RIP Ann C. Crispin

Sad news emerged this morning that science fiction and fantasy author Ann C. Crispin has passed away from cancer at the age of 63.

Crispin, who published most of her work under the moniker 'A.C. Crispin', is best-known for her contributions to several shared universes. She wrote six Star Trek novels, beginning with her first published novel, Yesterday's Son (1983). She also wrote in Andre Norton's Witch World universe as well as penning three tie-in novels for the V mini-series and later regular series. She also wrote the novelisation of the film Alien Resurrection. In 1989 she began writing her own series, Starbridge, which eventually expanded to seven volumes.

In the late 1990s she penned a series of Star Wars novels detailing the backstory of Han Solo. This material became the canonical origin story of Han Solo in the Expanded Universe (though it is expected that the rumoured Han Solo Star Wars spin-off will ignore the Expanded Universe altogether).

In 2011, impressed by her work on the Star Wars novels, Disney commissioned her to write the 'origin story' of Jack Sparrow from the Pirates of the Caribbean films, resulting in the 600-page novel The Price of Freedom. This was her last-published work.

As well as writing, Crispin was active in SFF fandom. She served as the Eastern Region Director and later Vice-President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. In 1998 Crispin also co-founded 'Writers Beware', an organisation dedicated to exposing scam agents, editors and publishers. In April 2013 she was named Grandmaster by the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers.

I read Crispin's Star Trek novels when I was young and found them to be among the best of the tie-in novels from that franchise. Crispin's skill was adding background and layers to characters readers believed they were already very familiar with, and she was not particularly interested in being restricted by concerns over canon. The result were novels that might not 'count' in the official histories of those franchises, but were still well-written and fascinating for the different perspectives on established characters. Her work on the Writers Beware program is also highly laudable, given the number of scam artists out there trying to take advantage of young and up-and-coming authors desperate to get published. Cory Doctorow has a brief obituary to her here.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides trailer

The trailer for the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie has launched. The film, On Stranger Tides, is loosely based on the Tim Powers novel of the same name (transplanted into the PotC universe, obviously), which is encouraging, and it jettisons the franchise's dead wood of Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley in favour of focusing on Johnny Depp and Geoffrey Rush, not to mention franchise newcomer Penelope Cruz. The film is also a back-to-basics stand-alone, all of which is good news.

What sells it, though, is Ian McShane (Lovejoy for British viewers, Al Swearengen for American ones) playing Blackbeard, whose ship is armed with dual flamethrowers. Nice.

Slightly more worrying: Pirates 5 and 6 are apparently already in the planning and will again be one big epic story split in two for length. To be honest, I think we can live without that (again). Episodic adventures starring Jack Sparrow every few years is fine.

Tim Powers' ON STRANGER TIDES will be the new PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN movie

Tim Powers' 1988 novel On Stranger Tides, featuring piracy and adventure on the high seas, has been an influential novel. A young Lucasfilm Games designer called Ron Gilbert read the novel, loved it, and used parts of it as inspiration for his classic Secret of Monkey Island computer game, along with Disney's 'Pirates of the Caribbean' adventure ride. In 2003 Disney released the Pirates of the Caribbean movie, a fine adventure yarn featuring a superb turn from Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow. It's storyline was also eyebrow-raisingly close to that of The Secret of Monkey Island (ghost pirates, unproven 'new' pirate hero, rescuing the governor/governor's daughter from the ghost pirate leader etc).


The movie was a huge success and two sequels followed. With the original movie working due to it being a fast-paced romp, the sequels naturally were slow-paced, grim-faced and overlong films which pretty much only worked through the sheer acting abilities of Depp (rejoined by Geoffrey Rush as able support in the third movie). The third film seemed to definitively close the story, but the fact that it became only the third film in history to take more than $1 billion at the box office meant further movies were inevitable.


The fourth film was announced today as being named Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and (according to a report in the comments) that the fourth film will be a loose adaptation of Tim Powers' novel into the existing movie universe. Quite a lot of the book will have to be changed to reflect this (including the major characters), but Powers was amenable to the changes after getting a promise from Disney that Johnny Depp would have dinner with Powers and his wife and give them cameos in the film.*

An interesting choice. I wonder if this was a deliberate move and tip of the hat by the writers, or whether Disney was developing ideas that were close to the novel so they decided to snap up the rights to safeguard themselves? Either way, it should lead to multi-thousand percent increases in sales of the novel when the film comes out, which is a great result. And without Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley, hopefully the new movie will be worth watching as well.

* Apprently this was a joke. What a missed opportunity!