Re: Adaptations and borrowing..

Stephen Baxter seems to draw a lot on other sources. His book The Time
Ships is a reworking of multiple HG Wells books (the time machine, the
wodld set free, the land ironclads, and many others), his book Voyage
(about the first mission to Mars in the 1980s) draws heavily on incidents
from the Apollo program, and there are episodes in other novels which draw
very closely from real world events.

Barry

I am a Statistician. One false move and you're a Statistic.
On 10/03/2015 1:51 AM, "Charley Seavey" <[email protected]> wrote:

> Cruising through the public library yesterday I came across a copy of a
> long ago Poul Anderson novel *The Game of Empire. *"First new Flandry
> novel in years" is the blurb on the cover- published in 1985 as it turns
> out. I loved the Flandry stories all those years ago, and did not remember
> reading this one.
>
> About two pages in I started thinking "this reads a whole lot like the
> opening chapter of Kipling's *Kim." *A bit more and a religious pilgrim
> appears. Along towards the end of the chapter he refers to the other
> character as "...little sprite of all the world."  Which nailed it for me.
>
> Which brought up the question in my mind: how many other writers/stories
> owe greater or large amounts to earlier writers? David Drake makes no bones
> about his RCN series having roots in Patrick O'Brian's nautical tales,
> although his plots are drawn from history back. I suspect Shakespeare must
> have contributed a plot or two. What else occurs to the assembled readers
> as having roots in other literary streams? Some must be obvious, maybe not
> others. Discussion should ensue.
>
> charley
>
> --
> Charley
> Desert Sailor
>