Eoin Colfer is a witty, tech-savvy guy, and based on author’s credentials alone, when his continuation of the Hitchhiker’s Guide “trilogy” arrives on shelves I’ll be sure to take a look. I’m guilty of being party to this kind of brand-driven exploitation, and I know it. Setting aside for a minute my serious qualms about the brand-name licensing trend in fiction publishing, two reservations spring to mind:

• Didn’t we already see, with Artemis Fowl: The Lost Colony (I have yet to read The Time Paradox), that Eoin Colfer is a cautionary case study in wells drying up?
• Didn’t we already see, with Mostly Harmless (and to a lesser extent, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish), that Douglas Adams is also a cautionary case study in wells drying up?

Hitchhiker’s is finished. Let’s move on.

In this instalment, I turn my attention to the distinction of art from craft, the social responsibility of readers and critics, and why it is appropriate to express concern about the proliferation of tie-in novels irrespective of their success as works of entertainment.

17.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I asked myself the following questions:

• Why should tie-in novels (or indeed, any commercial fiction) aspire to higher literary accomplishment when they already meet the needs of the market?
• Tie-in fiction, just like most of the genre fiction that is unfairly dismissed as juvenile, is a source of inspiration and delight to many. Why dissuade readers from exploring it?
• Short of a tie-in novel beating you up on the playground and taking your lunch money, do they really do any harm?
• What business does anybody have to tell anybody else that they should read/write X and not read/write Y?

Is it at all fair to expect licensed fiction, written for hire, to display an air of independent spirit? Perhaps it isn’t. Steve Perry:

Two, a lot of writers who do only original material consider themselves more artist than craftsman — the different between a fine arts painter, say, and a commercial artist. They can produce a great novel, but at their own speed and without any editorial direction until after they are done. I’ve had writers tell me they can’t conceive of writing to somebody else’s outline, or fleshing out a script, because it is too mechanical for them.

[...]

I know writers who are adept and professional at the biz, but who cannot write to order. I liken good tie-ins to good commercial illustration. There are some wonderful fine artists out there who can paint terrific pictures, but who, if you asked them to draw a horse in front of a firehouse, couldn’t do it to save their lives.

The suggestion is that we are to think of tie-in fiction as copywriting: a contracted quantity of textual output produced to specification, no more or less demanding or respectable than advertisements, instruction manuals, and press releases. It is manufactured to specification, and anything beyond that is a luxury for the author to be proud of and for the rights-holder to enjoy.

And let’s not deny it: by their very presence on bookstore shelves, tie-in novels are an advertisement for the label they bear, on top of their double life as the rearguard of the revenue stream. Well, either you are satisfied with the tie-in novel as exactly that—a commercial, and something to fill the pages, which the writers enjoy writing and some readers enjoy reading… or you’re not.

My impression is that writers who choose to do tie-in work have already accepted this, absorbed it even. Fair enough. It takes a specific skill set to produce copy to spec, and I have no problem with them promoting greater public awareness of what they do and setting up awards to pat each other on the back.

If you are comfortable with tie-ins serving a function—as a tendril of marketing—then don’t complain about the stigma. You can’t have it both ways.

I must emphasize that this is not to say that something intended to advertise cannot also be art. In some cases, even advertising has become an art form in itself. Flip through some magazines, and you will find some genuine eye-poppers of print design, maybe even a spot of surrealist photography. Advertising agencies have come to dominate the format of the sub-minute cartoon: cinemas show award-winning ad reels to packed houses, and the animation is often worlds better than the narrative cartoons on television. I attribute it in part to the fact that agencies have an incentive to compete for lucrative contracts, and that narrative continuity is not a factor as it is in fiction. I also attribute it to the insight that the quality and polish of a production can make it very memorable, even in the space of a thirty-second clip or a glance over a page from a magazine. Finesse captures your attention.

So I understand that tie-in novelists do invest in fine-tuning what they produce, not only as a point of personal pride but also because that is what is required to survive in a competitive market.

All the same, writers of any genre or subgenre do themselves a gross disservice by happily accepting a sub-literary status as craftsmen, not artists. And rights-holders do their own property a disservice by keeping things that way.

Many have rightly pointed out the parallel between the perception of tie-in novels among genre writers and the mercifully receding stigma against genre in highbrow literary circles.

History tells us that genre earned its legitimacy because it aspired to be great. So, too, did the comic book in the format of the “graphic novel”, in the hands of extraordinary gentlemen like Alan Moore and Art Spiegelman. If tie-in novels demand respect, they must transcend their tie-in-ness. That is what Adams managed to do with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, what Clarke did with 2001. It is true that Clarke and Adams were the creators of their respective IPs, but you can cover up their names and the novels would still speak for themselves.

Tie-ins need to be unique in the face of the sameness that brand names suggest—not just unique within their franchise, but in the context of all fiction. No doubt some will say they already have, and no doubt they will corroborate it with something they’ve read that I haven’t. As I’ve said from the outset, show it to me. I’d be glad to take a peek.

18.

Readers buy tie-ins. They buy lots of them, actually. Isn’t it enough that tie-in books entertain?

I have no problem with literature that entertains as its first priority. No, really! The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is perhaps my favourite American novel, and you can’t enjoy it as much as I did if its impassioned defence of escapism leaves you unconvinced.

However—and it is essential to understand this—books that entertain are not diametrically opposed to books of intricate architecture. The polarization of literature into two camps, separated by the line of unfounded assertion that entertainment should be easy and sophistication opaque, is a trend that hurts everyone.

You may have noticed that I place a great deal of emphasis on form—on a writer’s acuity for the nuances of sentences and words. There are some who think that attention to style is something pretentious for professors to marvel at, a disguise for the plotlessness of “character-driven” fiction with no relevance to the popular taste. This is dangerous and wrong. An attention to language as more than just a vessel of plot points and character traits is not just a genre convention of “serious” literature. It is essential to every book.

Fiction is not like policymaking: form is not an accessory to content, nor is style an epiphenomenon of substance. If you choose to deliver a story in words, you must attend to the words. You must use the medium. Professional filmmakers don’t use store-bought camcorders, nor do we give them a free pass if they demonstrate no facility for angles and lights. Writers, even copywriters, must be prose stylists. They must prove to me they are fit for the novel, and that their ideas wouldn’t be better off as story proposals or essays.

I don’t mind entertainment—in fact, I relish it—but great entertainment justifies its own existence with a sense of uniqueness and mastery: it makes you think about entertainment itself, and invites you to dive back in again and again to plumb its depths for hidden connections and patterns. Entertainment is not antithetical to making you think. Entertainment should make you think about why you had fun. That is the essence of memorability.

19.

Of course, I realize that there are enough readers out there that have been conditioned into not caring to sustain the tie-in market no matter what I say. “Leave us alone,” they say. “We like our plain-spoken stories; go play with your metaphors somewhere else. We don’t need your respect.”

I have discovered, over the years, the readers who only read within genre are as ignorant of what goes on in “literary fiction” as those who naïvely refuse to touch science fiction and fantasy are of the genres they eschew.

Expanding the audience of any literary subculture is not something we do, or should do, to ingratiate establishment types (whoever they are) that had hitherto thumbed their noses at our genre of choice. It is something we should do for the betterment of all literature.

Fiction can only benefit from the cross-pollination of ideas. Genre fiction underwent an overwhelming process of transformation and diversification once authors realized that their ideas could reach more readers, and take on more weight, if the delivery of those ideas exercised modes of communication that were not purely literal: that metaphor, symbolism, and wordplay added colour and revealed connections we might not have seen before.

Similarly, in recent years, the most encouraging trend in “literary” fiction—whether its practitioners admit it or not—has taken place in the absorption of the serious intellectual conversations and culturally embedded tropes that genre works have been playing with all along. Storytelling acumen has returned in force to a market that was starting to get buried in its own words (not to mention the grossest excesses of post-1970s, identity-oriented literary theory).

What, then, is the obstacle in the way of the tie-in? Why is it still a maligned subgenre despite its artists’, sorry, craftsmen’s best efforts?

20.

It’s simple. The tie-in is not a genre. The tie-in is a mode of production, and it contends with a more established, proven, and reliable mode of production: the auteur.

Before anyone calls me out on contradicting my own squawks and squeals of “Intentional fallacy! Intentional fallacy!”: I must clarify that my usual dismissal of authorial intention pertains to the interpretation, not construction, of texts. That is, I believe that we are free to assess works of literature as morsels of evidence that speak for themselves, regardless of the conscious testimony of the creator. We are free to read Shakespeare as an instructive comment on our own times, even though he clearly couldn’t have intended that, having been dead some four hundred years.

That is not the same thing as saying that authors don’t matter. Authors matter a great deal. It is no contradiction on my part to advance the thesis that authors are, in fact, the most reliable of all brands. Sturgeon’s Law doesn’t apply to individuals. Good authors produce more than one good book in ten: their books may vary tremendously, but the author brings to each work the same evolving history of influences, the same developing facility for language, and the same individual nucleus of fused cultural memory.

For whatever reason, shared universes and narratives by committee have never measured up to the touch of the individual. When we think of the Bach and Beethoven of the newspaper comic strip, we think of Charles M. Schulz and Bill Watterson, who drew every strip themselves and never farmed out their work, even though Schulz licensed a merchandising empire that rivals those of Disney and Lucas. When we think of films, we think of the great directors, the Hitchcocks and Leans and Spielbergs. They don’t do it alone, obviously, but there is a reliable consistency to their work because of the control they exercise over their productions in service of an individual style.

We can account for the recent resurgence of genre pictures, especially films adapted from existing brands and under-explored folk traditions, to the director-driven visions of filmmakers from fiercely independent backgrounds: Peter Jackson, Christopher Nolan, Ang Lee, Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro, Sam Mendes—the list goes on and on. They each brought with them a fine-tuned sensitivity to film language. And let us not forget that Star Wars began as something fresh and different, a film that had the gumption to leave its actors out of the opening credits, because it came from a real outside-the-box thinker who gave us titles as disparate as THX-1138 and American Graffiti.

In comic books—the template for the business model of tie-in series—the standout works are the individual visions, the contributions that Alan Moore, Frank Miller and others have made to everything from Batman to Daredevil. And those are just the pieces that play with existing properties and rethink them. The graphic novels that have reached out to readers who don’t ordinarily read comics, the titles that get optioned for films, are original properties with a unique and personal edge.

In prose fiction, the debate between producer-driven and auteur-driven creativity has never been as visible, because until the rise of the tie-in, it was never an issue. The auteur had dominated for centuries. Authors have always had to play ball with the market, of course—piles upon piles of rejection slips amass solely because the demand graph is unfavourable in select, unlucky climes—but the norm, outside the tie-in business, is for the writers to query the agents and publishers. The writers take the initiative. And their works need to be unique to sell.

In the service of art, the auteur-driven model just works.

21.

“Literature is subjective. Stop being critical; read and let read.”

All too frequently, I see people confuse subjectivity with the total, nihilistic abandonment of all aesthetics.

These are the same apologists who, when pressed on the subject of music, no doubt believe that the latest pollutants of Britney Spears and 50 Cent can peacefully coexist with the resilient traditions of Mozart, Verdi, and Ellington, even as the machine of entertainment-as-instant-gratification continues to make its war on the whole of our civilization’s accomplishment in the audible arts, stripping away the delicate layers of melody, harmony, and rhythm until nothing is left but noise.

To say that taste is subjective (true) is not equivalent to saying that criticism should be ignored (false).

Literary taste is subjective because no theory of what we ought to value is a statement of universal, objective truth. No honest critic pretends that what he says about a work of art is a statement of fact. It is, however, a statement of reasoned judgment, a form of persuasive discourse that lives and dies by the quality of its argumentation.

Like all ideals about how we ought to organize ourselves politically, or what we ought to consider the most desirable solution to a moral dilemma, the fact that something is subjective and perspective-dependent does not imply that nobody should persuade anybody else of the soundness of their perspective. In fact, subjectivity is precisely what makes a dialogue of values an absolute necessity.

The unsaid premise beneath all entertainment criticism is this: we should understand, and be able to defend, everything we like. We should be able to explain why we like it. “Because I like it?” That, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call a tautology.

The responsibility of every critic—and by “critic”, I mean every reader who releases a reasoned opinion into the public sphere—is to preserve and promote the belief that we, as an intelligent and self-aware species, should think about why we consume what we consume.

If we believe, and can defend our belief, that certain values we hold about literature are worth promoting, we will (and should) do what we can to affect the market. That fundamentally involves public gestures of persuasion. Opinions, kept to oneself, are powerless.

To let our friends and peers enjoy consumer entertainment without thinking about it is to leave them open to commercial exploitation.

That is why we recommend books through word of mouth: because we believe that others can derive value from them just as we did. We cultivate the literary tastes of fellow readers because, consciously or not, we have an ideal picture of what literature is all about, and we want there to be a readership to keep those ideals alive.

That is why, after suffering a half-century of slings and arrows from the highest battlements of tenured academia as well as the quicksand of declining popular taste, the Western Canon endures in the stewardship of readers who believe that our civilization’s cultural conversation remains relevant today.

All fiction competes with all other fiction: for shelf space, for attention, and most crucially, for time. It is unfortunate, but the game is often zero-sum. The promotion of certain literary ideals inevitably comes at the expense of others.

That is what we do when we tell anyone to read X instead of Y. That is how we reshape our environment in the image of our own ideals and pursue our dream of a better society.

We do it when we vote. I don’t see why we can’t also do it when we read.

22.

I think tie-in fiction has great potential. It is perfectly situated to initiate a dialogue about our modern multimedia milieu. And to do so, the tie-in novel must earn its place as more than just a piece of copywriting, but as fiction that presents itself as significant and unique.

“I hadn’t thought of it that way, but that’s how it is.” (Apologies to whomever it is I’m stealing from here.) As with all writing, that’s the reaction that even the most deadline-pressed tie-in novels should provoke. They should all exist as implicit critiques of their world, as all successful fiction is an implicit critique of ours. And by critique, I do not mean to say that they need to be adversarial; however, I do mean that they should invite the reader to think about a different aspect of the source material—not to fill in every last gap like a crude paint-by-numbers, mind you, but to look at the ambiguities from a challenging plurality of heretofore unimagined angles.

However, I remain concerned that it is simply not in the interest of rights-holding licensors to commission tie-ins that truly excel. If the tie-in excels, it is an ancillary effect of the author’s initiative, a bonus. The publishers have no interest in the future of literary accomplishment at large. The tie-in is the renewable money farm; it is precisely where the business does not take risks. I almost think tie-ins are, by their very design, vertically shallow but horizontally extensible. They are not meant to be re-read, though you can certainly do that if you wish. They are meant to sell the brand—the core product as well as the next book.

Even were we to think of textual production as a form of engineering, licensor-driven writing-for-hire is simply not best practice. Individual authors produce the best work because they have an incentive to invent.

So, when tie-ins compete with original works for shelf space and reading man-hours, I will take the original work any day. I will also recommend that others do the same. There is already too much great literature out there, and life is short.

It may be a stigma, and it may be a prejudice—but it is the authors’ and publishers’ responsibility to disprove it, not mine. Build it, and I’ll come.

The rest of the story

• Part the First
• Part the Second
• Part the Third
• Part the Fourth

In this instalment, I inquire into the the extent to which the sharing of a mythopoeic universe constrains the freedom of the individual author, viz. whether there is a place for genuine innovation between the oversaturation of “canons” and the anarchic multiverse of fanfic.

13.

When Red Dwarf creators Doug Naylor and Rob Grant parted ways circa 1994, they independently sat down to write their own solo spin-off novels—The Last Human and Backwards, respectively. Red Dwarf spin-offs were nothing new: the gestalt entity formerly known as Grant Naylor had already penned two (Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers and Better Than Life), both of which contained a number of ideas that fed back into the popular television show. What is remarkable about The Last Human and Backwards, which were not so much mutually contradictory as they were flat-out obstinate about the narrative non-being of the other, is how they revealed two opposed yet complementary interpretations of what Red Dwarf was all about, and what it very well could have been given the unlimited sort of budget that never visits British sitcoms that die too young.

Unlike the television show in its finest moments, neither book is the paragon of sci-fi comedy: for those risible pleasures, the obvious champion from the British Isles is the one and only tie-in novel to have seized control of its brand identity in the mainstream consciousness, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which one anonymous critic once described as—

Mostly harmless.

Regardless of their quality, the post-mitotic tomes of Grant Naylor provide an ample demonstration of the function that the tie-in novel should ideally serve. The motivation to collect them at all is no different from that which drives us to seek out making-of documentaries and sketches of lost episodes on the DVDs: the insight we get into the competing visions of Grant and Naylor is, by extension, a retroactive insight into the television show itself.

In the case of Red Dwarf, we are dealing with a unique situation in that the authors were the creators of the property and not third-party writers-for-hire, as is the case with most tie-in novels. Nevertheless, what I wanted to draw attention to was the interest that can bloom from the healthy interpretive debate that can exist between derived works, once we have already conceded their status as a subsidiary commercial property.

Ergo, I like much of what Raymond Benson says about James Bond:

Fans have to realize that every author’s oeuvre of Bond novels should be taken as a whole and separate from other authors’—with the exception that Fleming’s original books are the groundwork, the basis for the Universe. That original Universe is free to plunder, and that includes characters Fleming created. A writer of STAR TREK or STAR WARS would do the same thing. I didn’t look at my Bond books as a continuation of Gardner’s series. I started my own series. I was given carte blanche to use or ignore anything in Colonel Sun, the Gardner books, and even the John Pearson fictional biography. Anything I changed from earlier books was certainly not done out of spite! I wanted my Bond to use the old Walther PPK because I felt that was Bond’s gun, just as the Batmobile is Batman’s car!

As I see it, the best environment for the production of tie-in novels is one in which the individual author has ample room for experimentation. In similar environments like comic books and television, where writers work under the ordinance of a committee that guards the brand, the issues and episodes that we remember are the frame-breakers, the ones that turn our expectations upside down and waste no time with the pattern of the merely conventional. They succeed because they surpass the regular limitations of the brand, as “The City on the Edge of Forever” did for Star Trek.

The more individual the vision, the better. It is no coincidence that the most revered title in franchise superhero comics is Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns—not only an impressive accomplishment in formal terms and essential reading for anyone interested in the communicative possibilities of what Will Eisner termed “sequential art”, but also a standalone masterwork of sober meditation on the moral implications of Batman’s Gotham, from the public’s relationship to vigilantism to the consequent anxieties that come from government-sanctioned supermen.

A tie-in series of narrative continuations has a duty to foster a conversation on its own history. That is best achieved when authors have the democratic privilege, the franchise, to advocate their own ideological thesis of what their employer’s brand means and should mean; when they are free to discard the ideas of colleagues with whom they disagree; when they are given sandboxes to themselves, and need not tiptoe around the jealously guarded castles of their predecessors.

14.

I now turn my attention to one particular belief:

“The breadth of a shared, consistent canon makes a world feel immense and real.”

In the preamble to this series, I mentioned Wired Magazine’s article on Leland Chee, the Star Wars Expanded Universe’s continuity man. It is a vivid and entertaining portrait of an occupation that singlehandedly captures the twenty-first century zeitgeist envisioned by the selfsame magazine that canonized Marshall McLuhan as its patron saint.

It is also, at times, a cause for consternation:

Lucasfilm has to plan ahead and think long term. “We don’t reboot. We don’t start from scratch,” Chee says. “When Chewbacca died, he died.” (Poor Chewie yowled his last yowl in 25 ABY, when he was stuck on the planet Sernpidal as it collided with its moon, Dobido, in the novel Vector Prime, the first book in the New Jedi Order series. His death is now canon.)

“The thing about Star Wars is that there’s one universe,” Chee says. “Everyone wants to know stuff, like, where did Mace Windu get that purple lightsaber? We want to establish that there’s one and only one answer.”

This is not strictly true: canonicity is actually quite the tangle. Recalling the meta-genies of Gödel, Escher, Bach, Chee’s official position—corroborated by the historical evidence of change prior to the completion of the films—is that the canon exists in a many-tiered hierarchy (five levels high, at present) in which the core of the franchise is free to conduct its business with abandon, while the books exist in their own contiguous alternate-universe bubble (occasionally inseminating the core with a name, a character, or two), with nondeterministic entities like the video games in an outlying orbit. Whenever the films did something new, the backstory in the tie-in products had to revise itself to fit. It recalls the fanciful parable of the square peg and the round hole.

This is as it should be. As I have alluded to before, my hostility to the Expanded Universe during the production of the prequels was motivated by an insistence that the EU did not in any way constrain the imaginations of the film’s production team (true); that the marginal existence of the EU should not curtail free speculation on things it already claimed to “explain”; and that at any rate, anything beyond the most trivial influence from the EU was undesirable anyhow, as the tie-in books fundamentally promoted a specific ideology of what Star Wars was about that diluted a treasured brand of great dignity, and would prove more detrimental to the saga than midichlorians any day of the week.

All the same, what concerns me is what Chee identifies as the secret to the EU’s success—the desire of many fans to know more, and to have hard, cold answers fed to them on a plate. It serves as an unwelcome reminder of the lust for absolute, authoritative truth that drives the herd not only into the clutches of religious dogma, but also to a misapprehension (and consequently, mistrust) of scientific and rational inquiry as being about “facts” and “proofs”—the very same misapprehension that leads so many to dismiss science as just another religion, or just another instrument of Western hegemony. In collaborative mythopoeia, as in science, the ideal course of development occurs as a series of ever-better refinements and paradigm shifts that discards as often as it adds.

15.

It is healthy to want to know more. It is not healthy to expect and accept an absolute answer when it comes to something as transparently imaginary as fiction: to do so is to consent to the dulling of the critical and interpretive faculties.

As a reader, it would be the height of the intentional fallacy to blindly accept any statement of authority, even an agreeable one, as the final determinant of what to include or exclude when it comes to one’s personal scope of diegetic truth.

Nor is it desirable, even from the pragmatic standpoint of what Lucas Licensing should do to optimize the quality of its tie-in books, that the authors hired by Lucas Licensing are bound to each other’s narrative grotesqueries. With very few exceptions, they share the same overcrowded sandbox, the same beat-up, faded colouring book: there is little room for genuine exploration when so much territory has already been colonized by stories that did so much to reduce the majesty of cinema’s first wholly original heroic cycle to an overexploited puddle of apostrophe-riddled cliché.

There ought to be debate. There ought to be some risks. There ought to be authors who are given some degree of license to defy the tie-in continuity from within. The nine-volume story arcs can still exist and appeal to the same individuals they always have, if there is any room left for them to expand; but they should relinquish their monopolies, their exclusive drilling rights in their patch of the timeline. At the risk of chanting the all-too-familiar motto of capitalism, let quality soar on the wings of competition.

16.

But if it is a collapse of monolithic continuity that I want, why not tread in the even slushier marsh of fan fiction? Perhaps there, I’ll find that defiant, triumphant, high-literary Star Wars novel I insist cannot exist—say, a multigenerational family saga of the Russian disposition that crescendoes to a courtroom finale where Luke and Leia are tried for incest? (“Mr Tam, step away from the Nabokov and place your hands on your head.”)

• Whatever we think of tie-in fiction, it is vetted by publishers. The bar is low because demand is high. But as is the case everywhere else, agents and editors read the sloppier manuscripts so I don’t have to.
• Tie-in books are copyedited, i.e. readable in the most rudimentary, technical sense. By printing them, the publishers promise me this much. By stocking them, the retailers promise me this much.
• I may pose as a staunch advocate of fiction that challenges the conventions of the source text; however, I hear that for reasons completely unbeknownst to me (and honestly, I don’t want to know), the 90% bracket of fanfic writers that Sturgeon’s Law predicts has an unusual hankering to see Harry Potter get it on with all the boys. That is not what I had in mind.
• Fanfic overwhelmingly plays ball with tie-ins like the Expanded Universe. That defeats the whole point.

On principle, the frontier anarchy of fanfic should provide the ideal space for innovation that monolithic canons do not; no doubt fanfic writers have already seized on this observation, and made their fair share of attempts at genuine novelty. Unfortunately, like the vast majority of self-publication, fanfic is a country where the filter is set to off. I am a busy reader, and if I can’t even be bothered with tie-ins, I can safely say that I don’t have the patience to mine fanfic for nuggets of gold.

Is tie-in fiction just glorified fanfic? No, by the simple distinction that it’s not self-published. That is not to say that tie-in writers should feel comfortable in their smug sense of superiority over the unpublished (that means you, Lee Goldberg). Any criticism of fanfic on the basis of originality extends to tie-ins as well; that is why it is easy to perceive them as two sides of the same coin, one legal tender, one not. And in the case of a franchise like Star Wars, I speculate that there is a massive chasm of unfulfilled demand for derived fiction that rejects the established excesses of the EU, uses the films as its launching pad, and bears the stamp of a reputable publisher. As long as that market remains unexplored, that territory is fan fiction’s to keep.

To clarify, I think we can also agree that the whole point of licensing tie-ins in the first place is to capitalize on a core-product canon that it treats as inviolable. In the case of Star Wars, that should be the films, though the majority of fanfic voluntarily accedes to the EU for its shared knowledge base.

Remember: what I am advocating is not the radical disassembly of the core product itself, but the mutual competition between one tie-in writer and another, much like what happens with Bond. I’ll take my canons shaken, not stirred.

The rest of the story

• Part the First
• Part the Second
• Part the Third
• Part the Fifth

In this instalment, I evaluate tie-in fiction’s conundrum of creative diversity via the world’s most haughtily unqualified analysis of the Forgotten Realms novels.

9.

“As a consequence of its multitude of contributors, tie-in novels are increasingly diverse.”

Erik Scott de Bie:

There are, for instance, Realms writers who ascribe to the “rough-and-tumble he-man-like hero rescues the eye-candy/weepy girl and saves the day.” And that’s fine, if that’s what you want–that’s how Robert Howard wrote Conan, after all. Meanwhile, there are some Realms writers (like me) who eschew that classic fantasy sensibility and write fiction that at least attempts to deal directly with real-world gender issues in the Realms. There are Realms writers who love writing about quirky relationships and split-your-sides humor (Rosemary Jones), some who do high-octane action (Bob Salvatore), and some who write about the dilemma of the human soul (Paul Kemp).

I decided to conduct a bit of empirical investigation. What, you didn’t think I was going to hide behind my assertions forever, did you?

So here we have four Realms authors: Erik Scott de Bie, Rosemary Jones, R.A. Salvatore, and Paul S. Kemp. Let’s look at some samples.

Disclaimers:

• I am not a tabletop player: I’m not fond of the supremacy of dice. All I know about Forgotten Realms is that it is a Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting. I dabbled in Magic: the Gathering over decade ago—does that count?
• So I go into this with no preconceptions of what the universe should be like, as I would with Star Wars—but at the cost of missing references to established locations, events, and characters. For all I know, it’s just another fantasy series with an existence of its own.
• Although I maintain that I have no genre bias—I count, among my favourite authors, J.R.R. Tolkien, Philip Pullman, and Stanislaw Lem—I confess to being out of touch with open-ended fantasy series, tie-in or otherwise. If any criticisms I might level at Forgotten Realms apply to most contemporary fantasy, that’s an indictment of contemporary fantasy, not a pardon for Forgotten Realms.

Rules:

• I am not here to trash authors who are making an honest living and doing what they love. (I save that for Dan Brown.) If I have an opponent, it is the institution of licensed fiction. There is a difference, and I am aware of it.
• I am investigating solely for diversity. If I’ve picked a bad sample set, suggest another.
• I am not expecting Cormac McCarthy. I don’t even expect the Spanish Inquisition. I don’t say this to treat the samples with premeditated condescension, as that would taint the experiment; I am just being mindful of the fact that books have target audiences.
• I am also aware that it is grossly unfair to judge a novel based on an excerpt; even George R.R. Martin doesn’t hit his stride until his character arcs unfurl. But heck, agents and editors do it all the time. I exclusively select excerpts that the authors or their publisher have themselves chosen to use as an instrument of promotion.
• Above all, I promise to be fair.

The samples (opening chapters all):

• Ghostwalker (Scott de Bie)
• Crypt of the Moaning Diamond (Rosemary Jones)
• The Orc King (R.A. Salvatore)
• Twilight Falling (Paul S. Kemp)

10.

Let’s look at the opening paragraphs. Yes, I read a lot more than the opening paragraphs, but let’s ignore that for a minute; as tempted as I am to do a dialogue analysis, I said I would be nice. Instead, I want to isolate a specific unit of analysis to make an equally specific point.

Ghostwalker:

30 Tarsakh, the Year of the Serpent (1359 DR)

He ran through the woods, jumping at every snapping twig, every moving shadow. The height of the moon told him it was midnight, but the youth cared little. His clothes had been torn to ribbons in his desperate flight, and his flesh had been scratched brutally by the shrubs, branches, and rocks.

Crypt of the Moaning Diamond:

Ivy punched the camel. It backed out of her tent and stood with its big, shaggy brown head still sticking through the opening. Its large half-closed eyes stared at her, and it opened its mouth and rolled its lips back over huge yellowed teeth. Ivy hit the creature again, square on the nose, and the camel sidestepped—wide-bottomed feet on skinny legs—onto the equally wide feet of its screaming owner.

The Orc King:

Drizzt Do’Urden crouched in a crevice between a pair of boulders on the side of a mountain, looking down at a curious gathering. A human, an elf, and a trio of dwarves—at least a trio—stood and sat around three flat-bedded wagons that were parked in a triangle around a small campfire. Sacks and kegs dotted the perimeter of the camp, along with a cluster of tents, reminding Drizzt that there was more to the company than the five in his view. He looked past the wagons to a small, grassy meadow, where several draft horses grazed. Just to the side of them, he saw again that which had brought him to the edge of the camp: a pair of stakes capped with the severed heads of orcs.

Twilight Falling:

The young Tymoran priest lay unconscious on his side, bound hand and foot with thick hemp rope. A purple bruise was already beginning to form around his left eye. Vraggen eyed him coldly.

On a technical level, these are competent paragraphs. There aren’t any head-scratching sensory incongruities or renowned curators staggering to and fro. I’m sure each of the authors put a fair amount of work into chiselling the right opening sentence. Each of them had to go through the process of being vetted by an editor with an interest in protecting the brand. If you sent any of these Page Ones to Flogging the Quill (a website that posts regular critiques of unpublished openings-in-progress, most of them fantasy, few of them memorable) they would probably get a pass.

Nevertheless, if I were to go on paragraphs alone, the only one that prepares me to expect anything out of the ordinary, anything at all, is the Rosemary Jones passage about Ivy and the camel. 25% isn’t bad—it beats the 10% projected by Sturgeon’s Law—and if you read on, you can see that Jones keeps it up:

The camel’s driver took a swipe at Ivy as she emerged from her tent, swinging his open palm to slap the impudent female abusing his camel. He shouted something that Ivy decided was uncivil even if she did not know the dialect. She sighed—a sound only slightly less annoyed than the camel’s snorts. After all, she had not hurt the idiot’s mount (and the man’s bruised toes were not her fault). Ivy lacked the time for a really good fight, a beat-his-head-into-the-dung brawl, especially after spending most of the morning clearing lost dromedaries and their droppings out of her crew’s tents.

Observe: “he shouted something” (in the limited third person, nobody picks up every detail—nor should the reader), “the idiot’s mount” (injecting some characterization with a pinch of free indirect discourse), “beat-his-head-into-the-dung brawl” (a comic flourish between alliterated beats)—that’s the sort of thing I want to see.

In the other passages, everyone is too busy running, escaping, writhing, identifying characters by race and class (“The young Tymoran priest”, “A human, an elf, and a trio of dwarves”), letting me know that I can look forward to just another violence or threat. The writing is not bad, just rote. De Bie even indulges in a bit of telling-not-showing (“the youth cared little”); I don’t object to that on principle, since “telling” can be unavoidable from time to time, but then I look at his second paragraph (one sentence: “The youth would do anything to avoid his pursuers”) and wonder why he bothered to leave it in.

I also detect a pattern of cinematic envy: the excerpts are all in third person, all strictly linear, and all predominantly visual (audiovisual at best). There is something desperate about their bids for action-action-action; they are all so, how shall I put it, so subject-verb-object. A genre convention? Perhaps, but don’t all do it at once. I was promised diversity, diversity!

Above all, none of them tell me that I am in for something fantastic. This is supposed to be fantasy, right?

11.

For a point of comparison, I’m going to pick some genre writing off my shelf at random.

What do I want from your opening paragraphs? Your opening chapters? Your novels?

I want to see them recognize that language isn’t just about funny names and apostrophes (God, not more apostrophes). Language should imply a whole code of behaviours and project the absent totality of a cultural memory. Robert Heinlein:

I see in Lunaya Pravda that Luna City Council has passed on first reading a bill to examine, license, inspect—and tax—public food vendors operating inside municipal pressure. I see also is to be mass meeting tonight to organize “Sons of Revolution” talk-talk.

I want to see them present me with narrators, even third-person ones, with a rhetorical style that I am all too happy to put up with for several hundred pages—narrators who refuse to rest on the mechanical laurels of subject-verb-object, who show me they can paint in broader strokes than billiard-ball actions. J.R.R. Tolkien:

When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.

(Look at that flourish, “eleventy-first”. Everyone remembers the “eleventy-first”.)

I want at least a hint of thematic statement, a hypothesis that will guide my navigation of the book’s symbolic field. Ursula K. LeGuin:

I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are. But both are sensitive.

You want to start with a fight? Let’s start with a fight. Michael Chabon:

For numberless years a myna had astounded travellers to the caravansary with its ability to spew indecencies in ten languages, and before the fight broke out everyone assumed the old blue-tongued devil on its perch by the fireplace was the one who maligned the giant African with such foulness and verve.

Even writers who try their darnedest to be self-consciously straightforward or lowbrow (and reveal themselves as transparently good regardless) know that the written word has an infinite capacity for branches and what-ifs that push and pull in time. Ian Fleming:

The naked man who lay splayed out on his face beside the swimming pool might have been dead.

He might have been drowned and fished out of the pool and laid out on the grass to dry while the police or the next-of-kin were summoned. Even the little pile of objects in the grass beside his head might have been his personal effects, meticulously assembled in full view so that no one should think that something had been stolen by his rescuers.

You might be tempted to argue that Forgotten Realms writers don’t have a responsibility to make their sentences sing. After all, we can tell by the willing limits on their syntax and vocabulary that they choose to write for twelve-year-olds, if we can all agree here that the Forgotten Realms demographic is an adolescent one by design. Certainly we shouldn’t expect children’s writers to invest in the mutual funds of metaphor when that’s not their scene, right?

I read a fair bit of literature for younger readers, and in my experience, the simplification of syntax and the constriction of vocabulary does not excuse the writer from pursuing his or her craft with an absolute commitment to finesse. In fact, one of the most fascinating aspects of children’s writing is how far its best practitioners can go on a tight linguistic budget. J.K. Rowling:

Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn’t hold with such nonsense.

Yeah, but that’s Rowling, and she’s trying to be funny. High fantasy is serious! Yes, very serious.

Am I still being unfair? Well, lest you think I’m calling in the SS to shoot pigeons, let’s look at someone who is working squarely in the realm of post-D&D American high fantasy. George R.R. Martin:

“We should start back,” Gared urged as the woods began to grow dark around them. “The wildlings are dead.”

“Do the dead frighten you?” Ser Waymar Royce asked with just the hint of a smile.

Actually, bad example. To be honest, if I made my purchasing decision vis-à-vis Martin based on the woefully generic Prologue to A Game of Thrones alone, I might have missed out on the entirety of A Song of Ice and Fire. The first paragraph after the prologue fares so much better:

The morning had dawned clear and cold, with a crispness that hinted at the end of summer. They set forth at daybreak to see a man beheaded, twenty in all, and Bran rode among them, nervous with excitement. This was the first time he had been deemed old enough to go with his lord father and his brothers to see the king’s justice done. It was the ninth year of summer, and the seventh of Bran’s life.

A subtly exposed hint of the Song cycle’s skewed rotation of seasons, and a little boy’s barely contained thrill at gallivanting off to his first execution? Not to mention the quiet seeding of elements that will later come full circle, if you know how the book ends… now that is the scent of adventure.

Not so in the Forgotten Realms, where subjects verb objects.

Roll the dice, and weep.

12.

Now, you might be asking yourself: how is anything I’ve said relevant to tie-in fiction? For all we know, 90% of non-tie-in fantasy is just as guilty of pedestrian prose, Sturgeon’s Law nyah nyah nyah. Besides, I didn’t read far enough to see the writers develop their identities, and if I kept reading, Paul Kemp would have taught me something about the dilemma of the human soul (my question: what is the dilemma of the human soul?), and Erik Scott de Bie would have surprised me with his take on real-world gender issues—which, come to think of it, have a great deal to do with subjects verbing objects.

True, all true. Yet, based on my admittedly inadequate survey, I do think tie-ins have a few afflictions that might just be pathological:

• Since authors are no longer responsible for the heavy lifting of defining a world in trickles of exposition that don’t draw too much attention to themselves, it is incumbent on them to make their chosen “blank spot on the map” stand apart—but more often, what happens instead is an impatient dive for the main character’s conflict-in-the-moment without a proper “establishing shot” to set the context. Even historical novels take the time to build their particular perspective of the world that preexists the story.
• The predefinition of a target market passively enforces a degree of sameness between writers. All published novelists have to put up with the fluctuation of market demands, but with original properties, they at least have the option of shopping their work around. A Forgotten Realms novel will only ever be published by Wizards of the Coast, which has already determined who the audience is going to be—which, in turn, determines what they’ll print.
• Perhaps the originating franchise just isn’t that interesting to begin with—especially when it comes to games (be they tabletop, CCG, or electronic), where the main attraction is the nonlinear mechanics of interaction, not the flavour. This was apparent as soon as I heard Salvatore mention “A human, an elf, and a trio of dwarves”: it was clear that these were the elves and dwarves of post-Tolkien cliché and not their bretheren from the Brothers Grimm. Why? Because that’s what generic fantasylands are like these days. By the same token, I am not convinced that a Magic: the Gathering novel is fundamentally anything more than a very long chunk of flavour text.

As far as I can tell, tie-in writers see many of these supposed pitfalls as a welcome challenge. I admire that, but I’m not sure their publishers concur beyond the minimum of lip service that keeps their brand in demand. The interest of the property holder is to retain with an optimal balance of the familiar and the just barely novel enough. As for the writers, there can only be so much investiture in making something unique when the production schedule demands a throughput of several novels a year.

Where the dryness of the prose is concerned, this is what happens when a writer trusts the wisdom of workshops rather than an expansive experience as a reader. I am not knocking workshops here: I am just saying that the pattern of adherence to commonly disseminated mantras among beginning writers is itself a toxic source of genericity.

• Show, don’t tell!
• Tension on every page!
• Pick a point of view and stick with it!
• Put the murder on page one!
• Make fantasy names even fantasy-er with the liberal sprinkling of gratuitous apostrophes! (If you’ve ever actually advised someone to do this, please come over so I can shoot you.)

Apart from the last item, the above can be pretty good advice when you consider some of the alternatives, but it reminds me of the absolute beginners’ advice to improvise over the blues scale if you’re playing over blues chords. Yes, you’ll sound like you can play the blues, but you’ll also sound like everybody else. It is no substitute for figuring out the deeper secrets that the masters don’t tell you right away. Storytelling is too amorphous to be reduced to show and tell.

Again, the problem is not specific to tie-ins, nor inherently endemic… or is it? Between you and me, I think Wizards of the Coast has a pretty limited idea of what literature can do:

The first, and most important piece of advice, is: “Show, don’t tell.” The best way to achieve this is to write cinematically. Your writing sample should play like a movie inside the reader’s head. In movies we can see what a character is thinking by what he or she does, and by how the character interacts with others.

I disapprove.

If there is a guiding rule to my sense of aesthetics as a reader, or as a patron of the arts in any format, it is an expectation that artists use the medium. If you work with words, figure out what you can do with words that you can’t do anywhere else. Don’t, and your oeuvre (tie-in or not) will only ever deserve the name spin-off.

The rest of the story

• Part the First
• Part the Second
• Part the Fourth
• Part the Fifth

In this instalment, I continue to assess some of the arguments that are often raised in defence of the tie-in novel, with a particular focus on movie novelizations and the behaviour of the property licensors.

5.

“Basing a book on a movie is no less legitimate than basing a movie on a book.”

Keith R.A. DeCandido:

What this really is? Is the fact that, in this country, we view things on screen as more real than things in print. Part of it is simple numbers: more people watch TV and movies than read books and comic books. That’s why when you adapt a novel into a movie, you’ve got an entire Academy Award category to yourself (and other adapters like you), but when you adapt a movie into a novel, you’re a talentless hack who’s just in it for the money (never mind that screenwriters are far better compensated for their work than prose writers).

DeCandido aims his post at those who dismiss tie-in novels because of their irrelevance to the “canonical” continuity of the core product, arguing that when it comes to movie adaptations of superhero comics, nobody cares. (Then again, I’m not sure continuity was ever a staple of superhero comics to begin with—certainly not prior to the crisis of infinite earths.)

Mind you, the quality of the Star Wars books themselves was irrelevant to me: my pressing concern at the time was to ensure that people understood that a) in no way was George Lucas beholden to the parasitic continuity of the Expanded Universe in crafting his Prequels, nor should he be; and b) that I was going to go on seeing possibilities in the ambiguities of the films, as I would with any other film, rather than seek hard, cold answers in some tie-in product with an official stamp on it. As soon as Revenge of the Sith brought the Star Wars saga to an end, the whole matter of canonicity died a merciful death (for me, anyhow).

Let’s look at the more interesting issue, though: have we indeed discovered an arena where—horror of horrors—movies are more respected than books? How is that possible?

Prime Minister Steven Harper Piziks:

I know the answer–money. Screenplays earn scads of money, scads of people see the movie, and rave about it on TV, in movie reviews, and to their friends. As a result, money pours into the studio, and money gets attention.

Far fewer people read books than go to movies. Even fewer people read books based on movies. Movies are easy entertainment; books are more challenging. So almost no one cares about a carefully crafted novel adaptation of a movie. Readers will flock to a movie based on a novel to see the book come to life and to see how well it does or doesn’t work. Unfortunately, the opposite isn’t true. Movie viewers are less likely to pick up books because are harder to get through, and they don’t figure that the book will add anything to what they saw on screen.

I don’t buy this. Let’s ignore for a second that the Star Wars prequel novelizations sold like hotcakes. First of all, the movies based on books that people flock to see for easy entertainment are, by and large, not the ones that get nominated for Oscars. I liked Iron Man, but it’s not Schindler’s List or The English Patient or No Country for Old Men, and their markets are not one and the same. (Every now and then you get an anomaly like Forrest Gump that manages to succeed with audiences, critics, and Academy voters alike, but never you mind—and any way you spin it, there’s only one Lord of the Rings. The Dark Knight? The jury’s still out.)

I’ll tell you why some movies based on books get nominated for Oscars: because in artistry and craftsmanship, they hold their own against the best that the medium has to offer. They are responsible to the great tradition of cinema first, and their source material second. Look at Gone with the Wind or The Godfather, both of which preceded the age of the modern commercial blockbuster (which, according to the orthodox history, begins with Jaws), both of which we are quite comfortable speaking of as among the best that the medium has to offer in terms of performances and sheer command of visual language. We put them right next to works written for the screen like On the Waterfront and Citizen Kane, and the presence or absence of source material, no matter how significant, is invisible to us.

More often than not, film adaptations are mediocre. We forget about them and try again later. It’s been happening since at least the 1941 John Huston film of The Maltese Falcon, a noir classic by any measure, but not the first adaptation of the Dashiell Hammett novel. The first Maltese Falcon was made a decade earlier. Nobody cared. The only people who remember it ever existed are film history geeks writing about book adaptations and itching to pick a fight.

6.

Prose novelizations of films, on the other hand, do not have the benefits of either a safe reflective distance from the source material, or significant room for reinterpretation. If there is any stigma against novelizations, it isn’t that they add nothing: it is that our (well, my) instinct is to see them as rough drafts plus deleted scenes, and without the benefit of the visual language for which the film was designed.

I am sad to report that publishers and film distributors intend to keep it that way.

Tod Goldberg:

Max Allan Collins practically did write a book with his own blood. Collins is the undisputed king of the media tie-in, having written more than 50 of them (including 10 CSI novels and several puzzles, video games and comics also based on the program) since 1990, but he nearly ripped a hole in the fabric of the time/space continuum by novelizing the screenplay based on his graphic novel Road to Perdition. (Do the math in your head for that one.)

“The Road to Perdition novelization was a nightmare, frankly,” Collins says. “I went after it for obvious reasons—I didn’t want a ‘Perdition’ novel written by someone else out there. I proceeded to write the best novelization of my career, staying faithful to David Self’s script—which was already fairly faithful to my graphic novel—but fleshed out the script with characterization, expanded dialogue scenes and just generally turning it into a quality novel of around 100,000 words. After I submitted it and had the New York editor say it was the best tie-in novel he’d ever read, the licensing person at DreamWorks required me to cut everything in the novel that wasn’t in the script. That I was the creator of the property held no sway. I was made to butcher the book down to 40,000 words.”

It’s a tragedy, really. In Collins’ intended form, that sounds like a novelization I would read. Mind you, I would still approach it with caution. Road to Perdition is a remarkable film, but much of its success rides on strong performances, meticulous staging, and exemplary cinematography of the striking electricity that we associate with the mantra, “Every frame a Rembrandt.” In some respects, it is a film that holds its own against the very best. It invites us to judge it not only against gangster pictures or comic book adaptations, but against all motion pictures—and the comparison is not ridiculous.

In the meantime, riddle me this: even if we set all stigmas aside, are there any tie-in novels—novelizations, individual series, or otherwise—that we can truly conceive of as contenders for the Booker? The Pulitzer? Or to be more realistic—not all films get tie-ins, after all, and not all authors are willing to write them—the Hugo, the Nebula, the Edgar?

No—because nobody wants to commission one.

(In case you answered “Yes”: please leave a comment, and name the book.)

7.

I don’t think it’s conceptually impossible for a novelization to be a serious work of fiction. What is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, really, but a tie-in novel for a BBC radio miniseries?

To clear the institutional barricades against novelizations is probably a good thing. In fact, films that fail to live up to the promise of their screenplays—whether the cause be poor acting, editorial incompetence, budgetary constraints, or something completely different—are probably ripe for novelization. But the ensuing novel must be more than just an adaptation, and preferably composed at some temporal distance from its source material. For one thing, it must pay serious attention to structure and prose: why dump the content in a new form if you’re not going to excel at the form? We don’t forgive films either when they just adapt. There’s a reason Alfonso Cuarón’s interpretation of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is far superior to its (literally) by-the-book predecessors.

The fact is, most of what gets novelized is not that suitable for novelization. The finest special-effects spectacles on the silver screen are the ones with that poetic choreography of clashing swords and fiery explosions that were born to be visual. Animators don’t think in words. Take away the visuals and trade them for a verbal substitute, no matter how eloquent, and the essence of the source material’s appeal is lost.

Requisite exception to every rule: perhaps the most well regarded novelization of a film is Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, based on an early draft from his concurrently written screenplay to the Kubrick film, itself based on a short story of his from the 1940s. It stands alone as a serious classic of hard science fiction, even though—and, arguably, because—the manner of its inventiveness is quite different from what Kubrick did to plant 2001 as a monolithic landmark in the cinematic canon. On the page, “My God, it’s full of stars!” doesn’t imitate Kubrick’s fetal montage of transcendence and rebirth. It replaces it.

8.

We must remember, too, that the prose novel had a head start on film by several centuries. The standard of achievement on the printed page is staggeringly, mind-bogglingly high. All the same, that’s no excuse for not even trying.

Or is it?

Tie-in readers are a renewable resource. The existing brand is what draws them in, not the books themselves. Familiarity with the brand’s core product—the game, the television show, the movie—is an implied prerequisite; moreover, that is a safe assumption to make. The licensors of the franchise have no incentive to expand their audience. They’re not the gatekeepers. It’s not their responsibility. Star Wars novels draft their readership from the audience that is already receptive to the Star Wars films; that’s the extent of expansion. It is a safe assumption that the percentage of Star Wars fans who read daring, intellectual literature and have yet to erect an impermeable stigmatic wall against franchise fiction is, to say the least, infinitesimal.

This isn’t to say that franchise fiction never expands it audience, or that its audience is a strict subset of the brand’s followers. I’m certain there are legions of Forgotten Realms readers who don’t play Forgotten Realms, or Star Wars readers who abandoned the films when the prequels came about.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that the publishers (or property holders or book packagers or whatever you call them) produce fiction as merchandise precisely because of its reliability as a source of revenue. Their natural inclination is to play it safe. That encourages them to produce more of the same, but with just enough variation that their existing audience doesn’t abandon them. The expansion of that audience does not occur from within. Their ranks swell on the back of the brand’s core product—and that is where the perception of legitimacy comes with the money, and goes with the promotional machine that affords the brand its access to the mass consumer market.

The rest of the story

• Part the First
• Part the Third
• Part the Fourth
• Part the Fifth

To be perfectly fair, my aversion to tie-in novels, be they novelizations of films or spin-off series that seize a life of their own, was admittedly prejudicial in origin: how many, after all, had I actually read? Then again, I don’t need to sample every subspecies of gourmet tofu to verify that I just don’t like tofu; and likewise, I simply have better things to do than spend my precious reading time on something that I am predisposed to think of as systematically bad in the hopes that oh, maybe I’ll like this one.

Does this reduce to an argument from personal taste? Perhaps; but as longtime readers know, with me, nothing is ever just a matter of personal taste, and I take pride in being able to defend everything I enjoy without having to resort to the old standby of, “But it entertains me.” It is never enough to just be entertained: to be satisfied with so little is chiefly how we let society condition us to accept lower standards. We deserve better.

All the same, I am nothing if not open-minded. So if my readers would like to recommend a tie-in novel that they consider to be the pinnacle of the form, I will gladly feature it in a future instalment of the Wednesday Book Club. One rule: don’t pick Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire. (Everybody, for some reason, picks Heir to the Empire.) I’ve read it, and it sucks.

I’d also like to point out three items of interest I read earlier in the week: Forgotten Realms author Erik Scott de Bie’s spirited defence of game fiction, fantasy novelist Jim C. Hines’ confession of a prejudice against tie-ins that he would rather get over (with a follow-up post at SF Novelists), and Wired Magazine’s feature story on Star Wars continuity manager Leland Chee. For those interested, I also recommend this collection of articles (esp. Are Tie-In Writers Hacks?) published by the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers, an advocacy group for, well, whatever it is they do.

In the true spirit of friendly debate, I decided to give the common pro-tie-in arguments serious consideration instead of shooting them from the hip—and then subsequently, shoot them from the hip. The way I see it, if I’m going to promulgate the stereotype that tie-in fiction is second-class, I’d better have a good excuse.

1.

It is probably best to boil things down to essentials, for starters, so those of you who aren’t going to read this whole ruddy thing can at least absorb a brief statement of my position.

There are common criticisms of tie-in novels that I don’t agree with:

• “Tie-ins are ‘easier’ to write than original properties; ergo, they are inferior as art.”
• “Many tie-in novelists probably couldn’t get their foot in the door otherwise; they must not be very good.”
• “Tie-in novels are all the same.”
• “In the case of spin-offs and series, there is no point to reading tie-in novels when they have no bearing on the continuity (dare I say canon?) of the core product.”
• “Aside from an official sanction, nothing separates tie-ins from fan fiction.”

And there are criticisms of tie-in novels to which I have yet to see a satisfactory refutation:

• By the admission of some tie-in authors themselves, tie-in writing does not aspire to art: it is more comparable to copywriting or commercial illustration, produced to deadline, quota, and specification as a form of merchandise. I do not find this to be a satisfactory excuse for holding tie-ins to lower standards. Furthermore, to hold them to lower standards is to concede that the stigma is justified.
• Tie-in novels have a predefined target market and no incentive to expand it. In most cases, tie-in novels do not exhibit any concern for the finesse and craftsmanship that we expect of literature. This doesn’t mean the authors are necessarily bad: it is just as often the publishers who curtail the authors’ ambitions to pander to the projected behaviour of the established audience.
• In the case of a series, a shared continuity-by-committee is an undesirable constraint on the creative freedom of individual authors. The oversaturation of the imagined world is an inevitable result.
• Readers lead finite lives and are going to read a finite number of books. To instill brand loyalty in these readers is to deter them from reading diversely.

Tie-in writers and readers alike may wonder why, and it would be irresponsible to walk away from this topic without touching on the following questions:

• Why should tie-in novels (or indeed, any commercial fiction) aspire to higher literary accomplishment when they already meet the needs of the market?
• Tie-in fiction, just like most of the genre fiction that is unfairly dismissed as juvenile, is a source of inspiration and delight to many. Why dissuade readers from exploring it?
• Short of a tie-in novel beating you up on the playground and taking your lunch money, do they really do any harm?
• What business does anybody have to tell anybody else that they should read/write X and not read/write Y?

I am sure these concerns are on the minds of tie-in readers and writers alike who wonder why outsiders like myself are so eager to step on their toes. They are serious questions that any self-respecting critic of any literature must be capable of answering.

Naturally, we won’t deal with them first.

2.

Let’s begin with some of the more cogent arguments in defence of tie-in novels, which I am all too happy to concede.

“Tie-in novels are as difficult to write as original properties, if not even harder.”

I like this one, and not for the surface statement of fact that the difficulty of creating anything increases with every pre-existing constraint.

One of the most counterproductive fallacies in all of the arts and humanities is the notion that the harder something is to do, the more artistic it becomes (and vice versa). Or to paraphrase the more popular formulation: “My kid can do that; ergo, it stinks”—which doesn’t say much about our perception of children, let alone Jackson Pollock or John Cage. I’m not one of those all-inclusive, it’s-all-subjective pluralistas when it comes to art, but I do believe that everything deserves serious consideration. We should try to understand what someone is trying to do, even if they fail, and regardless of whether it pleases us.

We are easily impressed by technique because its means of production, so to speak, are limited to a few. I don’t have a problem with technique so long as we see it for what it is: an enabling force that opens the space of possible expression, not to be confused with expression itself. I wager that for most of the literate public, the unsaid belief underlying the stereotype that tie-in novels are hack work—apart from the historical substantiation—is something like this: Halo novels? My kid can do that.

We’ll get into fan fiction later. Not now.

Erik Scott de Bie:

How can one possibly–at least honestly–express the view that shared-world/game fiction is any less worthy than non-shared-world/game fiction?

It has all the same range and suffers all the same faults–it can address the same issues and is free to suck just like any other fiction out there.

The only real difference is that instead of expending the creative juice to *make our own world,* we spend it on *integrating our stories into an existing world* that is steeped in a hundred game supplements, three hundred novels, and forty years of tradition. If anything, that is *harder* than creating your own world, where you can just make up the solution to any problem. In the Realms (or any shared world), it’s research, research, research. Because if you don’t do that, your novel is going to crash and burn.

Consider the flipside: the difficulty of writing within externally imposed constraints does not imply that the presence of constraints is a good thing. I concede that the tie-in writer does not do “less”: if anything, he operates much like the historical novelist, the difference being that the history here is hypothetical (and being filled in by others all the time). But the presence of a challenge does not make a novel better, and an external challenge is not to be confused with the choice of an author (tie-in or not) to challenge him or herself to attend to the finer points of language, structure, and overall polish—and that is on top of the mission they have accepted, the exercise of the imagination in a universe already populated with symbols and rules.

3.

“Established authors choose to write tie-ins of their own volition, not because they aren’t good enough to write their own books.”

Jim C. Hines:

Digging deeper, I find — to my utter disgust — that on some level I feel as though original novels are somehow more artistic, more true to the integrity of the writer, more … whatever. My books are art. Yours are work done for a paycheck. Oh sure, Tobias Buckell might go slumming with his Halo novel, but he’s still a real writer at heart. Holy crap, someone please kick my ass now? This is bullshit, pure and unfiltered. I opened my second book with a nose-picking injury, and I’m judging other people’s writing as not artistic enough? Seriously, someone needs to smack me.

This argument is also known as, “Kingsley Amis and Sebastian Faulks wrote post-Fleming James Bond. They are damn good novelists. Therefore, it is probable that good post-Fleming James Bond exists.”

I’ve never actually read Amis or Faulks, but okay.

For the record: yes, I consider post-Fleming Bond or post-Baum Oz to be tie-in fiction, and the same goes for the emerging trend of advertising a deceased or retired author’s name as a brand in itself (cf. Robert Ludlum, Tom Clancy). I don’t think tie-in writers will argue with me here: they are all too happy to welcome these authors as peers.

It’s worth asking, then, why we (well, I) afford a degree of privilege to the originator of a character or series. Why didn’t I read any Oz after Baum, and what makes me think of Fleming’s Bond as the real Bond, succeeded by a dynasty of tributary imitations (which, I’ll repeat, I haven’t read)? That leads us straight into the complex theoretical quagmire of authorship, and I’m thrilled.

4.

“Every work of fiction steals from its influences; no author invents from scratch. Tie-ins acknowledge their influences openly and with permission.”

Aha, here we go—l’anxiété d’influence! Le morte d’author! Now we’re playing with power.

As I repeat at every opportunity, I have little use for authorial intention, and I am all for the appropriation and reinterpretation of existing texts. I have to be: I specialize in a genre of music where people make entire careers out of improvising a thousand different ways to play Gershwin or Porter or Ellington, and original compositions often step aside to make room for another lap around “Autumn Leaves”.

So I’ll heartily accept that reinterpretation is composition, as is the revitalizing task of expanding something beyond its natural borders. But in tie-in fiction, is there really that much reinvention? Who’s actually reharmonizing the tune and twisting its melody into a variegated knot of loop-de-loops and Möbius strips—and who’s just running the changes?

What I want to see in a spin-off story is a serious challenge to the structural conventions or ethical assumptions of its brand. I haven’t read Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (it’s in the queue), nor am I familiar with the musical by that name, but I’m going to slip it here as an example anyway. Another good example is The Final Solution, Michael Chabon’s 2004 novella about an octogenarian Sherlock Holmes. This is not to argue that every tie-in novel need be an act of defiance or revision, but what they should be is special and unique—not only within the context of their franchise, but as works of fiction that stand proudly on their own merits.

I’m sure enthusiasts of tie-in fiction would be eager to show me where this kind of thing already exists. Please do—and remember, I have very high standards.

The rest of the story

• Part the Second
• Part the Third
• Part the Fourth
• Part the Fifth

The substance of the original article’s argument is that the mainstream tends to dismiss fan fiction as an illegitimate activity, or a pointless waste of time, because it is locked into a capitalist mentality that cannot fathom why anyone would invest time in writing freely disseminated fiction they can’t sell. This is silly for a number of reasons, and it reeks of an ex post facto apologia for an activity whose supporters already found worthwhile from the start, but I’ll defer to Sarah’s observations before I lob my own handful of napalm on the pig-pile.

As Sarah correctly notes, “real” writers of original fiction aren’t in it for the profit either; in all but an infinitesimal selection of cases, fiction-writing is an immensely unprofitable activity, the quantitative and qualitative costs of which are grossly out of proportion to the potential financial return. More to the point, writers of original fiction deliberately choose not to post their work all over the Internet willy-nilly like fanfic writers do, because publication and property protection are actually (theoretically) achievable.

Furthermore, fanfic authors by and large don’t write for the end purpose of thumbing their noses at copyright law or the security that intellectual property protections offer the for-profit fiction market:

Beyond this, most people who want to write for a living want to write for a living. There are certain reasons for not wanting to pursue profit for fanfiction, even if such a pursuit were possible: I’ve spoken to people who enjoy the freedom to write what they choose, no matter how small the audience, to people who don’t want to feel the pressure of deadlines and quality control. But if copyright allowed, a market for fanfiction would exist. Who amongst its authors would actually turn the money down, given the option?

Okay, now it’s my turn.

First of all, I have no philosophical opposition against fan fiction, though I personally have little interest in reading or writing it. It would be quite hypocritical of me to oppose fanfic in principle: as a jazz musician, what I do all the time is participate in creating spontaneous derivations of copyrighted works. I’m just not allowed to sell them on records without permission. It’s a nuisance, but considering how much clout you need to press a commercial record in the first place, it’s not an issue. The classic jazz standards will live on as long as total strangers can get together and jam over tunes they collectively know, and I don’t see how fanfic is all that different, or how it is particularly threatened by the current state of copyright law.

With that out of the way: I find it utterly baffling that the author’s anti-property screed, along with its sycophantic responses, remain blind to the transparently obvious irony that fanfic communities only exist in the first place as the byproduct of a commercial entity. There wouldn’t be an audience for Harry Potter fan fiction, or a community of speculative writers to that effect, if the J.K. Rowling novels were not widely established in the popular consciousness as a shared basis of knowledge, a “canon” as they call it. And as much as I sing the praises of the Potter novels for the quality of their storytelling, it is the publishing business that made them popular—not the literary merit of the books, which is merely one variable in the publishing industry’s table of cost-benefit formulae.

Fan fiction only thrives on the widespread popularity of its source material. That’s why you don’t see fan fiction based on the novels of, say, Michael Ondaatje (and yes, I checked Google just to make sure). It isn’t because nobody wants to chronicle the Continuing Adventures of Hana and Caravaggio; it’s because Ondaatje’s fiction, while highly salable and widely acclaimed, doesn’t have the colossal market presence of a full-fledged franchise. And without an audience to validate his or her work—a community with a shared cultural literacy in its own internally consistent universe—the fanfic writer’s satisfaction will only ever be private.

(I’ll concede the air of a counterexample: Jean Rhys did write and sell Wide Sargasso Sea, which was effectively a Jane Eyre fanfic, if we are to put it crudely. The author of “Valuing the Work in Fanwork” belongs to a movement called the Organization for Transformative Works, which believes that fan fiction should be offered the same legal protection. Ethan Zuckerman provides a succinct digest which I don’t feel the need to supersede.)

That said, I can certainly sympathize with concerns about the overzealous enforcement of property rights, and I see no reason why fanfic need be suppressed. One could make the argument that the free proliferation of fanfic competes with licensed fiction, as when the Fleming estate commissions current authors to write “official” James Bond novels, and diminishes the profitability of that particular line of business. I think the marketing muscle of publishing companies more than compensates for any disadvantage in that arena: one only needs to look at the Star Wars Expanded Universe, which established an officially sanctioned extension to the continuity of the George Lucas films and sold well enough to earn a blind following of fans all too happy to write within its imaginative constraints, in spite of being almost uniformly terrible in quality.

It would be far too simplistic, however, to do away with serial rights in a single stroke. DC Comics doesn’t care if you put up a drawing of Batman on a personal website, but the sustainability of its core business depends on its exclusive privilege to restrict who has access to the commercial means of Batproduction. In comic books, as in McFiction, everything is farmed out to a licensed selection of individual artists (for better or for worse). But think of how low the quality of officially legitimized work would have to be for fanfic to pose a credible threat in the marketplace. I’m not sure it’s even possible.

But even if we accept that fan fiction constitutes fair use, as we probably should, it is especially haughty of the fanfic community to imagine itself as a merry band of revolutionaries. They depend far too much on the publishing superstructure to follow their ostensible upheaval to its dialectic conclusion.

Post scriptum: I confess to making a short-lived and abortive attempt at fan fiction in high school, as much out of ennui as a general disdain for the quality of the work derived from the Star Wars universe, officially licensed or otherwise. I won’t claim that I was any good either, but there is something quaint about my attempt to imagine Star Wars as written by William Shakespeare, a playwright about whom I evidently knew very little at the time:

LEIA
Darth Vader. Only you could be so bold
As to our diplomatic vessel hold.

VADER
Act not surprised so, my dear Princess.
A mercy mission this is not, confess.
Transmissions beamed aboard by Rebel spies
Art here. Now fill my ears not with more lies,
And tell me the location of the plans,
So they may be return’d to rightful hands.

LEIA
I am but here on diplomatic task,
In ignorance of what thou doth here ask.

VADER
Of a Rebel force, thou play’st a part;
A traitor, that is ev’rything thou art.

I recently discovered that Simon B. Jones independently stumbled upon the same idea. His execution is far truer to the Shakespearean flavour, though he begins with the Prequels, and takes the further step of translating Lucasian technology into the Elizabethan equivalents of the age of sail.

Although my own ambitions as a writer have long departed from the course of fan fiction (a trajectory to which I was never committed in the first place), I may revisit my little project one day, if only because of the following passage was rather promising:

[Enter ARTOO and THREEPIO.]

THREEPIO
How we are in this mess, I knowest not;
Of suffering, in life it be our lot.
I’ve got to rest before apart I fall
Or frozen shalt my joints become withal.
A desolation lies before mine eyes;
I thinkest not thy chosen path be wise
For rockiness impedes the road ahead,
The ease of which has little to be said.
Thou seeketh settlements beyond? I plea
That thou doth not get technical with me.
And what of thine alleged mission here?
Malfunction in a day thou shalt, O near
Of sighted scrap-pile! Let me not catch thee
For help thou shan’t receive, make a decree.
No more adventures! I’ll not go that way.