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

[atreic.livejournal.com]

Why is small gods a prequil? Am I missing something?

How are you defining prequils? Your idea of retrospective prequils seems rather flawed, in as much as "book 1 of a series became a prequil to book 2, even though book 2 wasn't written (or planned) at the time of book 1". I mean, this is silly - it lets you call every book with an unplanned sequil a prequil!

[filecoreinuse.livejournal.com]

Prelude to Foundation?

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I thought Small Gods was a prequel because Omnianism seems well established by the time of the other books (which apparently are all relatively contemporary), so I assumed the events in Small Gods, and probably even Brutha's death 100 years later, had already happened. For instance, in Carpe Jugulem Mightily Oats talking about Brutha seemed to me to be after his death, or there'd be less question abotu what he meant, which puts Small Gods 80+ years ago, and everything else happened in Rincewind's lifetime.

I'm nto sure *exactly* how to define a prequel, but "Set earlier in time containing and related in some way" seems to fit. What I meant about retroactive prequels was that Books 1, 2, 3 are written set in 3000AD, then Books A, B, C are written set in 2000AD, and assumed to be in separate universes, and then book 4/D is a sequal to all of them tying them into the same universe. If book 4/D had been planned from the start, A would fairly clearly be a sequal but if 4/D is made up later then A isn't really a prequel as it has nothing in common with 1.

[edith-the-hutt.livejournal.com]

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Intervention wasn't bad as prequels go. It's chronologically after the stories it's a prequel to, but there's time travel involved...

[edith-the-hutt.livejournal.com]

A thought:

Does the whole Babylon 4 saga count as a prequel?

[despotliz.livejournal.com]

Quicksilver and the rest of the Baroque Trilogy are a prequel of sorts to Cryptonomicon.

I'm sure some people like the Star Wars prequels.

[tienelle.livejournal.com]

Bujold's "Barrayar" books don't seem to be written in chronological order, so you could say that some of them were retrospective prequels to others. They seem pretty good.

Magic's {Pawn Promise Price} (Mercedes Lackey) were also prequels, and (I think) bloody good. The {Black White Silver} Gryphon, also prequels by the same author and in the same universe, were less good.