Asimov Estate Authorizes New I, Robot Books

daria42 writes "In a move guaranteed to annoy long-term science fiction fans, the estate of legendary science fiction author Isaac Asimov, who passed away in 1992, has authorized a trilogy of sequels to his beloved I, Robot short story series, to be written by relatively unknown fantasy author Mickey Zucker Reichert. The move is already garnering opposition online. 'Isaac Asimov died forty years after they were first written. If he had wanted to follow them up, he would have. The author's intentions need to be respected here,' writes sci-fi/fantasy book site Keeping the Door."

Comments

He's dead, Jim

[tverbeek]

Once upon a time, before the Mickey-Mouse/Sonny-Bono nigh-perpetual copyright laws were passed, 56 years after a book was published anyone was permitted to write sequels to it. If not for that legislative retconning, I, Robot would be in the public domain (in the US) now, making it part of our cultural heritage and free for anyone to attempt a sequel, just like anyone can write a sequel to Hamlet or The Wizard of Oz or The Odyssey or Huckleberry Finn or Moby-Dick. Maybe these new books will suck. Maybe they won't. But the creator of the original work is no longer, and no one is going to force anyone to read these. So what's the problem?