That said, I have to say just how much I have adored Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum Series But her last two (10 and 11) have left me wishing that Stephanie Plum would Get A Clue and the Gag with her cars exploding/catching fire/getting destroyed is really, really really old now.
One would think that after two or three years as a Bounty Hunter ( give or take a year or so.) she would catch on and manage it better, instead of being like Lucille Ball Meets the Three Stooges every freakin’ time.
I still love Ranger and Morelli, but frankly guy on guy action is more appealing to me with these two than getting into the physcology of just why two hotties like them would be remotely interested in a ditz like her.
Good example – although I confess I’m still enjoying the Stephaniw Plum books more than not enjoying them.
That said, the definitive example of the OP is the Anita Blake books by Laurell K. Hamilton. I liked them a lot up to Obsidian Butterfly, then they started to really decline quickly. The last one (Incubus Dreams) was so deeply, deeply shitty that it made me want to cry. I probably won’t even buy the next one, but just read it from the library.
Anne McCaffery’s Pern books, too. She should have quit after All the Weyrs of Pern.
I’m sure others will come up with more contemporary examples, but the first thing I thought of was Les Aspin’s Myth series. I really liked the first two or three books, but the rest just seemed to be going through the motions. I assumed that he was churning them out because of contract obligations.
Although I see he’s got he’s got a new one coming out. I’m sure I’ll buy it, just to see if he recaptured the magic of the first books.
I mentioned Jean Auel’s series that begins strong with Clan of the Cave Bear, an interesting and original novel about a time that most historical fiction writers never visited. Each successive novel moved closer to paint by the number historical romance, however, while Ayla creates everything from flint-fire technology to streaming video as she travels with her New Age caveman soulmate to France. By the end it’s almost dreck.
I loved John Jakes’s The Kent Family Chronicles when I was a teenager, but what began as believable (as I remember it) co-existence of fictional and historical characters in The Bastard becomes just name-dropping nonsense halfway through the series (one of the characters teaches Little Abie Lincoln to read, for Og’s sake!), the characters turn either sanctimonius or Snidely Whiplash and nobody in the family in several generations covered makes it to fifty because Jakes evidently ran out of things for them to do.
Yeah, they’re starting to get old.
In the same vein, Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone series (A is for Alibi, B is for Burglar, etc. ) have been going steadily downhill for a while, too. They started out funny and a little silly like the Evanovich series, but have gotten boring and dry. The lastest was “R” (I think- is “S” out yet?) and was incredibly boring.
Wow, I was only a few posts slow on the trigger, but everyone has already mentioned my fizzles:
Ender’s Game series
Clan of the Cave Bear series
Wheel of Time
Dragonriders of Pern
And some new ones:
A two-fer from Anne Rice. Her Vampire and Mayfair Witch series both started brilliantly and then sputtered into meandering nonsense.
Arthur C Clarke’s 20XX books. 2001 was fantastic, 2010 was ho-hum. Then it was bottom-of-the barrel rehashing after that.
Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat. This one might not be a true fizzle though, the later books were the same generally good quality, but were just retelling the same one-trick-pony plotline we’d read several times before.
Phillip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld series started out brilliant- the man who translated the Kama Sutra into English travelling through the afterlife with Herman Goering. Then Farmer abandons the characters, the premise, the plot, & most of the quirks of the setting. The second is still not bad, and it promises a “thrilling conclusion” in the next volume. The next volume also promises a thrilling conclusion in the next, but it takes great effort to slog through. The fourth promises the fifth will be the thrilling conclusion, but I recognize the trend and can’t get past the first page anyway.
I agree on Both Evanovich and Card. I think Card’s burnout is far worse on the Alvin Maker series though. If you’ve run out of ideas, then let the series die. Don’t write something weak and pretend that you’ve reached a satisfying conclusion. Evanovich needs to get off the Ranger/Morelli and exploding car gimmicks and get some new ideas. Eventually running gags become cliches and she’s landed on the shores of clicheland and claimed “this stinking desert” for herself.
Another series that’s run out of gas, IMHO, is Donald Westlake’s books about Dortmunder. There just not funny anymore.
Christine Feehan’s Carpathian novels. Okay, I know I’m saying a cheap romance series is fizzing out, but man, after the gazillionth book about a dominating, stubborn. muscular man with a gentle heart making a stubborn, annoying, innocent-yet-dead-sexy chick his Lifemate, I want to throw something. Can’t she reverse the formula for one book?
Doug Adams’ “Hitch-hiker” series sputtered out with “Mostly Harmless.” Had he entitled the book “I’m so sick to death of having publishers beg me to write more Hitch-hiker books and I can’t stand these characters any more”, his distaste for the series couldn’t have been more obvious.
The Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind. I keep coming back to the series just to see if each entry can be even more appallingly bad than its predecessor. The last few have been little more than Ayn Randian rants dressed up as bad fantasy novels.
Philip Jose Farmer’s World of Tiers series started off okay but got lamer almost by the page. Red Orc’s Rage, whether you consider it officially part of the series or not, was just shit.
I say thee nay! McCaffrey’s last several Pern books are not as good as her first several, true, but they’re still a good read. Plus, she’s now passed Pern on to her son, Todd McCaffrey, who made a great Pern debut with the recent “Dragonsblood.”
I’ll second Piers Anthony, in particular the interminable Xanth series, which gets more immature and more predictable every installment. (Or at least it did 10 years ago, when I stopped reading them.)
Christ, you aren’t kidding. I thought that it was bad when he would devote 10 pages to a rant about communism(in 1995 – I think we’d all gotten the point by then, Terry). Then he goes and devotes 1/3 of a 1000-page book to an allegory about how communism is bad. And then he devotes an entire book to the evils of pacifism and vegetarianism that was so bad, I was cheering for his main character to die by the end of it.
I admit I haven’t read the latest Todd McCaffrey one, but Dragonsblood left me cold. And I hated Dolphins of Pern so much I’ve never reread it. I didn’t mind Dragonseye – maybe because it was going back to a different time with all different people. Masterharper I hated so much I wanted to stab it to death with a fork.
Gene Wolfe would have been better off calling it a day with the book of the New Sun and the Urth of the New Sun I think. When you’ve written the defining books of a genre the only way to go is down. He could easily have started afresh with some new books, and with his talent they would assuredly have been fantastic. Instead, he elected to plough a similar furrow and write the book of the long sun and the book of the short sun, seven novels in all. I thought the last one was, admittedly, superb, but there was a definite drop in quality with the book of the long sun IMHO. Apart from anything else, it lumps the Master in with all the other fantasy writers who knock out series after series in the same setting.
