sharecropper n.

In the case of the ‘sharecroppers’, I also feel, perhaps naively, that young writers ought to be busy developing their own worlds and working out their own ideas and fresh material, rather than reworking ground already broken by older and more successful writers.

The recent influx of ‘sharecropper’ novels joins a flood of similar items—choose-your-own-adventure books, ‘Robotech’ books, Star Trek novels, and so on. It is possible to argue that none of these items are pernicious in themselves, perhaps not even the ‘sharecropper’ books.

There are many kinds of writers: the highbrows, the packagers, the high fantasists, the low fantasists, the horror writers, the hard sf writers, the soft sf writers, the feminists, the series writers, the producers of movie and TV tie-ins, the sharecroppers.

Given Clute’s preoccupation with ‘When It Changed’, it makes sense that his hardest words are for the dinosaurs, ‘alpha males of the veldt’ and the sharecroppers who try to sell nostalgic retro-fantasies of Power.

Writers who achieved some fame as sharecroppers but never produced any work of their own include Isaac Asimov…and Roger Zelazny.