Sixteen years ago, I write an entry about L’ordre des pierres, a comic in the Valérian & Laureline universe by Mézières and Christin. While they are not well know in the english speaking universe, their early works had a large influence, including possibly Star Wars.

While I love the series, that particular volume sucked, and did so in a way that seems endemic with older science-fiction authors. Like many others I disliked the Star-Wars prequels, and Ars Technica has an interesting article about the ideas George Lucas had for Stars Wars 7 to 9, they would have even been worse.

There seems to be a pattern with old authors, where they stop telling stories, and instead they write about their universes, try to make their various works a consistent thing. They cannot create new interesting characters, instead the reuse the old ones, while trying to connect them, to gather them in some strange family reunion. Where you would hope they would just write new stories, they feel the need to connect the existing one, or to reinterpret them.

Asimov tried to link Foundation with the Robot series, it sucked. Heinlein tried to… I’m not sure what he tried to do but it was bizarre. Many of the later Disc World books by Terry Pratchett had a similar feeling, characters which lived in distinct story arcs are joined.

In a sense, there is a similar pattern in computer science, where the framework is more important than the application…