This is a trend that has gone on for as long as people have making things. Artists borrow, steal, recycle, and pay homage to previous works all the time. I haven't seen Never Let Me Go, but I've read the book, and it is most certainly indebted to existing science fiction concepts. But in all of Kazuo Ishiguro's novels special the premise…
This is a trend that has gone on for as long as people have making things. Artists borrow, steal, recycle, and pay homage to previous works all the time. I haven't seen Never Let Me Go, but I've read the book, and it is most certainly indebted to existing science fiction concepts. But in all of Kazuo Ishiguro's novels special the premise is only important insofar as it serves as a vehicle for what really interests him (the nature of subjective and experience and the tension between how we see ourselves and our lives and the reality of them—or something like that.)
Likewise, while I agree that Roadside Picnic is a better book than Annihilation, I'm certain Jeff VanderMeer has read the former, and over Annihilation and it's two sequels takes those borrowed (or stolen, if you insist) ideas somewhere different. I think that's inevitable, actually, given what a different time and place he inhabits from the Strugatsy brothers.
Anyway, all I'm saying is, good art doesn't need to come from being new, it can come from a making an existing idea new again, or even just using it as a ladder to reach something else.
This is a trend that has gone on for as long as people have making things. Artists borrow, steal, recycle, and pay homage to previous works all the time. I haven't seen Never Let Me Go, but I've read the book, and it is most certainly indebted to existing science fiction concepts. But in all of Kazuo Ishiguro's novels special the premise is only important insofar as it serves as a vehicle for what really interests him (the nature of subjective and experience and the tension between how we see ourselves and our lives and the reality of them—or something like that.)
Likewise, while I agree that Roadside Picnic is a better book than Annihilation, I'm certain Jeff VanderMeer has read the former, and over Annihilation and it's two sequels takes those borrowed (or stolen, if you insist) ideas somewhere different. I think that's inevitable, actually, given what a different time and place he inhabits from the Strugatsy brothers.
Anyway, all I'm saying is, good art doesn't need to come from being new, it can come from a making an existing idea new again, or even just using it as a ladder to reach something else.