In honour of the release of the latest book in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy range, this week's meme asks:
What's your favourite book sequel?
It can be part of a range, it can be by someone other than the original author, it can be authorised or unauthorised. It's up to you. Anyone saying Eric van Lustbader's Bourne books will be shot, however.
If you can't do books, you can always do sequel TV shows (eg Ashes to Ashes). Or you can say which book sequel you really hated.
As always, leave a comment with your answer or a link to your answer on your own blog.
October 14, 2009 | Reply
The question seems kind of vague and open and leaves me a bit confused. (Which I'll admit is very easily done.....)
But the way I'm reading it is that books that were meant to be sequels or parts of trilogies should not be considered? I'm taking it that these should be books that came after a story that stood on its own?
For me this would leave out everything that followed the first books in the series for Sherlock Holmes, 'Lord Of The Rings', the Deryni Chronicles, the Dragonriders of Pern saga, the Riverworld adventures, and the Tales of Alvin Maker.
I guess though that one could count 'The Lord of the Rings' as a whole, and as a sequel to 'The Hobbit'. I can't see how I could beat that.
But I do have a runner-up which would stand as a sequel to a completed series, and which was also by another author. "The Barnstormer of Oz" by Philip Jose Farmer was a great adventure that put an interesting twist on the Oz books and made the series more adult. And it also did a great job linking Oz to the American politics of the early 20th Century...
October 14, 2009 | Reply
Oh, good one!
I just have to go with the following choices from different genres.
Horror is: Necroscope V: Deadspawn (which is such a harsh and hard book to read for so many emotional reasons).
Comedy would be: Witches Abroad
Graphic novel is Sin City's 'Hell and Back' (Just plain, vanilla old awesome).
Crime is: Exit Music
Non-fiction is: Elephants on Acid
Sorry for cheating a little and splitting up into several genres. Actually, I'm not really sorry at all!
October 14, 2009 | Reply
Like Toby, I find the definition of sequel here a bit confusing. So a series of books is like a series of episodes, right? And a sequel is like what Ashes to Ashes is to LoM- same world, some same characters, but a whole new story. Something that delineates it from the first.
Eg books 1-5 of Amber versus 6-10. 6-10 being the sequel in this case.
Okay so, with that kind of definition, The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant may be my favourite sequel (Stephen Donaldson). I actually read them before the first though.
I also highly enjoyed the Shadow series that was a sequel to the Ender books by Orson Scott Card.
TV show-wise, Sarah Connor was an excellent sequel to T2 in my opinion.
October 14, 2009 | Reply
As with all memes, a sequel is what you define it to be (within reason)
October 16, 2009 | Reply
Oh ok. This is very very difficult. Generally I don't like sequels as they very often don't match up to the first book. I'd make an exception for The Subtle Knife though. I loved Northern Lights, but The SK was awesome (Amber Spyglass less so). In the Harry Potter series I think Books 3/4 and book 6 stand out (film didn't do that one justice). Anyone read Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines series? Each one of those is of equal stature. Brilliant series.
Ok. Better try and move away from kids books - I am a big Jean Plaidy fan and The Captive Queen of Scots which follows the story of Mary Queen of Scots after she flees for England in The Royal Road to Fotheringhay still makes me cry. It's also the reason I write romantic fiction(-:
Am getting stuck now. Am sure there are others. But back to kids books for a moment, I picked up the new Winnie the Pooh in a bookshop the other day. I am always really dubious about revisiting classics, but from the little I read I think it's been extraordinarily faithful to the spirit of the original and I think I might have to buy it for myself for Christmas (children all too old now!). Ditto Geraldine McCaughrean's Peter Pan in Scarlet.
I am sure I should be able to think of other examples that aren't children's books, but my brain is refusing to play ball at the moment. I may well come back to this!
Oh just thought - do you count plays, Rob? I know techinically Antigone wasn't the first written in the Oedipus trilogy, but chronologically it's the last and my favourite of the three.
October 16, 2009 | Reply
Doh! Saw your comment on Twitter about Terry Pratchett and of course he does lots of sequels, most of which are brilliant. (OK I am loosely defining all Discworld books as sequels just so I can include him) My favourites in his series are: Reaper Man which was the first TP I ever read and still makes me laugh out loud, The Truth (fantastic satire on the newspaper industry) and Monstrous Regiment which has a wonderful comment about the boredom of ironing that I had to read several times to convince myself a man had written it (sorry Rob!). The man's a genius. But I think we all knew that...
October 16, 2009 | Reply
Mike Carey's Felix Castor novels are getting better and better as he reveals more backstory — well worth taking a look. I've just read the fourth one (Thicker Than Water) and the fifth is now out.
It's got a lot in common with Hellblazer, which Carey used to write — Castor is a London-based freelance exorcist who comes from Liverpool and keeps dragging his friends into his work — but it's departed from that considerably. Great characters, twisty and nasty plots, good writing.
I'm also enjoying Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie novels, which are crime/detective novels on the surface, but are actually more about coincidence, regret, destiny and lives lived in the shadow of trauma. Poor old Jackson never seems to get much detecting done, because he's the unluckiest man in fiction and events keep derailing him. But each book has been better than the last.
October 16, 2009 | Reply
I'll steer clear of film sequels - Godfather II being the mastrpiece it clearly is...
Anyway I'm rather fond of the Lucifer graphic novels that followed up on the characterisation from Gaiman's Sandman. But is that a spin-off rather than a sequel???? e.g. like Firefly to Serenity or Buffy to Angel...
And I'd agree with jane henry about the development of Pullman trilogy, except that since I wept right through the last two thirds of Amber Spyglass it couldn't have been that unsuccessful (though the writing in book two was probably the best of the three).
Just reading the Stieg Larsson trilogy and I never thought the second volume would have me turning pages faster than the first did; but it was an eyes wide edge of seat read and I'm kicking my heels now waiting for neil to finish reading the third.
I dare not even think too loudly that Doctor Who 2005-to date is a sequel to the 1963-1989 (waits for bricks to be thrown - just kidding, honest!!)
October 16, 2009 | Reply
Lisa I did like the last book, but I think my expectations were so high I was disappointed, and I didn't like what he did with Mary wotsit. I loved her so much in the second book and then found her bits rather strange in book 3. Also by the time it came out had left Scholastic so never got to see it in early form. Reading NL and the SK in ms form just about the most exciting thing that ever happened in my publishing days! The ending is very poignant though.
Am trying and failing to think of any classics which have sequels. I'm sure there must be some!
October 16, 2009 | Reply
" Am trying and failing to think of any classics which have sequels. I'm sure there must be some!"
Depends how you define classics. Gone With The Wind has an authorised sequel ("Rhett Butler's People"), as do Dracula, Peter Pan and The Time Machine. 20,000 Thousand Leagues under the Sea had a sequel. Alan Moore did his whole League of Extraordinary Gentlemen thing.
But I can't think of anything pre 19th century that has a real sequel beyond Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, which stretches the definition somewhat.
October 16, 2009 | Reply
"Lisa I did like the last book, but I think my expectations were so high I was disappointed, and I didn't like what he did with Mary wotsit."
I think he packed too much into the Amber Spyglass, opening up the multiverse and bringing in all the non-humans. The strength of the first two books is their restraint, in the way that the alternate worlds aren't all that different from ours. All the angels, little spy-people and animals-on-wheels put too much of a strain on the third book.
October 16, 2009 | Reply
" Am trying and failing to think of any classics which have sequels."
Richard III is a damn good sequel to the Henry VI plays. And Henry V is a brilliant prequel.
Back to the 19th century, Through the Looking Glass is good, too.
October 16, 2009 | Reply
Stu-n and there's me with an English degree(-: I really was thinking about novels. So Rob, yes, you're right there are authorised sequels, but very few that follow on, and Stu-n you're also right about Through the Looking Glass. But that's children's again. Adult classics seem not to have sequels generally. Good thing? Bad thing? Don't know really!
October 16, 2009 | Reply
I think he packed too much into the Amber Spyglass, opening up the multiverse and bringing in all the non-humans. The strength of the first two books is their restraint, in the way that the alternate worlds aren't all that different from ours. All the angels, little spy-people and animals-on-wheels put too much of a strain on the third book."
It was the animals on wheels that did it for me. And I agree about the restraint in the first two books - The Subtle Knife particularly. I love the character of Will and the pathos of the moment he meets his dad. Wonderful stuff. And if ever there was a case of a film really not living up to a book it was The Golden Compass. Disastrous. All the children fell asleep, including the oldest who'd read the books(-:
October 17, 2009 | Reply
"Adult classics seem not to have sequels generally. Good thing? Bad thing? Don't know really!"
Don Quixote was published in two books, ten years apart. Sequel?
(Not that I've read it)
I'm labouring under the misadvantage of not having an English degree, but the only sequel novels I can think of from the 19th century are Anthony Trollope's Barchester and Palliser series (which I also haven't read) and the Sherlock Holmes stories, which definitely are sequels, but I don't think they'd generally be called 'classics' (which is snobbery, IMHO).
October 17, 2009 | Reply
Stu-n I could only think of Trollope as well. Dickens, Hardy, Eliot, the Brontes - none of them wrote any sequels. But could you do a sequel to Wuthering Heights say and do it justice? I think probably not, it would be a pale imitation. I love the Forsyte Saga, but it's Irene's/Soames/Young Jolyon's story that interests me, completely bored by the story of their children. Just doesn't have the same power.
I agree about Sherlock Homes too. It's a classic. Those who say it's not are snobs!
October 19, 2009 | Reply
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. The second half is the sequel to the first half.