List of Chekhov's Guns, unanswered questions

[Ken Hutchinson]

No: HPFGUIDX 171922

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, Bart Lidofsky <bartl at ...> wrote:
>
> From: Goddlefrood <gav_fiji at ...>
> >One that I note that was not on any of the suggestions so far is 
> >the little matter of Grindelwald being defeated by Dumbledore. 
> >This would also lead on to expecting that all the dates in canon 
> >and their significance being explained. I expect an answer to 
> >neither of these two before DH is finished. If, however, 
> >Grindelwald does somehow feature then he has at least been 
> >set up within the so far published books.
> 
> Bart:
> A prominent science fiction writer (I THINK it was Ted Sturgeon)
found out the hard way that if you want to write a series, you have to
contend with increasing expectations. The story was about a bear with
a human child-level intelligence and his best friend, the scientist
who is working with him, at an experimental laboratory. In the first
story in the series, the bear saves the world from being conquered by
an evil scientist at the lab. The series only lasted 3 stories (in the
last, the bear went from saving the world to saving his friend's job). 
> 
> I suspect that JKR saw the same sort of problem. Here she has a
story of a child growing into a young man who saves the world from the
greatest threat it has ever seen. How the hell are you going to top THAT? 
>

Every so often Rowling has introduced a new magical concept or
technique. By itself that process leads to severe problems for an
author. In fact I would argue that Rowling passed that point long ago
but seems unaware of it. Be that as it may, Larry Niven's "Known
Space" universe had this problem. Over the course of many books and
stories he had introduced so many powerful technologies that it was
getting to be impossible to write a new story with an essential
conflict that a 12 year old reader couldn't find a trivial solution to
using a technology found in a previous story. He stopped writing in
that "universe" when too many 12 year olds started pointing this out
to him with every new story.

Then he hit the idea of backpedaling. He wrote a nice series of
stories about the Ringworld which was in an almost unknown backwater
of the galaxy that had diverged technologically from the rest of his
known space universe long before the civilizations that comprised the
bulk of it existed. In some ways it had a more advanced technology but
mostly it was just a different technology. So it was a fertile field
in which to write new stories using a few of the same old characters
without the "been there, done that, know how to solve it" problem. If
Rowling wanted to do something similar she could write further stories
in the Potterverse without the risk of inflaming her (or her reader's)
"Harry fatigue". I am sure there are a lot of stories that could be
set in earlier eras of the Potterverse, quite aside from the
possibility of prequels which apparently don't interest her.

I do hope that she kept Doug Adams' advice (not example!) in mind:
"Don't destroy the Earth in chapter 1 because you are going to need it
later". In other words, she might find use for Harry in the future
after all, I hope she hasn't killed him off.

Ken