Last night, I paged through The Eiger Sanction, The Loo Sanction, and *Shibumi *by Trevanian.
I read these years ago when they were new and I was young. I remember liking them very much and thinking Trevanian was A Great Author.
My opinion of Trevanian, now, would be that he is A Horse’s Ass. His spoofing of the super spy genre is, at best, ham fisted. There didn’t seem to be any love for the genre he spoofed.
Worse, though, is that for reasons I can’t articulate, I come away from his work with a distinct feeling that he has nothing but contempt for his audience. What little is out there in the way of interviews and such reinforces that feeling.
Another pleasant youthful memory ruined by trying to revisit it…
Awwww, I still like Trevanian. I think it’s possible that his elitist persona could also be a spoof. I just read a quote from him, after someone asked if he was Robert Ludlum. He supposedly said he’d never heard of Ludlum, that he only read Proust.
I liked the Sanction novels, but liked Incident at Twenty Mile and Summer of Katya better, and I really liked the two books he wrote as Nicholas Seare, Rude Tales and Glorious and 1339 – Or So.
I haven’t given up on any authors, but recent disappointments from Dan Simmons (Black Hills), David L. Martin, Joe Lansdale, and Stephen King mean that I no longer buy their books in hardcover as soon as they come out.
Stephen King.
ETA: Piers Anthony.
Ayn Rand ::shudder::
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. It took me far too long to realize that you are writing the same story, over and over and over, just set in different time periods.
Jean M. Auel. Stop taking 40 pages to describe a rock. And the Mary Sue-ing is way over the top.
Laurel K. Hamilton. Enough with random orgasms and sex already and put a plot somewhere in there. And you’ve admitted your main character is a self insert.
Stephen King. Do you even know what you are doing anymore?
Because? (Not arguing with your choice; it’s just more interesting to see people’s rationale for these things.)
Mine would be Tom Clancy. When I was in high school I loved the Jack Ryan series, but 1) his later books kind of started to suck, and 2) even re-reading the Jack Ryan stuff these days doesn’t really work for me. It all just seems kind of jingoistic and trite, I guess.
Piers Anthony is way, way, way, way at the front of the list.
Tom Clancy. It seems to me that he got a different ghost-writer after Executive Orders as his style seemingly completely changed.
Dan Simmons. Here’s my thread on his recent novel, Flashback. I don’t mind the politics, but the world-building completely and totally sucked.
Stephen King. I still buy his books in hardback, but it now depends upon the book.
I know I’ve posted this once before in a similar thread in the past.
John Steinbeck. Once he seemed all realistic and gritty, but now the pages seem to reek of booze and misogyny to me.
Although I still love Tortilla Flat.
I used to think that King was kind of clever. Not that his jokes were funny…about 95% of the things that he put in his books that I’m sure he thought were hilarious didn’t even register on my funny scale.
But he had a nice way of being clever. Unfortnately, starting somewhere in the Dark Tower series or perhaps a bit before, it felt to me that he was writing for no other reason than to be clever.
And at that point, it quit being entertaining. Every book was King just throwing around what he thought were neat-o little ideas and characters, but they were actually just the musings of an uber-Stephen who had all the leeway he wanted to write whatever he wanted.
I love the smell of booze and misogyny in the morning…smells like…Saturday.
Orson Scott Card.
Early SF was pretty good, even philosophical (Ender’s Game, Speaker for the Dead).
His public speaking was interesting too – Secular Humanist Revival.
But now it’s like he drank some especially bad Kool-Aid.
John Varley, sadly. Some of my all-time favorite books are The Golden Globe and Steel Beach and I love the Gaia series, but Mammoth was dreadful and Red Thunder was some kind of weird YA novel with teenage characters who acted like 30- or 40-somethings in a vaguely creepy manner. Plus the book was dumb. I will likely get Slow Apocalypse, though, because I live in hope.
Same here. I was a regular consumer of his stuff as a teenager - the Cluster series, the first seven or so Xanth books, Ox-Orn-Omnivore and a few others whose titles escape me at the moment. At some point it was like hitting a light switch and I just stopped buying and reading them. He really became a repetitive, arrogant and sort of icky hack ( well, he was always pretty icky going back to his inclusion in Dangerous Visions, but it became more pervasive ).
Ding! When I read them as a younger man I thought they were fun, techno-thrillers. Now, as a more politically sophisticated fella I can see them for the simplistic propaganda they are. Subtlety, they name is NOT Tom Clancy.
Preston/Child. The Pendergast novels as a whole are great, but the new series (Gideon Crew) is outrageously bad.
OP: Did you have in mind authors I don’t like anymore because they changed, or because I changed, or both?
I’ve been off and on with Stephen King. Right now I’m off him again. I’ve pretty much given up on Tom Clancy, and I haven’t read anythi ng but old Piers Anthony in years.
Either. Both. The novels I mentioned were written 30+ years ago and the author is dead. I skimmed over them and found that I had changed.
Piers Anthony: I changed.
Stephen King: He changed.
J.R.R.Tolkien.
As a youth I was as facile with LOTR as any evangelical preacher is with the bible. Chapter and verse. But lo! As an adult I find him unbearably longwinded and formal and his characters incredibly stilted. As for the poetry he sticks in all over the place, it’s only good when directly cribbed from Norse.