Prequels. I love ‘em. Stories which post-date the publication of an original work, but which pre-date the events of that work in narrative time.
I love the freedom that prequels afford an author to recontextualise a story and re-examine the motives of characters. I love that prequels can breathe new life into a story arc that might otherwise have reached its natural conclusion. Publishers obviously love prequels for the same reason, which is why prequels have recently blossomed most notably in sci-fi and fantasy, and sometimes in “serious” literature too.
And although it doesn’t meet the modern publisher’s technical definition of a prequel, I suggest that the Bible, especially the five books of Moses, fulfills many of the functional attributes of a prequel, at least in an ancient-world context. Certainly it was committed to paper (ok, papyrus) centuries after the events it purports to describe, and seeks to exposit the origins of those stories. It was in all probability written by multiple authors, attempting to weave their voices together with post-explanations of an epic story arc.
This first Prequel provided a group of semi-nomadic herders with a context for their lives and the situations in which they found themselves. It offered a narrative analysis of the fault-lines of the societies in which they lived. In Genesis and Exodus, a people told themselves stories of how they came to be and learned, so to speak, how the Republic became the Empire, the origin of the feud between Han Solo and Bobba Fett, and who shot first.
So, anyway — prequels. Know any particularly good or bad examples of the genre? In literature, film, drama or comic books? Any recommendations?
All prequels are bad because they are also called retcons :- )
De Niro as Don Vito in the second Godfather.
The ancient Greeks were always pre-quelling their stuff, right? The Iphigenia plays are prequels to Agamemnon, which is a prequel to Elektra, and so on.
Here’s a bit of a Plasticman stretch: “The Clouds” as a comic prequel to “The Apology.”
And of course the well-written Henry V and Richard II are later prequels to the earlier, poorlier-written Henry VI plays.
The truly appalling Hannibal Rising was written as a prequel to the excellent The Silence of the Lambs, and oh how one wishes it had not been.
Rumour has it that Peter Temple’s prequel to The Broken Shore will be coming out later this year. Could it possibly be as good?
PC – that Hannibal’s almost an all-prequel franchise, as The Red Dragon also predates TSOTL.
Capital volume I, later-written prequel to The Communist Manifesto?
Declaration of the Rights of Man by the French, later-written prequel to the Declaration of Independence by the Americans?
Since the creation story in Genesis is based on the Babylonian Enuma Elish it’s derivative, but not a prequel.
Batman: Year One. Heaven knows what retcons have happened since then in the comics world.
The large number of prequels to Frank Herbert’s Dune – written by his son and the very capable Kevin J Anderson – are nowhere near the old master’s level, and generally poor efforts, however The Butlerian Jihad was very enjoyable. I think it worked because they weren’t constrained by Herbert Sr’s notes and characters (as in their other trilogy, Prelude to Dune. That meant they could write their own novel, instead of trying to write someone else’s.
Red Alert, prequel to Command and Conquer.
Classic computer game prequel. Are there any other notable computer game prequels?
“Kid Stakes” and “Other Times” served as effective prequels to Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.
I would say that a true prequel needs to be a piece of arts created after the creation of first work, yet “set” before it. Therefore i would not count such things as Red Dragon, as the book was actually written before Silence of the Lambs (and adapted as Manhunter) before SotL was a twinkle in Jonathan Demme’s eye.
Anne McCaffrey jumped back and forth in time with her DragonRiders of Pern series, and I certainly enjoyed (in my youth) several of the novesls set in the past.
Deus Ex 3 is meant to be a prequel to the original Deus Ex – but I’m not holding out much hope of it being any good. The original game is peerless and perhaps the finest computer game ever made despite clunky graphics. The first sequel was a dumbed down, buggy mess best forgotten.
C,S.Forrester wrote his first Hornblower novel when Horatio was a captain and then later wrote, I forget the title, a novel with Hornblower as a Lieutenant and then even later a series of short stories with Horny as a midshipman.
The characterization was beautifully consistent throughout.
The incomparable Dorothy Dunnett wrote a whole series of novels with a single hero (8 of them, set in the 15th century) that was a prequel to her earlier whole series of novels with another single hero (6 of them) set in the 16th.
I’m deliberately not calling them ‘historical novels’ because it sends an entirely wrong bonnet-y and/or ancient sacred text/object-y sort of message. Dunnett was a genius, and her books are wildly superior to most of these sorts of things.
Flashman, bully, cad, coward and poltroon, was serially prequelised by his creator Fraser, who himself “borrowed” the character from “Tom Brown’s School Days”.
I think Flashy is the product of one of the more elaborate processes of prequelisation.
Ursula Le Guin’s short story ‘The Day Before the Revolution’ is a Prequel to ‘The Disposessed’
Does it count as a prequel when cartoon characters are shown as the “Li’l” versions of themselves?
Gregory Maguire’s “Wicked” is a prequel to “The Wizard of Oz”. It’s a good read, but really not a ‘young adults’ book, which is how’s it’s now being marketed on the back of the teen-friendly musical.
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If memory serves me, Jean Rhys’s “Wide Sargasso Sea” cleverly prequelled the mad lady in the attic from “Jane Eyre”.
C.S.Lewis – The Magician’s Nephew
I guess that in theory any multiple Doctor special is a prequel of sorts.
also apparently Robin Hobb’s current project is a prequel to the Assassin series.
All books are prequel, but some are more prequel than others.
If you’re a dictator who’s trying to quell an uprising, it’s probably because you didn’t take the time to do some pre-quelling in your spare time.
Not strictly a prequel, but I remember having a book called “Judy and Punch” which was about Judy in Seven Little Australians. It deals with an episode in which Judy is sent away to boarding school at which point she disappears from the SLA plot, and this fills in the blank. It was an awesome read as I recall and is the only example I can think of of a “Road” story set in Australia with a female protagonist (c’mon, literary people, shoot me down here!) I’ll hunt down a second hand copy one of those days. It’s funny you never hear of it, while SLA is such a revered icon.
There’s that movie Spider and Rose, Helen, where Ruth Cracknell goes on the road in an ambulance, or Japanese Story with Toni Collette.
(Unfortunately they’re both awful).
I’m glad to see Shakespeare got a mention (especially since we’re unlikely to see The Histories in public in this country again for a long time, thanks to the appalling efforts of the Sydney Theatre Company in their The Wars of the Roses). He must get some credit as the first English exploiter of the prequel.
“And although it doesn’t meet the modern publisher’s technical definition of a prequel, I suggest that the Bible, especially the five books of Moses, fulfills many of the functional attributes of a prequel, at least in an ancient-world context. Certainly it was committed to paper (ok, papyrus) centuries after the events it purports to describe, and seeks to exposit the origins of those stories. It was in all probability written by multiple authors, attempting to weave their voices together with post-explanations of an epic story arc.
This first Prequel provided a group of semi-nomadic herders with a context for their lives and the situations in which they found themselves. It offered a narrative analysis of the fault-lines”
I love the idea of the Torah as a prequel and certainly for Christian bibles the Old Testament is meant as a sort of prequel to the JC stuff. THe only quibble I have is the notion of the ‘semi-nomadic’ herders. None of the biblical texts were written by or for semi-nomadic herders. They were writen by scribes, most likely in temples, for the agrarian and small urban populations of Persian and Hellenistic Palestine.
the silmarillion was my favourite book for a short time when I was a kid. it was like a fun version of the bible.
Prequel to “The Guns of Navarone”… “Navarone Planning Committee”!
“Hmm,” thought Kensington as he surveyed the landscape, “this Navarone place is deucedly pretty, but still — it’s missing something. Somehow, it could use a little something… extra. But what?” He furrowed his brow, and glanced at his watch. Soon it would be time for his presentation to the Committee…
Good game Japerz.
Prequel to
“The Last Detail” … “The Second Last Detail”
“The Old Testament” … “The Older Testament”
“The Exorcist” … “The Dummy’s Guide to Satanism”
“One of the Still Numerous Mohicans”
“Lord Chatterley’s Ugly, Boring and Impotent Gamekeeper”
Proust, “Petite Madeleines Mean Nothing to Me”
We’re Warriors!
“The Empty Lot on the Floss”
“The House of Four Gables, with Room for a Few Additional Gables”
“On the Way to the Mountains of Madness”
“Stopping By Woods on a Chilly Afternoon”
Capt Marvel Junior. Superboy.
The Little Red Engine That Couldn’t
Biggles Spits The Dummy
You Only Live Once
The Bearable Bassington
Quatermass Gets Tenure
I Bit Peter Parker
Ernest: The Handbag Years
Everything’s Coming Up Apples: The Summerisle Story
Brideshead Visited
I Am A Feature Series Idea For Reader’s Digest
Portrait of the artist as an embryo
Apocalypse Eventually
Waiting for Godot
Waiting For Waiting For Godot
Hangin’ With Vlad and E-Boy
Finnegan’s Death
I Was A Teenage Teenager
Starship Poopers
The Whitsun Couplings
The Naked Brunch
Fear And Loathing In Barstow
The Hunting of The Snark:An IPO.
Fahrenheit 450.
A hello to arms
The Little Sleep
The Not-so-High Window
Lesser Expectations
The preliminary skirmishes in the lead up to what was become known as the War of the Worlds
Moby Duck
The Nine Hundred and Ninety Nine Arabian Evenings
The Laneway leading from the Street to Perdition to the Road to Serfdom
At the Mountains of Eccentricity
The Giving of One’s Phone Number to Cthulhu
Herbert West: Cartoonist
The Thing at the Garden Gate
????
Oh, I wasted that second last one. I really should have gone with
Two Hundred Pounds
To Be…
The Man With Qualities
Bovary On Fractures. (“An indispensable handbook for the rural physician” – Bulletin de recherche des Centres d’excellence pour la santé des femmes.)
The Six Pillars Of Worldliness
Lance-Corporal Pepper’s Semi-Detached Buskers
Valjean Gets Wood
Rum, Bum, Beef and Ancient Pistols: Falstaff As Commander.
“Fahrenheit 450″
I’ll pay that one.
Although, to be a real smartarse, you could have said
Centigrade 232
which rolls off the tongue quite nicely 2.
Dracula : The Human Years.
The Bride Just Flirting With The Best Men
The Second Man: Picking Cotton
Snoopy vs Hauptmann Oswald Boelcke
Atlas Itched
Prometheus – Quest For Fire
Jay And Silent Wolfsheim Strike Out
Planet Of The Lemurs
Humboldt’s Shift
Paleozoic Gardens
Growing Attraction In The Era Of Pervasive But As Yet Undiagnosed Severe Gastroenteritis
The Rather Damp World
Humbert’s Shift
Paul’s xeroxed Xmas letter to miscellaneous Christians.
Draft Suggestions of the League of Junior Zionists
Darwin’s “Galapagos: a Waste of my Precious time”
Wow, some real good ones here. I especially like Brideshead Visited and Herbert West: Cartoonist (could’ve also been HW: Animator)
I Know Why the Song-Bird Is Going to Wind Up in a Cage
Let Us Go Look for Famous Men to Admire
Failed Diplomacy, then War, then Peace
Manuscript Placed in a Bottle
The Caine Heated Discussions
Often Amber
The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Pre-game Pep Talk
Schubert’s Finished Symphony
The Fire This Time
Batman Begins?
Gravity’s Thunderstorm
Do Androids Sleep?
The Left Hand of Gloom
We Can Remember It For You Retail
The Happy Childhood of Elric of Melnibone
The Condemned Man
Quite so of the texts themselves, Michael. But those texts, we have good reason to believe, were written versions of oral tales that the Hebrews had already been telling themselves for centuries, and during their semi-nomadic phase as well. I guess that’s what I was getting at by the “ancient world context” of a prequel…
Meanwhile:
The Bourne Id
To The Future
Appointment With Godot
A Tale of Two Villages
Squire of the Rings
Little Vacant Lot on the Prairie
West Side Nothing To See Here, Move Along Please
Portnoy’s Disappointment
The Sketch of Dorian Gray
The Young Man and the Sea
Oscar and Nobody Else, Oh God I’m So Lonely
To Aim at a Mockingbird
The Sketch of Dorian Gray
Catch-21
Wuthering Mezzanines
Six Little Australians
The Owlet and the Kitten
Some Country for Middle-Aged Men
Lowermarch
Sorry, Mercurius, I missed your Sketch of Dorian Gray up there. Great minds and so on.
“The Caine Heated Discussions”
Queeg’s Big Ballsup
“Often Amber”
Fucks sake, these lights are screwed. Why don’t we just duck down a side street, turn into Lennox and we’ll be on Bridge Rd before you know it.
The Rime of the Mature Mariner
The Adolescent from Snowy River
Now We are Five
Hello, Columbus
1983
What Katy Does
“Moby Duck”
I thought long and hard about a prequel to that text. While you apparently didn’t. “Moby Duck” is just a fun line-liner flung overboard without much thought.
Unlike “Ahab’s Leg”.
Leopold Bloom’s Rainy-Day Guide to Stay-at-Home Indoors Fun
‘The Pilgrims Regress’ has already been bagged by C S Lewis, but what about ‘The Pilgrims Egress’?
Olaf Stapledon’s The Second and Penultimate Men.
Journey to the Centre of the Living Room
1 League under the Bathtub
The Man Who Was Wednesday
“Quite so of the texts themselves, Michael. But those texts, we have good reason to believe, were written versions of oral tales that the Hebrews had already been telling themselves for centuries, and during their semi-nomadic phase as well. I guess that’s what I was getting at by the “ancient world context” of a prequel…”
Actually, nowadays, not really. I know Genesis and other books present this nomad idyllic past but they’re just stories and probably not handed down for generations from some ancient nomadic past. Hebrews were Canaanites and thus had always lived in Palestine as farmers city-dwellers and, for some, pastoralists. The stories of Abraham, Exodus and conquest of the land were composed in Persian Palestine and were not handed down over generations. They are riffing off older stories but we don’t know what most of them are. But they’re more likely to have been stories like the Ugaritic Baal cycle and other stories of gods and goddesses.
Tom Brown’s Nursery Days.
Animal Hobby Farm
The road to Wigan Square
9 thesies on Furebach
the aspiration of nations
lighting Chrome
Eleven O’Clock’s Children
The Possessed
Prince Lear
Love in a Temperate Climate
The Parents Karamazov
The Canterbury Limericks
This game is just too fun for words, but I’d better stop.
Love ‘Ahab’s Leg’.
the waterworks of paradise
Phonecall with Rama
the little drummer student
There do seem to be a lot of possibilities for musical prequels…does Bruckner’s 0th symphony count? (it actually exists)
A tiny amount of evening music?
The rite preparations of winter?
March on the way to Paris?
October rainclouds?
All Noisy on the Western Front
Oh okay, just one more.
Sherlock Holmes and the Pokey Little Puppy of the Baskervilles
Who the Fuck is Earnest?
where are you going wally
Atlas raised an Eyebrow
The Fountain’s Foot
The Planet of the Humans
Conspiracy and Sentencing
Rosemary’s Foetus (in turn prequelled by A Glimmer in Satan’s Eye)
A Horse-Drawn Carriage Named Attraction
Semi-clothed Breakfast
The Average Gatsby
The Visible Man
2000: A Terrestrial Short Story
Present, Despite the Wind
Mutterings on the Bounty
Pitcher Near the Rye
Vineyard of Wrath
Full Bladder of the Sometimes Sometimes
Err, like I said on the wrong thread…
Drug-free Old World
Shouldn’t that be ‘Planet of the My Grandfather Weren’t No Monkey!’
Rabbit, First Wood, which is actually the prequel to every single Updike novel, novella, poem and short story.
Wot – no love for Underbelly 2?
I can haz Underbelly 2 open thread?
I liked it Aussie Bob.
Thought you put in a particularly good turn actually.
With respect, Mr. Trimbole,
You was a more sophisticated episode than Underbelly 1, with several plot threads being developed. Whether this series will hold the attention of the plebs as well as the first one, I’m not sure. But I think it could well make for some exciting television. I also appreciate the wayou gonna make Fred Nile and the like spit chips with the gratuitous nudity. (Did Mr. Asia cut off that blokes hands and throw them in the river, or was it his head. You sahoulda shown us it going in the bag.
btw, that’s not the way I remember the offices of the Sydney CIB looking circa 1969. (Don’t ask how I know.)
I was a little surprised to see the party political stuff they were throwing about i.e. Al Grassby vs. Mackay at the public meeting. Was that connection ever really established to the extent it’s portrayed? I was approx. 10 years old I think and wasn’t paying much attention to politics back then.
Head and hands, PB. Pre-DNA testing, a pretty effective method. And obviously, if there were DNA testing, all the spew that went back in the grave would have been a real worry!
Curses, I missed it! Serves me right for taking work home. Did Grassby look schmick? If Grassby’s in it, are Robin Askin and Norm Allan going to feature? Abe Saffron? If there’s any politician who deserves to be in a NSW Underbelly feature, it’s Askin.
And Paul, I think you’re going to have to tell us your CIB anecdote. If you know what’s good for you, and unless you want us to have to explain to the magistrate about the station steps.
Grassby did indeed look schmick, although the attention to detail elsewhere was woeful (hairstyles, clothes etc very period inconsistent). As was Matthew Newtons “is he or isn’t he?” UnZud accent that ebbed and flowed. Despite that, I thought it had promise.
Norm Allen’s in it, getting a paper bag full of cash in CIB. At least I think it was Norm Allen.
Nugan Hand, it was to do with the role I had in saving some-one’s life. I don’t think I can say anymore, even after all these years, because of client confidentiality. But I remember the place as an open plan office without all those cubicles. So far as I know the only cubicle was the office of the chief honcho of the relevant investigation department.They fed me take-away chicken and asked me what all my mates would think if they spread that around. Quite a creepy experience, actually, especially when they read out all the stuff they had on index cards about me, 98% of which was just plain wrtong.
Well the only response to that paul is. the Prequel to Evan Whitton’s ‘Can of Worms’ – ‘The Shovel of Shit’.
How the Grinch Noticed Christmas
A Sun-dial Orange
Ode on a Cretan Amphora
The Schmoozing and Signing of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
Mostly quiet on the sou-western front
Thomas Malory’s La Vie du Arthur
The Cat in the Cap
The Irrelevancies of St John
The Little Engine with Potential but no Particular Challenge
Medical Student Faustus
Full Bladder of the Sometimes Sometimes
Coffee, about to hit keyboard
Full Bladder of the Sometimes Sometimes
I can’t believe it took me that long to work it out. I have no coffee, which is just as well.
*curtsies*
(Currently reading): Slightly Pinko Road
Trout Mask Original
Let’s Guard the Rhine-gold Carefully Today
Reservoir Pups
In Light
The Velvet Underground Are Looking for a Singer
Waiting for Godot: The Early Years