Submission + - Ask Slashdot: How do you feel about derivative fiction? (google.com)
So the first meta-comment is that the subtitle (as in the above paragraph) should have some special attribute, but not an option on today's Slashdot. A larger size is popular, but...
Next meta-comment is that I'm too easily motivated by negative reactions. But maybe that's my own fault for reading so many books and just some kind of entropy law that there are more bad books than good?
Fastest way to deal with this book might be in the way of a suggested solution approach. Using generative AI, of course? From that perspective I think the biggest problem is that Sherlock Holmes is barely present. More of a background character. The story line is also pretty implausible and the Japanese aspects seem mangled, too. On the Japanese problems I'm not the expert to ask, but I noticed a lack of Japanese names in the acknowledgments. So the AI fix would be a prompt like "rewrite this book to make Sherlock Holmes into the hero with the Russell character more in a role like Dr Watson's and shift the writing style to be closer to Arthur Conan Doyle's style.
However I also got to thinking about the more general topic of derivative fiction. There are so many characters who are based on Sherlock Holmes. Some that come to mind as ultimately based on Holmes are Perry Mason, Jules Maigret, Hercule Poirot, Spenser, and Nero Wolfe and I'm sure I'll remember some others before I can finish writing this... However returning to the feature book, there is a lot of stuff about ninja in there, and I think they are mostly just as fictional as Sherlock Holmes with the same tenuous linkage to sources in the real world... So what goes around comes back to the same place?
Next I started thinking about quantifying the derivative works and we're back to stuff the AIs could help with. I feel like running a query something like this:
"What is the total volume of Holmes stuff written by Arthur Conan Doyle, both before and after the death of Holmes? Appropriate units would be tens of thousands of words. How does that compare to the Laurie King novels with Holmes? The comparison should include ratios. Now extend the analysis to other fictional characters that can be compared to Holmes."
The above list of characters could be included in the question, though it might be better to see what the AI comes up with and then add any of my favorites that get missed. Also, the query should be fed to several AIs so as to compare their answers... (I seem to have a talent for writing prompts that push the AIs into hallucinations.)
Closing meta-comment is to note that King has written about 15 of these novels as of 2015... Pretty sure that's well ahead of Doyle.