Sep 17, 2015

The other night I read a review of the new Lizbeth Salander novel, written by somebody other than the Millennium trilogy’s original author, who died before The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was published. And I wondered, not for the first time, why any self-respecting writer would want to write anything involving characters created by somebody else.

Actually, I have done this twice.

In my second novel, You Can’t Kill the Multiverse (But You Can Mess With its Head), I needed a character who was an assassin by trade and who would plausibly see destroying the multiverse as his greatest coup. Who better, I thought, than Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius? In this case, I asked Moorcock for permission to use the character, which he graciously granted.

I have also written a short story called “Portrait of a Spy in the Twilight of Empire” that features James Bond. (I could do this because Ian Fleming’s novels are actually in the public domain in Canada; unfortunately, it is illegal for me to try to sell it anywhere else in the world, which kind of limits my options.) The story is a 4,000 word deconstruction of the Bond myth which includes copious nods to the original novels, including a lot of Fleming’s stylistic tics. I’m actually very proud of it.

Notice, though, that in both cases, I used existing characters to further my own artistic agenda. The point of writing those stories was not to mimic a dead author’s style in order to fill a publishing company’s coffers (a practice you may get the sense I’m not overly fond of). There are characters I would love to work with (cough Dr. cough cough Who cough), but only if I could do it on my own creative terms. If not, I don’t see the point.