Post #4040762

2026-07-23 16:27 UTC

@Quasit@beige.party oh I refer to the original publication order of course. That idiocy about rearranging the books into chronological order was heavily insisted upon by Douglas Gresham, Lewis's stepson and Joy Davidman's child by her previous marriage who turned into a typical evangelical shit and joined forces with U.S. Army officer Walter Hooper who butted in after Lewis's death to take charge of his literary estate on grounds that really ought to be examined more closely. I know about Gresham's involvement because I once knew him. I was on some C. S. Lewis mailing lists for a while and got to know what a sinister and inflexible figure he was, and thus the topic of the ordering of the Narnia books became offlimits to discussion.

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@Quasit@beige.party 2026-07-23 16:36

@mxchara@seattle.pink I'm impressed! It does seem that a lot of authors have been posthumously screwed by their descendants. Tolkien's descendants (other than his son Christopher) utterly betrayed his vision for Hollywood cash. And Hugh Lofting's descendants did horrible damage to his works by allowing the outright bowdlerization of Prince Bumpo in the Dr Dolittle books. The only bright spot in •that• particular atrocity was that the complete original text and illustrations of the earlier Dolittle books are now in the public domain, and therefore freely available from Project Gutenberg. I was just thinking that all three of those authors were English, and wondering if there was a point in common. But then I remembered what Livy did to Mark Twain's unpublished works after he died; as I recall, she burned them. And of course Virginia Heinlein published many of Heinlein's works without the editing that was forced on him by his publisher. Although I suspect in that case, Heinlein would have approved–and not just because it was Virginia's decision. But as Isaac Asimov noted with witty circuitousness in "I, Asimov", Heinlein was utterly whipped by every woman he was with. For all that he so proudly proclaimed himself a rugged individualist, he was quite the...doormat in some ways.

Open ##4040957