This has been bothering me ever since my last post, and so I'm going to get it down here and then, hopefully, I'll be able to move on.
So Lee Goldberg. You know the whole controversy. If you don't, and you don't care, the rest of this won't interest you. If you do, read on and read this: Smart Bitch Candy goes after Lee. (Be warned, there's a lot of talk about processed meat products.)
In the many comments to that post, Robin (not my radiant Robyn Bender, a different, but also thoughtful variety of Robinosity) says
So does that mean JM Coetzee’s Foe (starring BOTH Crusoe and Friday) is fanfic or a derivative tie-in? Maybe he should give his Nobel prize back, or better yet, use it to beat some sense into Lee Goldberg, et al.
Which made me realize what was nagging at me. Lee Goldberg tells us it's
wrong to use somebody else's characters without express permission of the original author. So was Coetzee wrong? What about Tom Stoppard (
Rosencranz and Guildenstern are Dead)? What about the dozens of authors who have written books about Sherlock Holmes?
I anticipate that Lee will say that these cases are different, because the author has been dead for a long time. My guess is that in his view, it's okay to drag the characters of dead authors out to play. And it's even okay to publish a novel and make money off of them. So my question: Does that smack of necrophilia, or grave robbing, or some odd combination of both?
Curious minds want to know.
Also, I just realized that there's some logical fallacy in Lee's whole argument which is right on the verge of revealing itself to me, as in a vision, with singing angels and glowing stars and all that goods stuff. If the vision comes to you first, please, post it, and save me the excitement.