12/17/2022 0 Comments Silverlock bench![]() Literature (“The Road”) is “the one continuum all that’s left behind Ironically enough, today it primarily finds expression not through novels and poetry but through comic books, with outstanding examples being Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman and Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, both of which have an easygoing erudition that expose an attentive reader to more literary allusions (e.g., the titles of unwritten books in Morpheus’s library) than an average college-level survey of literature. But while the technique may have fallen from favor in mainstream literature in the decades since, the impulse has remained alive and well. This playful erudition ran amuck in Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake (1939), which is less a novel than a complex crossword puzzle where the game of identifying all its allusions has become an end in itself. Wodehouse’s Bertie and Jeeves novels will not be able to fully appreciate the fun when Peter Cannon combines the two in stories such as “The Rummy Affair of Young Charlie” (e.g., Charles Dexter Ward) or “Cats, Rats, and Bertie Wooster” (a comic recasting of “The Rats in the Walls”).Įarly in the 20th century, the fine art of literary allusion was raised to the status of a major literary movement by works such as Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and Pound’s The Cantos (1930-1969), where quotes from a vast array of sources are dropped in without explanation, yet the impact of the quote depends upon its being recognized and its original context taken into account in its new setting. Like alternative history stories, these stories depend upon the reader recognizing the literary elements being borrowed: someone who has never read an H. More recently, Marvin Kaye in The Incredible Umbrella (1976) and its sequels transported his hapless doctoral dissertation candidate through worlds based on Gilbert & Sullivan, Sherrinford Holmes (an alternate-world Sherlock), Dracula, certain of the Arabian Nights, and Flatland, among others. #Silverlock bench series#Sprague de Camp’s Incomplete Enchanter series (1940-41 and 53-54), where a modern-day protagonist is plunged into fictional worlds based on Norse myth, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, and so on such tales derive much of their kick from the juxtaposition between the courtly natives and slangy, irreverent newcomers with their contrasting points of view (the ultimate pioneer of all such tales probably being Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court). Sometimes such stories take the form of inserting new characters into an established setting, with an outstanding example being Fletcher Pratt & L. The impulse to write new stories featuring beloved characters or settings created by another author has given rise to both the Arthurian cycle and vast quantities of fan fiction, not to mention all the Sherlock Holmes stories unleashed upon the world since Nicholas Meyers published The Seven Percent Solution (1974). Similarly, Brooks’ The Sword of Shannara (1977) is a recasting of elements from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954-55) for fans of the original who wanted more “Tolkienesque” stories, and McKiernan’s two-volume “Silver Call” duology, Trek to Kraggen-Cor and The Brega Path (1986), is a direct sequel to Tolkien’s book with the names changed (Gimli to Brega, Khazad-dum to Kraggen-Cor, hobbits to warrows, and so on) to protect the not-so-innocent. ![]() ![]() With some books, the derivation is not general but specific: Pat Murphy’s There and Back Again (1999), for instance, is a re-writing of The Hobbit (1937) as a science fiction space opera, with a one-on-one correspondence between the characters and the plots. We recognize a work as belonging to a genre (murder mystery, pulp horror, urban fantasy) because it contains elements common to other books in that same genre. ![]() It’s a truism that all books are derived, at least in part, from other books. John Myers Myers, “Escapism and the Puritans” (1947) ![]() “When a man reads my books I do not take it that he is hiding out from anythingīut that he is simply doing something he considers worthwhile.” ![]()
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