Poll - are there any good prequels?

[jack]

This came up in the pub last night with the scifi society -- are there any good prequels, preferably scifi/fantasy? We thought of:

Children's books where the prequal is written second out of a series: Magician's Nephew, Charmed Life.
Series written out of order, such as Hornblower, Small Gods in TP.
Retrospective prequels: Asimov's robot stories became prequels to his foundation novels, though weren't at the time.

I decided that it's because prequels generally get written when an author (or their heirs) runs out of ideas, even more so than sequels, but if that's not the case they're by no means inherantly bad.

Can you think of any others?

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I think it's a bit like Small Gods, a book set in the same universe that happens to take place at a different time. Enoch makes it slightly more complicated though. He's also the only thing really making it SF and not just a geek-relevant historical novel.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

The thing about Enoch is that I wouldn't put it past Neal Stephenson to use the same character in two books just because he liked him, which is fair enough, but not normal; I would think this was the case except for the strange ressurection business in Cryptonomicon.

Well, even cryptonomicon wasn't quite sci-fi, more technothriller. If the genre is real-world except for one thing that might be sci-fi or might be fantasy, what does it count as? *shrug* :)

Or if you count all the anacronisms, it's Xth century sci-fi :)