Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet has three books narrated in some way by different characters, describing the same events, and then a fourth that carries forward (he was consciously mimicking x,y,z,t coordinates when he wrote them).
Just wanted to say “Thanks, all”! I’m rereading *Ender’s Shadow, *and I’m on the waiting list for the audiobook version of Dragonsong (first book of McCaffrey’s retelling from a kid’s perspective).
And even if it wasn’t a “legal” post, I’m going to start reading some apocryphal Gospels (doesn’t one of them have Toddler Jesus making birds out of dirt and breathing life into them just for fun?)
Don’t feel bad, I jumped in with Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea retelling of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre backstory before I realized I’d misread the OP and had to edit it out.
Some of Ursula K. LeGuin’s later Earthsea fiction might qualify for this category, as she revisited Earthsea wizarding culture and its take on gender roles.
There was a British writer who wrote mysteries in the world of horse racing, and while I don’t believe he did exactly the same story from a different perspective, some of the situations did overlap in various books.
I can’t think of his name. It was NOT Dick Francis (or his-whoever is writing those books now) but there were similarities. He was compared to Dick Francis. Obviously, not as a big in the mystery world.
And of course someone has already mentioned Lawrence DUrrell.
Michael Moorcock did this with his Eternal Champion stories.
In Sailor on the Sea of Fate and The Vanishing Tower, Elric meets Corum.
The King of the Swords depicts the encounters from Corum’s point of view.
As an added frill, their timelines are twisted. On the ship, Corum remembers meeting Elric at the tower. At the tower, Elric remembers meeting Corum on the ship.
Another one I thought of: Sharon Draper has a young adult series about a group of friends who went through high school together, one book from the perspective of each boy. They don’t overlap completely, but there are some key events that show up in all of them.
Evan O’Connell wrote the story of the life of Mrs. Bridge and then wrote the story of the life of Mr. Bridge to create a sort of double exposure of their marriage and life together.
FWIW, I’ve found the trope for that–P.O.V Sequel.
I need to get caught up on my Scalzi, I really liked Old Man’s War.
I liked parts of the Enderverse, some of it bored me though. The parts written about the assorted characters that aren’t Ender and what happens to them after the war were ho hum.
Piers Anthony’s Incarnations series was enjoyable when I was younger, but I tried reading some of it just recently and couldn’t. I think I’ve aged out of his target demographic.
Generally though, I like reading different perspectives of events from the various characters in the story. I find it tiresome though if they just rewrite the original story from a different perspective, I think it works better if its just a few isolated incidents in the new characters own distinct and different story line.
The True Game series and the Jinian Footseer series from Sheri S. Tepper overlap in time and events. Though at one point in the second series the first person narrator says something like “This part of the story has already been written about elsewhere, so I won’t repeat it here.”
A little surprised that no one’s mentioned this yet, but Heinlein in his last published novel, To Sail Beyond the Sunset, revisits scenes from Time Enough for Love, told this time from, the POV of Maureen Johnson Smith LOng that were originally told from the point of view of Lazarus Long (as Ted Bronson). She also re-tells scenes from “The Man Who Sold the Moon” and “The Roads must Roll”.
Ooh, great link! A lot of good info, and commentary on the phenomenon. And I like the label for it too!
So what do you think? Lazy writers milking their hit for more money? Legitimately fleshing out a fascinating subcreation? A little from column A and B? Other?
How I found it (and a tip for finding other specific tropes): I looked up the page for something that I knew used the trope (in this case Ender’s Shadow) then looked at the trope examples until I found one that matches. If there is a trope for an idea and a page for that specific piece of media, you’ll usually find what you are looking for.
Like anything, it can be interesting if it is done well. But I personally haven’t really run across much of that specific trope (the Card books, the Rice books) so I haven’t had enough exposure to be tired of it. So no strong opinion on it one way or the other.
One other instance that I thought of originally is BttF 1 and 2, where in 2 you get Marty and Doc’s point of view of what Marty and Doc were doing in 1. (Hey, they were novelizations of both!)
The Conquerers’ Trilogy by Timothy Zahn did that in the first two books. The first was from the human perspective the second from that of the aliens, with quite a bit of the events overlapping. The events look quite different from each side.
Only one chapter really overlapped. Most of The Vampire Lestat is about Lestat’s life before he met Louie, and and what happened to him afterwards.
It’s even quicker if you know two or three examples of a trope: Then you can just search for all of them together.
David Weber’s Honor Harrington novels started out as a fairly straightforward series of science fiction novels, and then branched and expanded into a large cluster of novels and short story collections both by Weber himself and by co-authors about different parts of the “Honorverse,” including multiple interlocking novels addressing the same events as they happened and affected different galactic quadrants.
That’s a good link, it led me to (and i ended up reading) “The Martian Invasion Journals of Henry James”, a short story by Robert Silverberg. Quite fun.
James Ellroy…Dudley Smith in a novel, the LA series and in Perfidia to name just one.
While it’s not the same author, there’s a re-write of the scifi-horror classic “The Thing”, written from the point of view of the alien, called “Things”.