I’ve gotten this question once or twice already. I didn’t realize I even had that many readers yet! But the ones I do have don’t seem to get the reference.

Sa souvraya niende misain ye.

The line is written in the Old Tongue language from the excellent Wheel of Time series by the late Robert Jordan, and its exact translation into plain English is “I am lost within my own mind.”

I rather enjoyed Wheel of Time, and I’m sorry that Robert Jordan passed on and won’t be able to end the series as he would have done. I’m sure Brandon Sanderson will do his very best, using all the resources Robert Jordan left behind, and I look forward to seeing his efforts. But, as with the continuation of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series by other authors and the sequel to Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Eoin Colfer, it’s simply impossible for it to be the same, because they aren’t the same pople. This can even happen to one author over time; you need only look at the beginning and end of Robert Asprin’s Myth Adventures series to see that (specifically, compare Another Fine Myth to Something Myth Inc).

I’ve only read the first of the Foundation continuations, Foundation’s Fear, written by Gregory Benford. It’s certainly set in Asimov’s universe, but takes the bold and effective tactic of updating many of the perceptions of future technology quite a bit. Several of the characters are modified here and there, most notably from my point of view R. Daneel Olivaw. I’m quite appreciative of the new portrayal of the character, but it’s very clear that Asimov wasn’t behind it.

My second example, the sequel to Hitchhiker’s Guide, is, in my humble opinion, the most extreme of any. And Another Thing… is a good book and an engaging read, enough so for me to read it a second time, but I did not feel for even one page that I was reading something set in the same universe that Douglas Adams created. Perhaps an alternate universe a few b (fifth-order) coordinate points over. If I had to point to one element, I would say that there were too many serious emotional overtones, in contrast to the egregious nonsense that Douglas Adams often made use of. In short, I think that Eoin Colfer followed and expanded on the tone of Mostly Harmless, which I seem to recall even Douglas Adams admitting was not his best work. Had And Another Thing… been based more closely on the original The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or perhaps The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, it probably would have been more true to that universe.