I disagree that an author of fiction can just mention their “source” and get away with any level of similarity without being labelled a plagiarist. In non-fiction you need to directly quote, or reformulate, and if you’re so close to the original you’re stealing most of the words and word order, you’re still a plagiarist if you only cite the source and don’t use a direct quote instead.
In fiction it’s rather more difficult to mix direct quotes and new material and get a meaningful result, so the lines need to drawn differently, and in my opinion McKiernan crosses the line into plagiarism with the level of “borrowing” he does.
Lots of space captains owe at least something to Forester’s Horatio Hornblower, as admitted by their creators. Gene Roddenbery admitted as much. So did A Bertram Chandler with his John Grimes stories.
The title pretty much announces that. The other books of that trilogy (Wild Angel and Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell) include a Tarzan pastiche and a metafictional mystery novel involving quantum theory.
Individually, the first two novels are ok, but the third, connecting with them, is mind-blowing (and makes the first two even better in retrospect).
In this thread, I was reminded of Pat Murphy’s “Max Merriwell” trilogy (never marketed as such, but clearly one) and how two of the books were by fictional authors.
There and Back Again was by “Max Merriwell.” Wild Angel was by “Mary Maxwell,” a pseudonym of Merriwell Through Time and Space with Max Merriwell is by Murphy, though it might be by Merriwell’s alter ego “Weldon Maxwell.” “Pat Murphy” is also a character.
There’s also Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream, which, once you get past the cover material, is actually Lords of the Swastika by Adolph Hitler.
And Philip Jose Farmer channeled Kilgore Trout for Venus on the Half Shell.
I’m not looking for pseudonyms, but rather a book purportedly written by a literary character or historical figure for literary effect.
Wasn’t Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy basically a sci-fi fictionalization of Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? ::checks Wikipedia:: yes, it states that Asimov took ideas from there and ran with them.
Only the tolerance of our system for fiction to borrow from itself and require no citations keeps things like Sword of Shinola from being plagiarism. Where one author is “influenced” and repurposes some ideas, another retypes older books with sparse changes and calls it their own.
Sure, but I think McKiernan was very explicit about it:
Again, I think it’s a fair cop if someone wants to say his books are derivative shit and watered down versions of better authors (not saying I agree, just that this is a valid opinion to hold) but the plagiarism charge suggests a level of deceit that McKiernan doesn’t attempt. He’s not re-using themes and whistling innocently while doing it, he’s explicitly saying “I took these from Tolkien”.
Whether or not someone wants to read a book where the author admits to lifting sections wholesale from another author is up to them, but it’s not plagiarism.
I’m not sure that plagiarism requires deceit. It’s the use of another’s writings without adequate credit; whether it’s meant to deceive readers is another facet.
It’s the use of other people’s materials as your own.
I don’t see how any of those qualify given that he is very open about using Tolkien’s works as a source.
I’m not any huge McKiernan fan; I read the trilogy & duology back 25 years ago (and bought his follow-up book in the late 80’s that I never read) and remember them to be entertaining enough to finish but that’s about it. I just think that the plagiarism charge is unjust.
Ian Macdonald is a prolific Science Fiction author. In one of his early books, Desolation Road or Out on Blue Six, (I can’t recall at the moment) he includes a scene where a renegade plumber foils incompetent and obstructive plumbers by switching their air hoses with sewage hoses-
If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s straight out of the film Brazil.
A pretty obscure case that fits the OP’s criteria. Some years ago I was reading one of Philip Kerr’s later Bernie Gunther novels - basically a Chandler-style noir PI in Nazi Germany - shortly after having read Howard Smith’s Last Train From Berlin. The latter’s an American journalist’s contemporaneous first-hand account of Germany between the outbreak of WWII and Pearl Harbor; the guy who was still there after Shirer had left. What leapt out in Kerr were a handful of vivid period details that I remembered from Smith. But then that was surely a fairly obvious source for an historical novelist on that subject to have both read as background and to mine for just such details.
I’m not sure that plagiarism requires deceit. It’s the use of another’s writings without adequate credit; whether it’s meant to deceive readers is another facet.
As everyone knows, Shakespeare did plenty of “borrowing” of earlier writers’ ideas and plots – without, I gather, being particularly scrupulous about assigning credit. Of course, this whole scene was more free-wheeling back then.
I’m a fan – with big reservations – of Harry Turtledove, and tend to wax a bit tedious about him. Even Harry’s greatest admirers admit that a lot of his work involves not original material, but re-tellings in one way and another. I’m given to understand that his “Videssos” novel series-es – setting, the Byzantium of antiquity and its neighbours, thinly disguised, “with magic” – in fact uses almost unchanged (and unacknowledged), much real-world Byzantine history; with particularly much being “borrowed”, of the works of the contemporary historian Anna Comnena.
I enjoyed HT’s “Videssos” stuff: the more, I suspect, because my knowledge of genuine Byzantine history is almost nil – thus, being bothered by his wholesale theft of same wasn’t an issue for me. Sometimes ignorance can be bliss !
Likewise, Mike Resnick has adapted African history into several SF novels (“Inferno,” “Paradise,” “Purgatory”), but it worked for me, because although I recognized the parallels, I’m not familiar enough with the details to make the similarities annoying.
