Grand unified books thread

[Darth Wagtaros]

Hey if you guys can round up about $3 million or so I'll make a sweet little Flashman indie game. If you can get me $15-20 million I can deliver a nicely polished AA game.

Or at least a Ciaphas Cane video game.

[Habbaku]

Hey if you guys can round up about $3 million or so I'll make a sweet little Flashman indie game. If you can get me $15-20 million I can deliver a nicely polished AA game.

  I would be willing to invest in this.

[Jacob]

Is Flashman old enough to be unencumbered by copyright?

Hmmm... 

[Jacob]

To answer my own question... it looks like George Macdonald Fraser passed away in 2008, so as I understand it Flashman won't be fair game until 2078.

[mongers]

To answer my own question... it looks like George Macdonald Fraser passed away in 2008, so as I understand it Flashman won't be fair game until 2078.

Yep, 70 years after death, that's been the UK author copyright duration for some time.

Though you might be interested in Tolkien as that enters the public domain in the not too distant future. 

[Jacob]

There is going to be a lot of flies buzzing around Tolkien the moment the time comes.

[crazy canuck]

I am looking forward to see what can be produced once the estate loses control over content.

[Habbaku]

Considering the board game/card game releases, the estate has already given up a significant amount of control. I don't have high hopes for the reins being let loose completely.

[Sheilbh]

Also it's not always totally straightforward - it's very, very different but Stephen Joyce was famously protective and restrictive on the use of Joyce's works. He was incredibly litigious over the Joyce estate.

The EU copyright expired in 2011 but it didn't quite lead to the flourishing that had been hoped for. I think there were still US copyrights in some works and the estate still found ways of being pretty restrictive. Now Stephen Joyce has died it might open up a bit as I think it was very personal for him but I'm not sure. I think Dmitri Nabokov was similarly quite strict - so maybe there's also just something of it moving through a generation or two so the owner of an estate feels less personally involved/engaged?

Not least because from my pov I wouldn't say the Tolkien estate appears to have been overly discerning in recent years

[Oexmelin]

LOTR or Dune, or even Star Wars to an extent, got a lot of value from the feeling we got a glimpse of a much larger universe. Our current tendency to over-explain everything reduces quite a bit the mystique and mystery of these stories.

[Bauer]

LOTR or Dune, or even Star Wars to an extent, got a lot of value from the feeling we got a glimpse of a much larger universe. Our current tendency to over-explain everything reduces quite a bit the mystique and mystery of these stories.

Yeah over explaining is a big negative aspect of modern storytelling.  The readers' imagination fills in the gaps nicely when done properly.

[grumbler]

LOTR or Dune, or even Star Wars to an extent, got a lot of value from the feeling we got a glimpse of a much larger universe. Our current tendency to over-explain everything reduces quite a bit the mystique and mystery of these stories.

Agreed.  On of my favorite authors, Roger Zelazny, used to write a short story featuring the main characters and settings of the novel he wanted to write, and then erased the short story so that it would be in the back of his mind when he wrote the novel, but would never appear in print to ruin the mystique of the novel.

[Sophie Scholl]

LOTR or Dune, or even Star Wars to an extent, got a lot of value from the feeling we got a glimpse of a much larger universe. Our current tendency to over-explain everything reduces quite a bit the mystique and mystery of these stories.

That was actually something I really enjoyed about the new Superman movie. It didn't rehash the origin story again. It didn't require 50 movies and 40 tv shows to fully understand. It was just a little slice of the wider DC world and a fun story attached to it. It was a nice breath of fresh air.

[Oexmelin]

Agreed.  On of my favorite authors, Roger Zelazny, used to write a short story featuring the main characters and settings of the novel he wanted to write, and then erased the short story so that it would be in the back of his mind when he wrote the novel, but would never appear in print to ruin the mystique of the novel.

I have never read Zelazny. I have been meaning to read something of his, but never got around to it. Every time I thought about picking up something of him, I couldn't find it on shelves. He enjoyed quite a bit of success in French, to the point that I see his novels much more frequently in French language bookstores than in English language one.