Jen at Crazy for Books restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another, but then couldn't continue, so she handed the hosting responsibilities off to Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them.
This week Billy asks: Do you enjoy reading retellings of, or 'sequels' to, classic novels? Why or why not?
Based on the handful of novels I have read that meet those criteria, I'm going to have to say no. Most of the long-delayed "sequels" to classic novels that I have read have been long-delayed sequels to classic works of science fiction, and by and large, those have proven to be terrible. For example, Arthur C. Clarke published Rendezvous with Rama in 1973, which quickly became one of the most celebrated works of science fiction. In 1989, Clarke teamed with Gentry Lee and began producing sequels to Rama, specifically, Rama II, The Garden of Rama, and Rama Revealed. These sequels were, to be blunt, terrible. They were so bad that they almost retroactively made the first novel worse.
Similarly, Isaac Asimov originally published the Foundation trilogy between 1951 and 1953, and it is regarded as one of the keystone works of the science fiction genre. Twenty-eight years later, in 1981, he published Foundation's Edge, and then three more books in the series. He later published more books to tie the Foundation novels to his Robot series. The end result is a big mess, which was made worse by the fact that all of the novels published in the 1980s just weren't particularly good.
There are other instances of this happening in the science fiction genre, but I figure that's enough examples to make the point. In my experience, delayed sequels to "classic" books have a poor track record when it comes to quality, so I haven't really enjoyed them when I have read them.
Previous Book Blogger Hop: The Tupolev Tu-244 Was a Proposed Supersonic Passenger Aircraft That Was Never Actually Built
Subsequent Book Blogger Hop: My Copy of "Last and First Men" by Olaf Stapledon Is 246 Pages Long
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