About four months ago, I wrote a blog entry regarding 'pastiches' in the De Campian sense. There were several interesting comments on that post. While I thought I laid out my basic attitude toward pastiches fairly well, there are certainly various angles that I didn't cover.

It's a complicated topic and, thanks to Spraguey, one fraught with a lot of emotional baggage. For those too lazy to click hyperlinks, I might as well quote myself. Here are my previous comments on 'pastiches':

The old, long-accepted definition of "pastiche" went something like this:
“A literary, artistic, musical, or architectural work that imitates the style of previous work.That definition, thanks largely to the efforts of one L. Sprague de Camp, is mostly defunct in conversations among SFF fans and has been for a very long time. “
What that definition refers to is usually called 'an homage' or 'a tribute' or 'a rip-off' nowadays. A de Campian 'pastiche' is a different beast. What Spraguey called his 'pastiches' of Robert E. Howard's Conan were not in "the style of" the previous REH Conans. The "style" of those de Campian tales was often quite different regarding the tone and actual literary 'style' of the originals.
What we now understand as 'pastiches' could be more accurately described as this:
“A literary work that continues the adventures of another author's character, regardless of whether it is written in the style of the original author or whether it adheres accurately to the lore previously established by the original author.”

Using the Spraguean meaning of 'pastiche', the lineage of such literary efforts stretches back almost all the way to the beginnings of European literature. It used to be generally agreed that Homer--when he wrote The Iliad and The Odyssey--was simply putting earlier versions of those tales into their most perfect form, Not exactly pastichery, but fairly close. As an adjunct to those two Homeric classics was 'The Epic Cycle'--or so we thought.

Recent scholarship seems to indicate that the Epic Cycle came first and Homer cherry-picked two major incidents from it to craft his immortal classics. Who 'pastiched' who?

However, there is little controversy in regard to Virgil's The Aeneid. It was definitely a 'pastiche' of the events found in Homer and the Epic Cycle. Virgil used the data/lore derived therefrom to craft his tale and also utilized the same Dactylic Hexameter as Homer. His Aeneid was basically equivalent to Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Son of Tarzan, only Virgil's tale was concerned with Aeneus, son of Hector rather than Korak, the son of Tarzan.

Virgil took Homer/The Epic Cycle and turned it all into a 'shared world' wherein a barely-named scion of Hector became the ultimate progenitor of the Roman Empire. Virgil's epic has been considered a classic in its own right since Late Antiquity.

Sir Thomas Malory drew upon--at least--half a millennium's worth of legends and balladry when he penned La Morte d'Arthur. Malory borrowed and stole from various sources to create a classic that still resonates. He 'created' almost nothing, but his vision of the Matter of Britain is the one that predominates and influences to this day. A vision, I might add, that influenced Robert E. Howard.

James MacPherson seems to have done the same thing as Malory in relation to the adventure tales of Finn Mac Cool common to both Gaelic Ireland and Scotland.

That was the late 1700s. By the mid-1800s, we start to see the modern form of the de Campian pastiche emerge.

Jules Verne, in his An Antarctic Mystery, clearly wanted to 'complete' the tale that Poe left unfinished in 'The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym'. Verne seems to have not understood the scientific underpinnings for Poe's novel, let alone the overall intent. This was a common problem for pasticheurs of various SFF authors going forward.

My examples above establish that there is an ancient and substantial literary tradition of 'finishing' or 'completing' or 'continuing' the works of other authors.

One commenter on the DMR Books blog had this to say:

"What's the point in writing pastiches? Stretching your creativity? Honoring a dead author? If that is the case, then that honor feels as shallow and hypocritical as the assertions made by certain sports teams, the ones where they claim that they are honoring the Native Americans by turning caricatures of them into mascots. Pastiches are always of inferior quality. That's because even a mediocre writer wouldn't bother to write a pastiche based upon the work of an inferior author.
Is the reading public clamoring for more pastiches? I don't think so, even if there's obviously a market for them. If people have to write pastiches, then let them write sequels to Thongor Fights the Pirates of Tarakus or The Eye of Argon. Then they should at least be able to match the quality of the original."

Well, let me provide a list of SFF 'hacks' that one can peruse. Here are just some of the 'hacks' that have written de Campian pastiches over the past century or so:

Leading off the list is one of the greats: Fritz Leiber. His Tarzan and the Valley of Gold is a labor of love. The same could be said of Ramsey Campbell's tales of Solomon Kane or Poul Anderson's Conan novel. What about Jules Verne or Manly Wade Wellman? What about Karl Edward Wagner or Adrian Cole?

Are all of them hacks and hypocrites?

Consider this point of view from another DMR Blog commenter:

"I tend to be fairly lenient on pastiches since I understand that no writer is going to be identical to the creator. Also very few have the talent of Howard. I have also written pastiches so I figure it is best to be tolerant of others since some might have objections to mine."

This is simply a variation of the 'appeal to emotion' logical fallacy. Whether one is a good or bad writer or whether one is a writer of pastiches should have nothing to do with whether writing such pastiches is good or evil.