Thanks! And I'm the one who's going to get killed if too much C'thulhu winds up in his possession. I couldn't convince the wife that it was a knitted lima bean with roots coming out of its face... and bat wings...
Rebooting Books!
anonymous
April 14 2010, 13:07:32 UTC
Maybe I'm over-reacting, but that is a genuinely EVIL idea (and I don't mean 'evil' as in hard-assed but clever, I mean 'evil' as in somewhere akin to SIN. I hope that everyone who sees a 'rebooted book' boycotts it- and maybe the author too! I speak from experience, as I owned copies of Nick Polotta's _Bureau 13_ books. The old ones, being typical paperbacks, self-destructed after a while. I bought new copies, only to find that he had gone back and 'updated' them. I was deeply annoyed and disappointed to see the changes he'd made- changes which didn't add to the stories at all, but rather detracted from the original flow.
Re: Rebooting Books!
anonymous
April 14 2010, 17:55:25 UTC
I don't know; I would have a hard time boycotting John Scalzi. He's "hard-assed clever" when he writes.
Your example is an odd one - in the case of those books, the author himself altered his original works. It's akin to George Lucas constant tweaking of Star Wars. Scalzi, on the other hand, is writing his story from the ground up. It's more akin to the new Battlestar Galactica. That doesn't necessarily make it good - it just doesn't necessarily make it bad, either. I mean, even if you want to go to literary examples, folks have re-written their own versions of "The Odyssey" a bunch of times, and "Ten Things I Hate About You" was a fairly successful remake of "The Taming of the Shrew." Heck, even Sherlock Holmes gets re-launched. The BBC is about to set a new Sherlock series in the twentieth century. It's got a few hallmarks of suckage, but who knows. I'll give it a chance.
Re: Rebooting Books!ps238principalApril 16 2010, 06:15:25 UTC
The same "Bureau 13" they made the role-playing game from? I'll have to go look those up.
Mind you, the computer game was a laugh riot if you could deal with the clunky interface and buggy gameplay. Most of the book and intro stuff stressed being VERY undercover, not showing off you were weird, etc. This was the rule, in spite of the fact that one of the possible characters was a woman in a silver bathing suit, encased in a steel and Plexiglas egg with robotic limbs. :)
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My daughter named her car "Gandalf". It's grey. And no one passes her in it.
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I speak from experience, as I owned copies of Nick Polotta's _Bureau 13_ books. The old ones, being typical paperbacks, self-destructed after a while. I bought new copies, only to find that he had gone back and 'updated' them. I was deeply annoyed and disappointed to see the changes he'd made- changes which didn't add to the stories at all, but rather detracted from the original flow.
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Your example is an odd one - in the case of those books, the author himself altered his original works. It's akin to George Lucas constant tweaking of Star Wars. Scalzi, on the other hand, is writing his story from the ground up. It's more akin to the new Battlestar Galactica. That doesn't necessarily make it good - it just doesn't necessarily make it bad, either. I mean, even if you want to go to literary examples, folks have re-written their own versions of "The Odyssey" a bunch of times, and "Ten Things I Hate About You" was a fairly successful remake of "The Taming of the Shrew." Heck, even Sherlock Holmes gets re-launched. The BBC is about to set a new Sherlock series in the twentieth century. It's got a few hallmarks of suckage, but who knows. I'll give it a chance.
-J.T.
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Mind you, the computer game was a laugh riot if you could deal with the clunky interface and buggy gameplay. Most of the book and intro stuff stressed being VERY undercover, not showing off you were weird, etc. This was the rule, in spite of the fact that one of the possible characters was a woman in a silver bathing suit, encased in a steel and Plexiglas egg with robotic limbs. :)
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-JT
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