Confusion reigns here.

Bilbo was older than 55, just that his body was 'stretched and thin' as it is reported in the book. As Bilbo had the ring at a younger age that Frodo he felt the effects at an earlier age.

Now if Gandalf had brought in good chocolate none of this anguish would have happened due to the anti oxidents in chocolate.

And if Saruman had been given a nice piece of good mud-cake, he wouldn't have bothered with sacking the shire. He'd have been too busy sleeping it off.

Bunyip: in the movie, there is a flashback where Bilbo finds the ring. If I remember The Hobbit correctly, then he was 55 at the time. (or thereabouts)

In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo is the same age as Bilbo was when he found the ring. But there is a huge difference in appearance. What I am getting at is that I am sure they looked much more like each other in Tolkien's head. So who controls what the Bookworld version of a character looks like: the author, or the readers?

So, if for some reason and bizarre set of circumstances, everyone decides that Sherlock Holmes is short and stubby and more like Poirot in fact than the tall, thin drug addict he in fact was, does his bookworld character change to fit this perception or remain true to what the author envisioned? And what if an author's view of a character changes, due, say, to a comic book or movie?

And what about characters that do in fact change? For example, the characters in Sandman, where differing artists, with different drawing styles, depict the same character. And does fan-art affect this? Or fan-fiction, which would mean that Kirk and Spock are in fact lovers. Do those sort of changes have to be "canon" or is it merely the readers' perception that matters?

I want answers! :P

__________________________________
'We're all mad here. I'm mad, you're mad." [said the Cat.]
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "Or you wouldn't have come here."
- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures In Wonderland

You can approach the question(s) from the negative direction: rather than asking "who controls what the Bookworld character looks like", ask "who doesn't?"

If the reader controlled looks, then - using your example - there would have to be millions of Sherlocks, one for each reader or, alternatively, every Bookworld character would be continually morphing in appearance. So clearly "the reader" is not the answer.

Similarly, all illustrations - whether in comics or the occasional illustration in books - are (visual) art, not fiction, and the illustrations themselves are not part of Bookworld. In the same way that political cartoonists work by caricature, visual representations of a fictional character can vary as much as anyone likes, but they do not actually constitute that person (or character). Our new Prime Minister is often amusingly represented as TinTin but that doesn't make him TinTin. Similarly there is one Sherlock Holmes who may or may not look like any illustrations of him and - in the same vein - an actor playing Hamlet may or may not look like the Bookworld Hamlet.

There must be a King Kong in Bookworld because Merian C. Cooper wrote the book and Kong lumbers through his role whenever anyone reads it. The films, comics, cartoons etc are not, however, the book - so the Bookworld Kong plays no part in them.

Fan fiction creates a new entity. If, as a devoted fan, I write a story involving Spock, Kirk, or Sherlock Holmes, I am clearly simply trading off the name and I have no ability to use the 'real' characters in whatever I write. If my piece of fiction gets read by someone, then presumably my Sherlock is an entity in Bookworld but is distinct to the original Sherlock in the same way that the different Thursdays are distinct (and almost opposites in some ways).

To get back to the actual question then, who does that leave? The author is the only person left who can create what the Bookworld version of a character looks like. All other versions of that character, in illustrations, comics, film, on stage or in a reader's head are simply based on that character but only exist in whatever the medium happens to be - think of all the different faces of James Bond for a start. It is similar in non-fiction: if I read a biography of Lawrence of Arabia, I can imagine him however I want but that doesn't change what the man really looked like, and Peter O'Toole's six foot frame in the movie doesn't suddenly add a foot to his actual height of barely five feet.

<blinks>

It's gotten very 'trek-fan' obsessive in here. And I'm proud to have played my part in that... Shall we start arguing about whether or not matter transport beams work or whether they are really cloning devices? Please?
I'll start!

Those matter tranference beams must be cloning/replication devices, not actual transport devices...

<Cont argument from here>

Kirk is Kirk, Spock is Spock, two diff'rent rhythms to the rap...

I agree with Robert that "The author is the only person left who can create what the Bookworld version of a character looks like."

I know what D'Artagnan looks like to me, and he looks nothing like Gene Kelly, or Chris O'Donnell, or even the painting (from the period) duplicated on my Signet Classics paperback. Who did Dumas see?

So then what about movie scripts? Or scripts for tv shows? There is no reason that they can not be in the bookworld, or we need to get rid of Shakespeare. Which we know is there.

So now would the character be based on the script, written by one or two people (which may be written with no idea what the person looks like, save for example "scar on left pinky") but which is realised by a group of people?

And what about collaborative works?

__________________________________
'We're all mad here. I'm mad, you're mad." [said the Cat.]
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "Or you wouldn't have come here."
- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures In Wonderland

BK Is the matter transmitter/cloning device in Startrek a direct descendant of Tessler's invention in "The Prestige"?

Shhh, no spoilers please...am watching The Prestige tonight as soon as small noisy child gets booted upstairs to bed...will look out for Star Trek / Prestige crossover moments.

<Clamps hand over mouth>

Mpphfmmphr mrmmuph!

The discussion reminds me of two things at present.

1] Somewhere in the TN stories there is a comment made about how much the readers must bring to the story. Part of this must be the depiction of characters, landscapes, etc., created from the clues given in the books. In FAS Landen describes Thursday (only bit I can recall now is 'big boobs' - testosterone effect) but the points which he describes are used by the readers to create/refine their image of Thursday. Many of these images will be similar, so that a sort of consensus arises about Thursday's appearance, which allows the discussions we had previously in another thread about who should play Thursday in a movie version.

If we all had created widely variant images such a discussion could not have been undertaken.

2] the other point is that this is deep philosophical territory. DO NOT BE ALARMED - IT WILL NOT HARM YOU - for there is a lot of discussion about how we create images from stimuli, how well those images match up in different minds, how other factors affect the process and how individual these forces are. An example is a red light stimulus. A series of individuals are exposed to a pure frequency of red light shining on their eyes. Later they are asked to adjust a variable frequency light to replicate the colour and brightness they were subjected to. They all pretty well do it.

Question: Is the same process with the same values at each stage going on in each mind? There is a fair expectation that it is not, for we all see colours differently so we each make a colour map internally that is unique to ourselves. We all experience the brightness differently.

But when we come to matching the variable light we are matching the output to what our individual minds hold. So while some would have classed the red light as dim and pale, others may have recorded it as bright and garish. We set the variable light to replicate what we hold in our minds, and that means our own unique impression of the light we were subjected to.

Similarly with other things, and more so with concepts that are not detailed, such as written descriptions of characters.

Which at the end of it comes back to 1]. Readers do a lot of the work and the skill of the writer is what makes many minds create similar images.

I have navigated other parts of this forum and I can say that one of the happiest moments of the tour was the photo of Thursday (with car, without face).

From that happiness comes this totally selfish plea...

Dear Mr. Fforde,

I understand you have been contacted by persons wishing to develop(e) your novels into a stage/television/film production.

Please do not give in to their attacks.

I appreciate the fact that their attacks are actually attempts to fling money at you and your descendants.

DO NOT GIVE IN.

Sincerely,

OC Not

p.s. I am recommending your books to everyone I know. Isn't that better than filthy lucre?

Inneresting question innit, OC?


How much money do the descendants of one Bard of the Avon have which is attributable to the Bard himself?

The Globe was very successful and old Willie became quite well off by the normal standards of the Times, or Daily Mirror (Sorry - old gag creeping in). The money may be gone but those who are descendants of Willie can still trade on the name 400 years later, if they still carry the Shakespeare name.

Similarly the descendants of Zigmunt Freud ztill play on ze name.

As for making of movies of good stories I think it is like entropy - it is inevitable unless there is a change in the universe.

I am told that LOTR and the HP stories were rendered into cinema format with little distortion of the original stories. If the Ffordian galaxy of star stories is rendered into cinema format we can only hope that it is done in the same manner.

I very much doubt that Fforde will translate as funny into film.

Same with Pratchett, although Hogfather was good.

__________________________________
'We're all mad here. I'm mad, you're mad." [said the Cat.]
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "Or you wouldn't have come here."
- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures In Wonderland

Martin raised movie scripts. Since "Hamlet" (the stage script) is in Bookworld, I guess there's no reason why the movie script can't be there. I doubt that many people would actually want to read a movie script though (let alone a shooting script <shudder>) so the Hamlet in the movie script could very well be a generic - or a whole bunch of them for that matter, taking turns walking through the passionless format of the movie script. Same goes for James Bond etc. (as has indeed been the case on the screen itself ever since Connery hung up his martini glass).

With regards to OCN and a TN movie: Jasper spoke in Brisbane in 2006 and addressed this. He said that he was thoroughly opposed to the idea because he knew that Hollywood would change the character beyond recognition. But then he started musing about how many zeros might follow the "1" on a cheque and his eyes began to glaze over.

Dan Simmons explains matter transference beams in his Ilium/ Olympos books. The whole DNA structure of the would-be "passenger", including the bits of grey matter which contain the electric charges of memory, are sent - a bit like an email - to the destination terminal and the whole person is reconstructed from new material there, while the original at the departure port is disintegrated. Which would have saved the main problem in "The Pre............" (Kitten's other hand clamps over mouth).

Discretion appreciated as the Prestige-fest was aborted at the last minute in favour of Arlington Road when Mr House said, "I didn't know this one has Tim Robbins in it!" Hoping to get Prestige back on schedule tonight...

Are there any living descendants of Shakespeare? I thought there were some descendants of his sister, but Hamnet died young and I think Shakespeare's daughters outlived their children and didn't have any grandchildren.

my mother has a 1600s copy of the New Testament in german...

personally, my oldest book is a 1889 edition of The Mysterious Island. best Verne there is - i love it to bits.

COOL!

I wants it precious!

1624's my oldest book (so far, anyway - I'm just unpacking all my books and trying to work out what I have room to keep and what I need to give away, so there will be more, though probably not older...)

I thought Mr Ff had said categorically that he wasn't going to give the movie rights to anyone and that if anyone made the movies it would be himself - after all, it's one of the things he knows a lot about.

"One of the things he knows a lot about?" Well, they'd be in focus anyway.