Zack Weinberg

Mary Gentle's Ancient Light, totally does that thing to the previous volume, Golden Witchbred. It isn't quality at all, it's the end of SotT thing.

The last third of Friday by Robert A. Heinlein.

The end of the film of Contact. (I made up my own end, which is much better, and we try to pretend it was the real end.)

P.S. They can't make Will Stanton an American. It would be wrong.

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Most of these I haven't been exposed to. I remember that the end of the film Contact disappointed me by comparison to the book, but not to the level of wanting to write my own ending. What's yours?

And yeah, Will Stanton being an American: what the hell were they thinking? The entire series is so steeped in Britishness (and mostly Englishness, even), you can't have him be anything but. To some extent this is a flaw in the original IMO; Cooper's protestations of the Old Ones being all over the world, and the final victory being for the entire world, fell rather flat for me. It wouldn't work. Rules change in the Reaches. (Am I making sense?) (Also, at age 12 I was so angry at Merlin for destroying the book of Gramarye. I think I still am, a bit.)

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My end of Contact.

She gets into the alien spaceship, it's sealed, it whizzes off, we see her in it, as happens.

Then we hear it dock, and the door opens. Through the door we see aliens (lots of different kinds, as in the cantina scene of Star Wars but more sophisticated), weird corridors, star background through windows, clearly an alien space station. It focuses on her face, and a sense of wonder. She puts out her hand and takes a step towards them.

Cut to -- because we don't want to get into the complicated details of aliens, unfortunately -- her, no older, back on Earth, having travelled FTL and encountered relativity, putting a clearly alien flower on the grave of the priest guy, whose death dates indicate the time she has elided in the trip. In the background, to further underline the missed time, an alien conferring with a black female US president.

Eventually we'll have the software.

I agree about rules changing in the Reaches, that's a really good way of putting it. I liked the bus driver, and I liked Stephen giving those messages, the Old Ones of the Ocean Islands are ready -- not that they'd really have needed to do it like that, when you think about it. It doesn't work as the whole world. However, I can't think of any children's book that succeeds on this one. A Wizard Abroad is just painful.

I think Cooper did a fair job of Wales, in The Grey King. I don't feel it as cultural appropriation at all.

There was no need to destroy the book of Gramarye -- at least, it was arrogance to think they wouldn't ever need it again and it caused unnecessary problems. It's not as bad as the end of SotT though, because that is life-denying -- "you must forget that there is magic and that your lives had significance because otherwise you won't be able to bear the real world " is pernicious nonsense. I think she wanted to end the series with closing it all down, and it wasn't necessary, she could have left the centuries long struggle with another little victory in our time, and no need to relax vigilance for tomorrow.

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Hm, so you would want to revise the end of the book, too. (The end of the movie is the same as the end of the book, only with several hundred pages of detail and all the stuff about there being a message embedded in the decimal expansion of π left out, if memory serves.) I do like your ending better.

I've never been to Wales but it always seemed to me that The Grey King got place right in a way that a lot of stories don't.

When we were children together, my sister and I used to talk about how we would redo the endings of books, from time to time; in retrospect it was always rather Mary Sue-ish and everything-must-come-out-right-ish, but hey, we were children. The end of SotT is the only ending that ever annoyed us so much that we actually sat down and wrote a continuation fic to Fix It. No doubt it was terrible; I can only remember that it started with Barney, several years later, going into a pub in Oxford and bumping into Merriman and the White Rider, who were cheerfully reminiscing over pints. Apparently it was just too boring outside time, so they came back.

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marphod.livejournal.com

The Last book of Swords, and the last chapter in the pentultimate book in the same series, by Saberhagen.

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rysmiel.livejournal.com

The last ninety seconds or so of Dogma.

Endymion and The Rise of Endymion.

Xenocide and Children of the Mind.

Also, Thomas Harris' Hannibal. Not that it does not exist, exactly, it's just really bad and self-indulgent fanfic that happens to be by the author of the original work.

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rysmiel.livejournal.com

What the Simmons and Card examples there have in common that makes them anathema is having introduced new notions that might perhaps have made reasonable works on their own, though not IMO such good works as the earlier volumes in the relevant series, but notions that did not fit with the appropriate universe and mode of story, and that were forced in anyway in ways which break key things that make the earlier volumes good.

The ending of Dogma breaks the film by a sudden shift in level of reality and consequence that undermines all the weight of how things have worked up to then.

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rysmiel.livejournal.com

Come to think of it, can anyone think of an example of a character or world that was first presented in a work in one mode and worked really well and that later worked equally well in a work in a different mode ?

The biggest such gap to have been successfully crossed that I can think of off the top of my head is Oswald Bastable in The War Lord of the Air et sequelae, but that's neither by the same author as the originals nor is it pulling away from who Edith Nesbit's Oswald Bastable might plausibly have grown up to be.

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Man, I agree so thoroughly about the Simmons ones.

Let's see... let's make a hugely compelling universe, make up all this stuff... ok, that's inconvenient now, so now one of the main sources of information was LYING to EVERYONE and the Core actually works this totally other way. Yeah. No one will mind.

I won't even start on the nanites in the blood crap.

I feel like I have other examples of this in my head somewhere but I haven't managed to tease them out yet, zwol. I'll post if I do think of something.

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Wasn't it you who objected violently to my lack of desire to continue past the end of Hyperion?

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Yes. You really really should read Fall of Hyperion... but stop there. :)

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Oh, okay. (I remain of the opinion that the end of Hyperion doesn't need any followup, but maybe I will change my mind someday.)

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And I do respect that opinion, while personally finding Fall of Hyperion to be brilliant.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you have an impressive to-read stack as it is, so I'm not going to push the point.

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I put a <grin> at the end of the previous post, but it was eaten as malformed HTML.

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Mmm, yeah. And we will not discuss what proportion of it is backlog just for the courses I'm taking this quarter.

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I totally agree with you. Stay where you are. Nothing more is necessary.

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Hmm, I have some issues with the Endymion books (in particular, Simmons' whole conviction that Life is Just Somehow Magical), but I actually like them greatly on the whole. The funny thing about that series is that there are 3 possible stopping points, and if you stop at any of them you get a complete and (mostly) coherent work, just they're totally different works.

(Compare Secret Country, where books 1 and 2 make a perfectly complete and meaningful story -- though not a very happy one! -- and then book 3 turns it into something quite different.)

In particular, I disagree about him pulling the old hacky-patch-up trick, because the unreliability of knowledge, esp. about things that are so much bigger than we are, is a core theme in that work. (Is Bush good or evil? The point isn't the answer, but that both of possibilities are just *true* for someone. Now what is the Core, really, factually?) Not only does he contradict the original story, he then contradicts the second story, then there's a fourth one and no-one knows if *it's* true... or something like that, it's been a while :-). But how many books pull off an unreliable omniscient 3rd person narrator?

-- Nathaniel

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I seriously considered mentioning Xenocide et seq. in the original post. I've been known to tell people "read Ender's Game, then go to a library and find a copy of the first edition of Speaker for the Dead and read that, and then pretend Card never wrote anything more in that universe." [As you may or may not know, Bob, Xenocide directly contradicts the original ending of Speaker for the Dead... so Card went back and changed SftD in subsequent editions. IMO this aggravates (in the legal sense) the problems you noted.]

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He changed the end?

Don't tell me how.

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The last event I can remember in Dogma is God causing the fallen angel's head to explode. Is that what you are referring to, or did something happen after that? I'd like to remember, because it sounds like it's the same sort of thing as the original Silver on the Tree example, and not at all the same thing as Simmons and Card

Come to think of it, the end of Mieville's The Scar had a similar problem: he spent the entire novel building up to an event of apocalyptic significance and then stepped back from the precipice at the very last moment. Very disappointing. And then he did it again in Iron Council... that's the last novel I buy in that universe. Bleah.

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tkil.livejournal.com

Douglas Adams publicly admitted that he was bitter and sick and tired of people asking him for more Hitchhikers' material, so he went out of his way to kill off all the possible sequels.

Maybe it was in Mostly Harmless that he did that -- but my recollection is that MH was actually a bit of an "apology". It's been a long time.

I'm not sure it's stuff that I'd imagine "doesn't exist", but might be a related case...

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