I hate weenie answers like I’m about to give, but I’ll give it anyway. “It depends”
Robert Asprin spent who-knows how many books destroying the Myth-Adventures series (Skeeve becomes an alcoholic with no people skills? Projecting much, Rob?) and when Jodi-Lynn Nye started ghost-writing (sorta–both of their names were on the cover but apparently his contribution was “I dunno. Let’s do the next one where Aahz and Skeeve go to…oh…let’s say…Mars” and she’d do the actual writing. And the books have improved tremendously. No problem in buying her stuff.
On the other hand, Zelazny was clear that he did NOT want Amber to continue without him but they got some guy to do it anyway. That’s bad enough, but then, rather than going forward with the (Merlin, etc) story, the guy tries to tell the Secret Origin of Amber. And really? Who cares? So…I might have tried it, had he done something interesting with the series, but between the author’s stated wishes and the fact that the doof who sharecropped the series decided to spend 3 books rehashing what Zelazny did in a few paragraphs? Who cares.
Donald Kingsbury wrote a brilliant conclusion to the Foundation saga (he didn’t get permission from the so the serial numbers were barely scraped off) but it’s SO DAMNED GOOD that as far as I’m concerned, it’s cannon. (“Psychohistorical Crisis”–or: what happens after the 1000 years is up and the Second Foundation takes over? What’s it like?)
So…it depends. Author’s wishes matter (but they’re not the be-all and end all), story quality matters a lot and story subject matters a lot (any sharecropped novel that decides to be a “prequel” will be ignored on sight)
I enjoyed 'em. Well, okay, I enjoyed two out of the three. The first and third books were quite good, almost up to Zelazny’s standards. The middle book was a slow, weary, dreary drag. Hell, it too the protagonist nearly 100 pages just to get up out of bed in the morning!
I thought it worked, overall. The “new family” of brothers and sisters was pretty nicely in sync with Zelazny’s descriptions and pacing and love of double-cross intrigue. He sets you up to like certain characters…who turn out to be finks. He sets you up to dislike others…who surprise you by acting heroically.
Just like Zelazny!
If there were to be more of these…I’d read 'em!
BTW, has anyone written subsequent “John Carter of Mars” books?
(ETA: Philip Jose Farmer’s “The Wind Whales of Ishmael” was pretty clearly a “Barsoom” book. And Jack Vance’s “Tschai: Planet of Adventure” quadrology had a lot of Barsoom in it.)
Only one book had the alcoholism angle. It just seems like a bigger element of the story because of the decade or so of not releasing any further books.
Once Asprin came back, the books he wrote (particularly the Dragon books) were quite good.
There was a shared universe boom back in the 80s when I was still a kid. Exposure to various different authors writing in the same basic setting, even using each others’ characters at times, was ample demonstration that I like certain people’s writing, not necessarily the settings, characters, systems of magic, etc. Some authors I like don’t necessarily play well with others, as I’ve discovered when reading collaborations.
Ghost-written stuff may have fooled me, but if so, I’ve never found out about it after the fact without previously feeling something “off” about the writing. For example, years before I ever knew anything about Asprin’s private life, pre-internet, I saw a change in the writing after Myth-Nomers and Im-Pervections. The previous M.Y.T.H. Inc. Link didn’t really feel like his writing either, as it was a drastic POV departure from other books in the series. He explained it as a style challenge, but I think he may have been trying out an early collaboration with a contributing author (probably Nye). No proof though.
I can’t get too mad about subsequent authors, since some of the greatest characters were written by the worst authors (Robert E. Howard? Arthur Conan Doyle? Edgar Rice Burroughs? Does anyone ACTUALLY prefer Ian Fleming to John Gardner?). Regarding Conan, Steve Gerber in an interview once said that Roy Thomas’s Marvel Comics adaptations were undeniably superior to Robert E. Howard’s original stories, so maybe comics do have some kind of literary quality.
Also worth considering: Mike Lenehan ==> Dave Kehr ==>Ed Zotti…
Going back a few years, I thought Ruth Plumly Thompson did a fine job of writing more Oz books after L Frank Baum died.
In general, I think my attitude would be “why not, I’ll give it a shot”. If it’s bad, I’ll stop reading. If it’s good, I’ll keep reading. Why be a purist?
(Answer to the OP’s question: ) Mostly, no, for reasons similar to those others have given:
And I’ll add:
Continuing some other author’s series seems like such a “hack-ish” thing to do. There are enough good authors writing—why waste my time with the work of hacks. And…
I can’t help feeling that what the original author wrote describes what really happened; while any subsequent writer who continues the series is just making stuff up about those characters, not telling us what they really did.
I was just going to mention this. When I was a kid, I read abnd loved all of Baum’s Oz books, but the library didn’t have any of the books written by other authors who continued the series, and at the time I didn’t even know they existed. Since learning of their existence, I’ve been mildly curious, but not enough to have actually read any of them.
Another example from childhood: the “Three Investigators” books, in a series started by Robert Arthur and continued by several other authors. I read them as a kid, in no particular order, and while I don’t remember noticing radical differences in style or quality between the various authors, I do remember thinking the ones by Arthur were the best.
I guess another example is the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. as a kid, I had no idea that the original Franklin W. Dixon/Carolyn Keene had died before I learned to read (or that they were the same person!) and just assumed the new ones were written by the same author as the old ones.
They weren’t the same person - or any person. I read my daughter some of the original Nancy Drews and about 40 of the '50s vintage ones and so have read some histories. “Carolyn Keene” was the wife of the head of the Strattemeyer Syndicate and then a woman in Ohio IIRC who wrote most of the rest. Not the same person as the guy who wrote Hardy Boys. And they guy who wrote the original Tom Swift books wrote the Uncle Wriggly books.
The new Tom Swifts were by "Victor Appleton Jr.: and the newer ones, in space, were by “Victor Appleton III” so they weren’t even supposedly the same person. However, neither was Tom.
Don’t know of any official other Barsoom books, but Fritz Leiber wrote an official Tarzan book (based on a movie, I believe) got a number in the Ballantine Tarzan series.
Um… Yeah, that’d be me. Not because I think Fleming is much good, but because Gardner was so awful! Those books were skunk-ass terrible! Gardner struck me as the worst spy-thriller author ever!
(Wouldn’t it have been cool if Frederick Forsyth had written a Bond novel?)
Cool! I didn’t know this! I’m a big Leiber fan, so I’ll have to track this down!
The early Forsyth might not have been bad at it. The one we’ve had for the last 35 years? Well, leaden, clunky, and politicized doesn’t even begin to describe that one.
Re the OP: in general, no. In fact, frequently by the time the original author has gotten to the 10th or 20th books, I’ve lost interest. Usually the books have turned formulaic and have lost momentum, and might as well have been written by any Joe Schmoe off the street. McBain’s 87th Precinct stories were an exception, but, for instance, I’ve lost interest in Pratchett’s Discworld.
You took the words right out of my mouth. About 3 books after Spenser’s shooting, I realized Parker just didn’t care any more, and decided for myself that Spenser had been in a coma the entire time, just dreaming the same story over and over again with different details, because that’s what Parker was writing.
