantic in me i guess that wants the sunset scene. King did it well with the Dark tower series, where the storyline concluded but Roland is still somewhere in midworld being roland. In the real world I know it's the merchandising and spinoffs and sequels that keep the sick cycle spinning.
And I agree Lovecraft isn't the end all and be all, but what I do like is given his time and place in history he went places others weren't, and he basically says come take a walk with me and imagine if... maybe thats romanticizing again, but thats why I love reading.
Thanks John, that was just the romantic in me, it's just the romantic in me i guess that wants the sunset scene. King did it well with the Dark tower series, where the storyline concluded but Roland is still somewhere in midworld being roland. In the real world I know it's the merchandising and spinoffs and sequels that keep the sick cycle spinning.
And I agree Lovecraft isn't the end all and be all, but what I do like is given his time and place in history he went places others weren't, and he basically says come take a walk with me and imagine if... maybe thats romanticizing again, but thats why I love reading.
