Yes, I am shamelessly ripping off RealityChuck’s thread about movies that have done this.
To misquote T.S. Eliot, bad writers borrow, great writers steal. In that vein, what books have you read that you consider to be rip-offs of some earlier book? I don’t count books that are intended to be in-the-style-of, modern re-writings of, or otherwise acknowledged reformulations of previous or classic books. I’m talking about a book you’ve read that you thought shamelessly ripped off another (in plot/style/or substance), and was it for better or for worse?
My nominee: House of the Spirits, but Isabel Allende. Call it a poor man’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. I couldn’t read a chapter of Allende’s book without glaring duplications jumping out at me. Was it that hard for her to devise new fantastical imagery in the spirit of magical realism? What an awful, awful book – and I’m a big fan of Latin American lit.
Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time “saga” is a bastardized hybrid of Lord of the Rings, Frank Herbert’s Dune, Stephen R. Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever and a phone book.
How about a million billion wannabe hardboiled mystery writers ripping off either Dashiell Hammett or (more usually) Raymond Chandler. Ross MacDonald is the most famous Chandler clone, athough he grew out of it as his career matured. I could name fifty others. (I went through a private eye phase once.)
And August Derleth wrote an exact pastiche of Sherlock Homles with his Solar Pons stories. This was years before the hundreds of Holmes’ novels popping up today.
Amazing as it might seem, I think mysteries are even worse than sf for blatant rip-offs.
Alessan: I haven’t read Dune, nor the other you mentioned, but I don’t see how you can compare The Wheel of Time to The Lord of the Rings, much less consider it a rip off. They’re both in the same genre, obviously, but beyond that I don’t see any untoward similarities.
i agree with exapno. mysteries are ripe for ripping off. perhaps the most egregious case is parker ripping off j. mcdonald’s travis mcgee for spenser. caveat: i love spenser and travis equally, almost.
Yeah, but the similarities, along with the coherencies, end there. Not that I won’t read book 10, Crossroads of Twilight, when it comes out (hopefully) this November.
Damn it, I was just being flippant about the Tolkien comment. Comparing any modern fantasy to lLord of the Rings is one of those things we fans have to do whenever the opportunity arises. I think’s it’s on the membership card.
I stand by the rest of my post, though. Wheel of time is the most derivative work of fantasy since the Fionavar Taphestry, and far less fun. I’m starting to believe that Robert Jordan and Chris Carter are the same person.
Okay, as for my picks…I think This Perfect Day borrows (or steals, whatever) a lot from Brave New World but it (TPD) is a way better novel. The ideas are similar, not sure if it’s stealing per se, so I’m not sure if it fits in the thread. It’s more like it takes the ideas and makes them more of a better read.
Now I think I’ll head over to the Ripped Off Movies thread…
