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I thought there was a bunch of other LOTR stuff written by Tolkien's son. I guess it doesn't really count because I don't think the books tie too closely to the original trilogy arcs, but I've never read the Tolkien Jr. books.
Tolkien's son has never 'written' anything. What has been published by him is JRRT's original notes, drafts and unfinished stories, not to mention some fully-completed essays (some of them of great interest, particularly about the Istari, the Palantiri, the military organisation of Rohan and why Gandalf recruited Bilbo to go on the quest in
The Hobbit).
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Hmm... also it is debatable whether JRRT wanted to ever publish the Silmarillion. Apparently he hated the fanboy attention LOTR got
Erm, not really. JRRT actually worked with Christopher in the last two or three years of his life before he died in preparing
The Silmarillion for publication, and JRRT mapped out precisely what he wanted to go into the book. It was never his intention that
The Silmarillion remain unpublished, and he had been promising to finish and publish it ever since
Lord of the Rings came out twenty years earlier, but his usual procrastination meant he couldn't finish it himself.
More recently, Christopher has admitted that although the overall storyline of
The Silmarillion is what JRRT intended, some of the details are a bit hazy, as JRRT never finalised certain elements of the story that his son knew he was working on, such as Galadriel's role in
The Silmarillion and what role the Druadan and the Ents played in the First Age. As JRRT never finalised those ideas, CT couldn't include them in the published book.
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Also good call on dune. Herbert's son did finish some books, but the core trilogy was herbert. The ones his son did are kind of external to that original story, kind of like the Tolkien Jr. situation described above.
No, it's not like that situation at all. Sigh.
Frank Herbert planned to write three
Dune novels. When he finished
Children of the Dune he realised there was scope for an extended 'coda' for the trilogy, that became
God-Emperor of Dune. Then his publisher offered him an obscene amount of money, so Herbert caved and wrote a trilogy that began with
Heretics of Dune and continued with
Chapterhouse: Dune. At this point (1986) Frank Herbert died. He'd planned Book 7 but hadn't written it. In 1999 or thereabouts the notes for this showed up and Kevin J. Anderson and Brian Herbert somehow extrapolated the entire
Preludes of Dune and
Legends of Dune trilogies and the 'Dune 7' duology from what allegeldy was less than three sides of A4. Whilst
Sandworms/
Hunters of Dune may indeed be what Frank Herbert planned, the earlier trilogies are very definitely not, mostly consisting of stuff KJA and BH pulled out of their asses.
OTOH, all of the material published by Christopher Tolkien is JRR Tolkien's own work. CT has
never written original Middle-earth fiction or material himself. The most he's ever done is updated some of the names from the final few chapters of
The Silmarillion (which JRRT had left untouched since the early 1920s) so they matched the names that JRRT had changed elsewhere. All of the other books CT has released -
Unfinished Tales, that 12-volume
History of Middle-earth series and
Children of Hurin - is material written by his father that he simply assembled and published, sometimes with notes about where the material came from.
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Correct me if i'm wrong, but is this actually the first time a series with a relatively definitive end in sight could not be finished by its original author for reasons of death?
(ie: Not the Bourne books, which Ludlum finished and the publisher ressurected for $$ as opposed to any real reason)
- Abyss, can't quite belive this has never happened...
Tolkien and Frank Herbert are the two main examples.
Mervyn Peake had planned ten
Gormenghast novels but only finished two, the rought draft of the third and the first chapter of the fourth before he died. He didn't leave behind any notes for anyone else to work from either.
Isaac Asimov was planning several more books to pull together the
Robots and
Foundation series when he died in 1992, but never got round to writing them.
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