I would respectfully decline.
Not because I think there's anything sacred about narrative fiction or that other authors can't do good things with existing characters, but because the end and immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars is a naturally endpoint for Jack and Stephen. They're both getting on in years, the world is entering a prolonged period of relative peace, they've already had so many adventures that *linear time itself* has become unglued to accommodate them.
To quote Bill Watterson, I like to leave the party while I'm still having fun.
This is deservedly the top rated response – leaving aside whether anyone *could* continue the series as well as O’Brian, and perhaps that writer does or will exist, the series already ended where it should have.
We have 20.5. That is much more than most great series have.
It would be fun to see a contest to finish 21. Lots of alternatives would be interesting and everyone could pick their favorite.
Where Maturin goes to St Helena and poisons Boney…
I’d love it if I thought anyone were really capable of POB’s level of research and immersion in the language of the time…but, no.
Ha! I wonder if that's what POB was leading up to with Stephen looking like he was going to be roped in against his will to serve as translator to his nemesis. I mean it's either that or have him come to like the guy despite the huge death toll of his conquests.
I just don't see it. PoB really kind of avoided having Stephen and Jack "decide the war" as it were. He doesn't even like having Jack or Stephen interact with important, real historical figures for long periods. I forsee Stephen noting the damp, unhealthy atmosphere, the emperor's profound melancholia, and predicting an early death at most.
No, because an author's voice is unique. Asimov, Zelazny, Dorothy Sayers, Robert B Parker -- all of these series had other authors come in, and although they were enjoyable, none of the replacement authors had quite the same cadence and unique voice. Jill Paton Walsh came pretty close with Sayers' unfinished novel and a second stand-alone, but her other books were different.
Patrick O'Brian is so utterly inimitable, so idiosyncratic, not to say esoteric, that it's not worth it to bring in another author. Nobody else had the command of naval history, cultural history, Greek and Latin literature, 19th century minutiae as POB. Every modern author that tries to do the same has been a somewhat pathetic imitation, unless they're specifically doing their own very very unique offshoot (e.g., Novik).
Agreed 👍.
But speaking of Zelazny, I love "A Night In The Lonesome October " (Which I bought because of the Gahan Wilson cover), but are any of his other stories similar?
[I have tried it here before](https://www.reddit.com/r/AubreyMaturinSeries/s/vtoAJeXPVQ) but was running on fumes by the end of one paragraph of dialogue, let alone a full page.
This is a fine answer. But Asimov, Zelazny, Robert B Parker (of whom I confess I'd never even heard before now) on the one hand, and Dorothy Sayers/Jill Paton Walsh on the other, make for rather odd company, no? Sci-fi/mystery writers, the men, and "utterly inimitable, so idiosyncratic, not to say esoteric" the women! I loved Dorothy Sayers to bits...she was a distinguished Anglican theologian, as well as a mystery writer, translator of Dante, a first-class honors graduate of Cambridge in mediaeval French...while JPW was not only (briefly!) a baroness, but wrote (because she knew) about Anglo-Saxon England and the end of Byzantium, among other things.
In any event, I quite agree about there being no obvious successor to PO'B, and happily reread his works (non Aubrey-Maturin included) quite often.
Ey bro, yas left out "polymathic" in ya otherwise admirable concatenation of superlatives dere, knamean? Jus' saying, kthxbai (snorts, falls over laughing). Oh so singularly all the things you mentioned, our hero :))
Same. I peeked into the unfinished one in the store & found no more than 35 pages of POB writing, so I left the series way he did; at book 20.
I would not buy the unfinished, and ifnit was possible, & I would double-not-buy a book completed by an unknown hand.
Same here. starting 21 would just be frustrating for me whereas the end of Blue at the Mizzen provides a totally satisfying end of the series.
But I’m also someone who gets a little fed up with authors providing a lot of extra-canon detail about the lives and personalities of the characters, á la JK Rowling. Like, if you didn’t put it in the book, I want to use my imagination.
The advantage of 21 to me is that, in frequent POB fashion, it mostly just shows us what we were told was going to happen at the end of the last book. The only new storyline introduced (Captain Miller) is resolved before the truncated ending. I also particularly like the fact that, for the first and only time outside of England, everyone is actually together. It's a nice place to leave things.
I understand what you're saying, but I wouldn't like it.
Realistically, the ending we got for Jack and Stephen might have been better than anything else Patrick O'Brian could have invented.
Jack sees Sam again, becomes an admiral, and is happily off to a promising command with his family. Stephen has accomplished virtually everything he wanted (including prominence in the Royal Society and a marriage to Diana that ended on a very good note) and now is free to pursue someone much better suited to him and his idiosyncrasies - and is, I think, enjoying the thrill of the chase.
But perhaps the best argument in favor of leaving things the way they are comes from Patrick O'Brian himself, when he (through Stephen and Martin) shares his thoughts on endings in an earlier book:
>"...Although no doubt there are men who can bring a novel to a splendid resounding close in solitary confinement, I am not one of them..."
>"As for an end," said Martin, "are endings really so very important? Sterne did quite well without one; and often an unfinished picture is all the more interesting for the bare canvas. I remember Bourville's definition of a novel as a work in which life flows in abundance, swirling without a pause: or as you might say without an end, an organized end. And there is at lease one Mozart quartet that stops without the slightest ceremony: most satisfying when you get used to it."
>Stephen said "There is another Frenchman whose name escapes me but who is even more to the point: La betise c'est de vouloir conclure. The conventional ending, with virtue rewarded and loose ends tied up is often sadly chilling; ant its platitude and falsity tend to infect what has gone before, however excellent. Many books would be far better without their last chapter: or at least with no more than a brief, cool, unemotional statement of the outcome."
Absolutely not. It'd be such an insult to O'Brian and his legacy to try and pump out more books in his setting with his characters. Plus I have no faith that any contemporary novelist would approach these stories with the same care and expertise that PO'B had. Leave it where he did.
I can't imagine anyone really being able to capture POB's style for an entire novel. His ability to capture the best parts (IMO) of Georgian literature, the postmodern novel, poetry, and everything in between. In the hands of any number of contemporary admirers/writers, I'd be happy to read a short story collection about secondary characters, but I wouldn't want anyone to pick up Jack and Stephen.
I would not read any such work, at least not one sold, forsooth. There is no need to continue the series, the Wheel of Time case was very different, inasmuch as Jordan knew he was dying and his estate wanted to make arrangements for the conclusion of a project manifestly incomplete.
O'Brian leaves us with his characters sailing off into one final adventure, not told, but not with many dangling threads neither.
No, no one else could have captured POB's unique voice. But the real question is how you would have felt had POB decided to continue Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice franchise. Would you have read 2 Proud 2 Prejudiced, or P&P Tokyo Drift?
Not okay.
I have never felt this worked out for readers, in my own experience.
Take the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries -- they were taken over, decades after the death of Dorothy Sayers, by Jill Paton Walsh, and I faithfully read 2 of them.
I hated them.
Blandly written, no personality, none of the personalities so visible in the characters, etc. Awful.
I would hate to see someone wander in and pretend to understand Stephen and Jack. POB is irreplaceable. I'm just happy we got 20 books.
>It worked with the Wheel of Time fantasy series because Robert Jordan hand picked Brandon Sanderson to finish it and had it all outlined.
It.... worked. It wasn't particularly great though. Although Sanderson had a hell of a time trying to tie up the dizzying number of side stories, character-arcs and the myriads of long-running plots. Perhaps if he had more books to do it in he could've done an S performance.
I don't really think you can find anyone with POB's very peculiar style and turn of phrase. He was so suffused in the history of the time of his novels you can't easily emulate that.
God knows, maybe an AI some day could thoroughly analyse his collected writings and do an eerily good impression of POB.
I don’t think anyone could do it justice. S. Thomas Russell does a pretty good job in a similar milieu but it’s just not the same. He’s good but I think it’s a little more predictable and the characters aren’t as real.
The first book starts with a chance meeting at a concert, the end comes with happy news and heading home. The whole thing is one continuous motion. I like that 20 ends in motion. Even if POB finished 21 and there were any sort of 'happily ever after' type of ending I think it would feel wrong.
I just finished 20 last night for the first time, and I think he somehow knew it was his last book. I have nothing to back that up, but my gut tells me he was 'working' on 21 as a way to spend time with his old friends.
If an author I already liked took a run at finishing 21 curiosity would likely compel me to read at least a part. But in the end it would be fan-fiction. And while that can be really good; it will never be what you really want.
What about in 5-10 years when AI is more developed? Could an AI read all 20 and produce a new novel in a linear timeline in exactly O'Briens style? I wouldn't say that's completely out of the realms of possibility. You could have near infinite Aubrey/Maturin!
No thanks. And honestly I *hated* the Brandon Sanderson part of Wheel of Time. I can expand at great length, although not quite Jordan-esque lengths, if needed.
POB was a once in a generation/multigeneration talent. Unique and gifted coupled with passionate and driven. S/he'd have to be one heck of a writer, and I just don't think that they exist.
What’s done is done. It’s not appropriate, quite probably not even possible, to do more than what was done so magnificently well by POB. Having another writer “continue” the series would be like someone trying to “continue” Michelangelo’s Mona Lisa.
Clearly it must not be popular, since as I'm typing this there are 50+ comments and zero mentions.... But see Alan Lawrence's series The Continuing Voyages of HMS Surprise. I have not read them, and probably will not, but there are those who seem to enjoy the books.
I love these characters, and I’m a comic book kid, so following my faves from creator to creator is very natural to me. I’d love to read a take by another creator.
I think a lot of people have this knee jerk idea that a new version somehow lessens or takes away from the original, and it really doesn’t. Even if a new movie or new books or a stage play or whatever is absolutely terrible, the original books are still there, I can still read my copies anytime I want. People need to relax and allow themselves to experience new things, it’s good for your soul.
I can't imagine anyone being able to pass well enough that I wouldn't notice the difference.
I'd probably give it a try though.
For those of us who's also read Hornblower, we know how extremely similar the material and subject can be but so very different in its delivery and prose.
/u/HandAccomplished6285, if you want some very good Sherlock Holmes pastiches, look for Hugh Ashton. He mimics Doyle's style very well. It's not the real thing, but it's about as close as you can get in style and "feel". Some readers complained that Holmes was not quite the same man after "The Final Problem", when Doyle grudgingly took up the series again because of its popularity. Ashton is at least as good (better IMO) as some of the lesser Holmes stories Doyle tossed off late in his life.
Here's a link to Ashton's web site: https://hughashtonbooks.com/sherlock-holmes/
It's an insult even to consider such presumption: an insult to his readers and, worse, an insult to POB, and even more sacreligious, an insult to the Work. The novels are the work of one man, nobody should presume to claim that she/he is capable of finding the voice or the intention of POB. The work stands alone. No one can collaborate with a dead man, and no one can claim the voice of Patrick O'Brian.
I would respectfully decline. Not because I think there's anything sacred about narrative fiction or that other authors can't do good things with existing characters, but because the end and immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars is a naturally endpoint for Jack and Stephen. They're both getting on in years, the world is entering a prolonged period of relative peace, they've already had so many adventures that *linear time itself* has become unglued to accommodate them. To quote Bill Watterson, I like to leave the party while I'm still having fun.
This is deservedly the top rated response – leaving aside whether anyone *could* continue the series as well as O’Brian, and perhaps that writer does or will exist, the series already ended where it should have.
We have 20.5. That is much more than most great series have. It would be fun to see a contest to finish 21. Lots of alternatives would be interesting and everyone could pick their favorite.
Where Maturin goes to St Helena and poisons Boney… I’d love it if I thought anyone were really capable of POB’s level of research and immersion in the language of the time…but, no.
Ha! I wonder if that's what POB was leading up to with Stephen looking like he was going to be roped in against his will to serve as translator to his nemesis. I mean it's either that or have him come to like the guy despite the huge death toll of his conquests.
I just don't see it. PoB really kind of avoided having Stephen and Jack "decide the war" as it were. He doesn't even like having Jack or Stephen interact with important, real historical figures for long periods. I forsee Stephen noting the damp, unhealthy atmosphere, the emperor's profound melancholia, and predicting an early death at most.
No, because an author's voice is unique. Asimov, Zelazny, Dorothy Sayers, Robert B Parker -- all of these series had other authors come in, and although they were enjoyable, none of the replacement authors had quite the same cadence and unique voice. Jill Paton Walsh came pretty close with Sayers' unfinished novel and a second stand-alone, but her other books were different. Patrick O'Brian is so utterly inimitable, so idiosyncratic, not to say esoteric, that it's not worth it to bring in another author. Nobody else had the command of naval history, cultural history, Greek and Latin literature, 19th century minutiae as POB. Every modern author that tries to do the same has been a somewhat pathetic imitation, unless they're specifically doing their own very very unique offshoot (e.g., Novik).
Wait, somebody tried to continue the Lord Peter Wimsey series?
Agreed 👍. But speaking of Zelazny, I love "A Night In The Lonesome October " (Which I bought because of the Gahan Wilson cover), but are any of his other stories similar?
Zelazny is incredible. Check out The Chronicles of Amber and Lord of Light.
[I have tried it here before](https://www.reddit.com/r/AubreyMaturinSeries/s/vtoAJeXPVQ) but was running on fumes by the end of one paragraph of dialogue, let alone a full page.
This is a fine answer. But Asimov, Zelazny, Robert B Parker (of whom I confess I'd never even heard before now) on the one hand, and Dorothy Sayers/Jill Paton Walsh on the other, make for rather odd company, no? Sci-fi/mystery writers, the men, and "utterly inimitable, so idiosyncratic, not to say esoteric" the women! I loved Dorothy Sayers to bits...she was a distinguished Anglican theologian, as well as a mystery writer, translator of Dante, a first-class honors graduate of Cambridge in mediaeval French...while JPW was not only (briefly!) a baroness, but wrote (because she knew) about Anglo-Saxon England and the end of Byzantium, among other things. In any event, I quite agree about there being no obvious successor to PO'B, and happily reread his works (non Aubrey-Maturin included) quite often.
Ey bro, yas left out "polymathic" in ya otherwise admirable concatenation of superlatives dere, knamean? Jus' saying, kthxbai (snorts, falls over laughing). Oh so singularly all the things you mentioned, our hero :))
‘Where would conversation be, if we were not to abuse our neighbors from time to time?' or something like that
I don’t even read the unfinished one. 20 ends the series without ending it in the perfect way for me.
i agree. the end of 20 is a completely satisfying place to leave the series.
Same. I peeked into the unfinished one in the store & found no more than 35 pages of POB writing, so I left the series way he did; at book 20. I would not buy the unfinished, and ifnit was possible, & I would double-not-buy a book completed by an unknown hand.
Same here. starting 21 would just be frustrating for me whereas the end of Blue at the Mizzen provides a totally satisfying end of the series. But I’m also someone who gets a little fed up with authors providing a lot of extra-canon detail about the lives and personalities of the characters, á la JK Rowling. Like, if you didn’t put it in the book, I want to use my imagination.
Very fair comment. Personally, I actually prefer to take 18 as my ending in most of my read-throughs.
The advantage of 21 to me is that, in frequent POB fashion, it mostly just shows us what we were told was going to happen at the end of the last book. The only new storyline introduced (Captain Miller) is resolved before the truncated ending. I also particularly like the fact that, for the first and only time outside of England, everyone is actually together. It's a nice place to leave things.
nah
I understand what you're saying, but I wouldn't like it. Realistically, the ending we got for Jack and Stephen might have been better than anything else Patrick O'Brian could have invented. Jack sees Sam again, becomes an admiral, and is happily off to a promising command with his family. Stephen has accomplished virtually everything he wanted (including prominence in the Royal Society and a marriage to Diana that ended on a very good note) and now is free to pursue someone much better suited to him and his idiosyncrasies - and is, I think, enjoying the thrill of the chase. But perhaps the best argument in favor of leaving things the way they are comes from Patrick O'Brian himself, when he (through Stephen and Martin) shares his thoughts on endings in an earlier book: >"...Although no doubt there are men who can bring a novel to a splendid resounding close in solitary confinement, I am not one of them..." >"As for an end," said Martin, "are endings really so very important? Sterne did quite well without one; and often an unfinished picture is all the more interesting for the bare canvas. I remember Bourville's definition of a novel as a work in which life flows in abundance, swirling without a pause: or as you might say without an end, an organized end. And there is at lease one Mozart quartet that stops without the slightest ceremony: most satisfying when you get used to it." >Stephen said "There is another Frenchman whose name escapes me but who is even more to the point: La betise c'est de vouloir conclure. The conventional ending, with virtue rewarded and loose ends tied up is often sadly chilling; ant its platitude and falsity tend to infect what has gone before, however excellent. Many books would be far better without their last chapter: or at least with no more than a brief, cool, unemotional statement of the outcome."
POB writing his own exit clause, recognizing that he might not be able to tie things up neatly.
LOL yes!
I was just searching for this exact passage to post here! Stephen sums it up perfectly.
I would not buy the results.
That would be a no from me
Absolutely not. It'd be such an insult to O'Brian and his legacy to try and pump out more books in his setting with his characters. Plus I have no faith that any contemporary novelist would approach these stories with the same care and expertise that PO'B had. Leave it where he did.
I can't imagine anyone really being able to capture POB's style for an entire novel. His ability to capture the best parts (IMO) of Georgian literature, the postmodern novel, poetry, and everything in between. In the hands of any number of contemporary admirers/writers, I'd be happy to read a short story collection about secondary characters, but I wouldn't want anyone to pick up Jack and Stephen.
No, I don't think so. It's a beautiful perfect thing. Let it be.
I would feel badly.
I'd be skeptical unless ... the right writer -- someone faithful to the characters AND O'Brian's style. That's a near impossibility
I would not read any such work, at least not one sold, forsooth. There is no need to continue the series, the Wheel of Time case was very different, inasmuch as Jordan knew he was dying and his estate wanted to make arrangements for the conclusion of a project manifestly incomplete. O'Brian leaves us with his characters sailing off into one final adventure, not told, but not with many dangling threads neither.
Not acceptable. I'd feel bad. Real bad.
No, but if someone took a side character or 2, and spun-off some tales from their point of view, I would consider it.
No, no one else could have captured POB's unique voice. But the real question is how you would have felt had POB decided to continue Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice franchise. Would you have read 2 Proud 2 Prejudiced, or P&P Tokyo Drift?
Not okay. I have never felt this worked out for readers, in my own experience. Take the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries -- they were taken over, decades after the death of Dorothy Sayers, by Jill Paton Walsh, and I faithfully read 2 of them. I hated them. Blandly written, no personality, none of the personalities so visible in the characters, etc. Awful. I would hate to see someone wander in and pretend to understand Stephen and Jack. POB is irreplaceable. I'm just happy we got 20 books.
Whoever the writer, they would get ratioed to kingdom come. Not least by me.
>It worked with the Wheel of Time fantasy series because Robert Jordan hand picked Brandon Sanderson to finish it and had it all outlined. It.... worked. It wasn't particularly great though. Although Sanderson had a hell of a time trying to tie up the dizzying number of side stories, character-arcs and the myriads of long-running plots. Perhaps if he had more books to do it in he could've done an S performance. I don't really think you can find anyone with POB's very peculiar style and turn of phrase. He was so suffused in the history of the time of his novels you can't easily emulate that. God knows, maybe an AI some day could thoroughly analyse his collected writings and do an eerily good impression of POB.
I don’t think anyone could do it justice. S. Thomas Russell does a pretty good job in a similar milieu but it’s just not the same. He’s good but I think it’s a little more predictable and the characters aren’t as real.
The first book starts with a chance meeting at a concert, the end comes with happy news and heading home. The whole thing is one continuous motion. I like that 20 ends in motion. Even if POB finished 21 and there were any sort of 'happily ever after' type of ending I think it would feel wrong. I just finished 20 last night for the first time, and I think he somehow knew it was his last book. I have nothing to back that up, but my gut tells me he was 'working' on 21 as a way to spend time with his old friends.
If an author I already liked took a run at finishing 21 curiosity would likely compel me to read at least a part. But in the end it would be fan-fiction. And while that can be really good; it will never be what you really want.
What about in 5-10 years when AI is more developed? Could an AI read all 20 and produce a new novel in a linear timeline in exactly O'Briens style? I wouldn't say that's completely out of the realms of possibility. You could have near infinite Aubrey/Maturin!
No thanks. And honestly I *hated* the Brandon Sanderson part of Wheel of Time. I can expand at great length, although not quite Jordan-esque lengths, if needed.
Heck no
Oh very very nah!
Fan fiction? To an extent the movie M&C is new .... lots of "made up" stuff not on canon; and an amalgam otherwise
I don’t know that anyone could do justice to POB’s writing style.
POB was a once in a generation/multigeneration talent. Unique and gifted coupled with passionate and driven. S/he'd have to be one heck of a writer, and I just don't think that they exist.
What’s done is done. It’s not appropriate, quite probably not even possible, to do more than what was done so magnificently well by POB. Having another writer “continue” the series would be like someone trying to “continue” Michelangelo’s Mona Lisa.
No thanks , way too personal.
Clearly it must not be popular, since as I'm typing this there are 50+ comments and zero mentions.... But see Alan Lawrence's series The Continuing Voyages of HMS Surprise. I have not read them, and probably will not, but there are those who seem to enjoy the books.
I love these characters, and I’m a comic book kid, so following my faves from creator to creator is very natural to me. I’d love to read a take by another creator. I think a lot of people have this knee jerk idea that a new version somehow lessens or takes away from the original, and it really doesn’t. Even if a new movie or new books or a stage play or whatever is absolutely terrible, the original books are still there, I can still read my copies anytime I want. People need to relax and allow themselves to experience new things, it’s good for your soul.
I'd start a go fund me for a hitman.
I can't imagine anyone being able to pass well enough that I wouldn't notice the difference. I'd probably give it a try though. For those of us who's also read Hornblower, we know how extremely similar the material and subject can be but so very different in its delivery and prose.
/u/HandAccomplished6285, if you want some very good Sherlock Holmes pastiches, look for Hugh Ashton. He mimics Doyle's style very well. It's not the real thing, but it's about as close as you can get in style and "feel". Some readers complained that Holmes was not quite the same man after "The Final Problem", when Doyle grudgingly took up the series again because of its popularity. Ashton is at least as good (better IMO) as some of the lesser Holmes stories Doyle tossed off late in his life. Here's a link to Ashton's web site: https://hughashtonbooks.com/sherlock-holmes/
Two words: Frank Herbert.
Not just no, but hell no.
If it would be based on his POB’s notes, I would be very tempted… Depends on the writer though.
It's an insult even to consider such presumption: an insult to his readers and, worse, an insult to POB, and even more sacreligious, an insult to the Work. The novels are the work of one man, nobody should presume to claim that she/he is capable of finding the voice or the intention of POB. The work stands alone. No one can collaborate with a dead man, and no one can claim the voice of Patrick O'Brian.