shared universe collections

[pwalker8]

This is the sort of thing that has been around for a while, but three collections that came out in the last year brought this practice to the forefront of my attention. Those collections (this Spring's Black Tide Rising, the collection of stories based on Ringo's Black Tide Rising series; Shadows & Reflections, a Roger Zelazny homage that came out a couple of weeks ago; and Monster Hunter Files, the collection that came out this week based on Correia's Monster Hunter series) are all examples of this sort of book.

Basically, you get half the stories by name authors and half the stories by authors that are relatively unknown. Of the name author stories, a few were actually written for the anthology with the rest stories that the author had sitting around, so they modified it to kind of, sort of fit the requirements (Seriously, I read one author admit that is what they did).

I understand why these collections come out (though noting that Zelazny's daughter is listed as an editor on the Zelazny anthology, I suspect it was a way for his children to get around his widow's hold on the literary estate). It generates money and gives the publisher a chance to groom some lesser known authors. I just wish that the various authors would actually try to stay in the spirit of the shared universe. For example, in the BTR anthology, one author had the zombies climbing trees and acting like baboons. In the MHI anthoogy, one author took one of her existing characters and used it with very little effort to fit it in the MHI universe.