What I got for Christmas

Look what I got!

It’s a reproduction of a 1950s card came based on the Dan Dare comic. I’d guess the original was made in 1952 or so, because all the pictures on the cards are from the first three story arcs, from the start to the middle of Marooned on Mercury. And yes, I could tell that from glancing through the deck, and yes, I’m aware of what a massive geek that makes me.  (It’s worse than that: I immediately spotted an error on one of the cards. The elevated tube-train is labeled as a Treen telesender but it’s actually an electrosender: the telesender was a teleporter. Ha! I am a special kind of nerd.)

Anyway, the game itself is very simple. There are four suits with 11 numbered cards each, and the rules provided are for a simple trick-taking game along the lines of Whist. There’s nothing Dan Dare about the game besides the artwork. You could play that game with a normal set of playing cards. You could certainly put pictures of anything you liked on the cards and the game would be unchanged.

The game mechanics feel dated, more so than the 50s futuristic artwork. It’s interesting to compare the game with modern licensed board and card games. Games today are more complex and often make some attempt to model the story of the licensed property, with unique mechanics that reflect the property’s unique story elements. For example the Battlestar Galactica board game has the players moving their characters around the ships of the fleet and fighting off Cylon attacks, and has a special mechanic that some players are secretly Cylon agents. The Arkham Horror board game has the players running around Arkham fighting monsters, and has a sanity point mechanic to reflect the Lovecraft source material. If Dan Dare were new today, I’d expect a licensed game to have elaborate rules that modeled players cooperating to fight some evil Treen plot.

But those games reflect a modern approach to games design, influenced by cross-pollination from tabletop roleplaying games. Back in the 1950s there wasn’t that tradition of novelty in game design. Card games were things like Whist, so a licensed Dan Dare card game was a Whist variant with pictures of spaceships on the cards.

The Thing about Sequels

This afternoon I saw The Thing, the confusingly-titled prequel to the 1982 sci-fi/horror classic The Thing. It’s a prequel, but it’s also sort-of a remake, in that the credits proclaim it to be based on the same short story (John W. Campbell’s ‘Who Goes There?’) and its plot goes through the same motions with a different set of characters.  It’s not exactly a bad film, but it adds nothing to the original.

Also in the news recently, a prequel comic to Watchmen is apparently in development, and there are rumours of a Doctor Who movie. I’ve seen some fans outraged about these things on social media. A Doctor Who movie would spoil the TV series! Watchmen doesn’t need a prequel!

My thoughts: it’s true that Watchmen doesn’t need a prequel, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that a prequel would be bad. Alien didn’t need a sequel, but most people regard Aliens as very good. Similarly the Doctor Who TV series doesn’t need a spin-off movie, but the movie might turn out to be great.

Of course it’s possible that the Watchmen prequel and the Who movie will be awful. (Very likely in the case of the Watchmen prequel, but I’m hesitantly optimistic about the Who movie). But so what? There are lots of awful comics and movies: why should people get outraged about these ones?

Because these spin-offs spoil the original work. And that’s where I can’t get my head around the outrage: because however awful the Watchmen prequel turns out to be, my copy of Watchmen will still be there on my bookshelf. Perhaps I approach things differently as a writer, but I don’t feel obliged to read a work in the light of spin-offs made later by different writers or production teams.

The author’s intentions at the time of writing aren’t the way to evaluate a work, of course. But neither is the idea that there is a fixed canon, one true history of a fictional world, and all sequels or spin-offs of the same work are windows into that world. To go back to the Alien universe, I don’t have to watch the end of Aliens with the start of Alien3 in the back of my mind. I can watch Star Trek: The Next Generation without caring that the events of the series would somehow be ‘undone’ by the 2009 movie. I can watch the first two seasons of Battlestar Galactica and pretend that it’s leading up to an ending that made some kind of sense. The writers didn’t have these later instalments in mind when they wrote the original works, so why should I think about them when watching them?

This isn’t about ignoring bits of canon that you don’t like: it’s about taking each work as a thing in itself, respecting it more rather than less because it’s not real, because it was created at a particular time by a particular person or set of people who had a partricular idea in their mind.

So, the prequel to The Thing added nothing to the original work, but it also took nothing away.