I think the only novels that can count as remakes are those where the first novel was based on older source material. Then the remake novel can be based on the same original source material, just like the first one was, and not be considered a ripoff of the first novel.
The original source material would have to be something even more basic, most likely a legend or oral tradition. Therefor we get multiple “remakes” of stories about King Arthur by Malory, T.H. White, Marion Zimmer Bradley, etc. And we get multiple remakes of stories about Beowulf by Michael Crichton, John Gardner, Neil Gaiman, etc. And we get multiple remakes of stories about Gilgamesh by authors like Robert Silverberg, Stephan Grundy, and Gian Franco Gianfilippi.
Yes - the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys examples are the most analogous to movie remakes: they take the same basic characters and plots but update them for a more current culture.
I knew that “If This Goes On–” was rewritten, but I hadn’t realized that it expanded from 33,000 words to 57,300 words. That certainly qualifies as expanding a novella to a novel.
He also later wrote a couple of new Merlin-turns-Arthur-into-an-animal adventures. Originally, he published them as a separate volume titled The Book of Merlin, where they really didn’t fit (they’re shoehorned in at the end of Arthur’s life, instead of the beginning), but later printings of The Sword in the Stone have them in line with the rest of young Arthur’s adventures.
And on another note, Asimov once wrote the same short story twice purely by accident (when you’ve written as much as him, apparently you can forget what you’ve already written). I don’t remember the titles, but the gist of it was that dinosaurs were much more intelligent than we think, and actually technological, and caused their own extinction through warfare. The story (in both cases) was told through a framing story of two guys talking in a restaurant and exploring the implications, with one of them pointing out that we’re on the verge of the same fate.
Not by accident - Asimov took the plot of a story that had never sold, and which he thought had been completely lost (“Big Game” Big Game (short story) - Wikipedia ) and rewrote it (based on his memory of the original, and with more skill, I assume) as “Night of the Hunter” - only to discover sometime later that a copy of “Big Game” did exist (in papers he had donated to a college). Asimov did accidentally write two very similar nonfiction pieces several years apart (I don’t remember which ones).
Piers Anthony wrote a novel But What of Earth? in 1976. Roger Elwood bought the publication rights but wasn’t very happy with the book. He had Robert Coulson step in and heavily revise the original (to the point where Anthony and Coulson were listed as co-authors).
Anthony was very unhappy with the final product. He sued Elwood and eventually won back the publication rights, which he used to release his original version in 1989 (along with a bitter denunciation of Elwood).
A Russian writer, Alexander Volkov, essentially rewrote L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz in 1939. Volkov’s version was titled The Wizard of the Emerald City. Volkov’s book uses parts of the plot and most of the characters from Baum’s original but the changes are significant enough that it doesn’t work as just a translation.
If we’re doing this, we’d have to list a lot of High Fantasy novels as “remakes” of The Lord of the Rings.
I’m not going to comment on the others, but Total Recall was only very, very loosely inspired by “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” (which isn’t a novel, as my quotes indicate) and so the novelization of the film is, like, two continents removed from any ideas Dick had.
Stephen King re released The Stand with additional material the original editor cut out including a new prologue and epilogue and characters that had been completely excised from the original. It also updated a few references to dates and products to make them more timely.
Legal question: if a writer publishes a reworked version of a novel or similar work, can they force the publisher of the original version to withdraw the original work? And do copyright protections carry over from the original work, or do they start all over again?
I agree. I’ve long argued that the bulk of the original film was lifted from Robert Sheckley’s novel The Status Civilization. As usual, Sheckley got no credit.
Anthony did not come off well in his own account of the controversy. He has far too high a regard for his status as an author. His basic attitude was how dare a mere editor think he could touch the words that an author had created.
This is something I wondered. Can an author publish the same book twice, without violating his own copyright?
College professors get to re-publish “New and Revised” editions of their textbooks all the time, so why couldn’t, say, Tom Clancy have re-published his Hunt For Red October a second time, with some tweaks, a decade later after the first publishing, if he didn’t like his first one?
Yes. Thomas Hardy (for example) made lots of little revisions to his novels whenever a new edition came out, sometimes just correcting typos, but sometimes altering more significant things.
A year ago I read an edition of Frankenstein that printed only Mary Wollestonecraft’s (soon to be Shelley) original writing, without Percy Shelley’s changes and additions. Call it the Ur-Frankenstein.