Well, he says he does, anyway. Though how detailed that plan is, only he can say.
I’ve got a completely skewed view of Queen because the only ones I’ve read were the Sturgeon and Davidson ones
The Kay Scarpetta series by Patricia Cornwell.
I would not say Lee Child was unable to keep it up, exactly, but in any event he turned over the Jack Reacher stuff to his brother.
Not to mention that ****ing hamster that would not die.
I mostly agree, but found book 1 more palatable than you did.
Robert Parker had trouble keeping up the Spenser series after he died.*
Dick Francis’ novels declined markedly after his wife’s death (she supposedly was a valued contributor to his work) and when he enlisted his son’s co-authorship. The son is still cranking 'em out as far as I know.
Fans have a terrible time accepting that even the best series can’t go on forever. As mentioned, Rex Stout had a long and valued run with Nero Wolfe.
*someone continues to write Spenser novels.
Bought the last two when they were published in hardback. They are still sitting in a drawer at my job waiting to be opened. One of these days…maybe.
I liked them okay. But yeah, I wouldn’t have shed a tear if they had never been written and I agree on first series basically being one book.
Ugh, yes. PJF was great out the gate, but he never seemed to be up to sustaining a series. I’d say it was similar for the World of Tiers series, though it didn’t go down hill quite as bad as Riverworld (which I never actually finished).
Meanwhile as a youngster I had always wanted a sequel to The Stone God Awakens which reads very much like the first book in a series idea he abandoned. But in retrospect it is probably just as well I didn’t get it.
This brought me back to the thread, as I am/was a big fan of World of Tiers, but Beyond the Walls of Terra was the last one I enjoyed at all. The Lavalite World was tedious, Red Orc’s Rage felt like a self-absorbed naval gazing waste of time, and I have but never managed to make myself read More than Fire. Considering the sheer scope of the universe, it can’t be said that he ran out of things to write about, but instead got tired of the setting and characters. For what it’s worth, TLW while not inspired story-wise, was at least a vaguely interesting setting and tied up the ‘main’ story of the previous few novels reasonably well, making the later works feel rather tacked on.
About other works mentioned in the thread, yeah, I enjoyed Honor Harrington for about 6-7 novels, since I enjoy military sci-fi, but especially when the stories started getting tied in with all the collaboration works and micro-characters, I grew distant and gave up. Stirling’s shorter works and series are absolutely better than the sprawling “Dies the Fire” which lost me past the end of the first generation’s story. As for the War against the Chtorr, I remember finally getting and reading A Rage for Revenge, enjoying it, and then saying to myself “I don’t know if Gerrold knows where he wants to go with this…” Something born out by the decades since.
For someone who hasn’t yet been thrown under the bus, I’ll nominate John Ringo. His Paladin of Shadows, Black Tide Rising, and The Council Wars all noticeably degraded over time, with two of the three mentioned having just kind of drifted ‘away’ with no real feeling of conclusion. Which is still better than the Troy Rising series which was epic for all lovers of Schlock Mercenary, but had serious story creep in the third novel which ended with absolutely NOTHING resolved.
Is that literally set in the Schlockverse, or just the sort of thing Schlock-fans would enjoy?
I’ll give you the wiki description, since it is better than the one I tried to type @Chronos
The Troy Rising series has been inspired by the webcomic Schlock Mercenary and its universe. It has been created with the approval of both authors, but is not considered canon for the webcomic series. The series is set in the early days of human-alien contact, with humans forced to defend the Earth from the alien invasion.
The technologies, races, and the dark humor/snark are very, Very Schlock, even if it isn’t cannon.
Howard Taylor wrote the introduction, and one of the major characters is rather clearly modeled after him. I would recommend the first book without hesitation, the second with minor quibbles, and the third with many reservations.
/end Hijack
But while originally planned as a trilogy, it seemed very clear to readers (and Ringo confirmed later) that it was going to be extended several more books and then . . . nothing. Thus it’s place in this thread.
People raved about Gene Wolfe, but I found the sequence disconnected.
This reads like the Voice of the Cynic, and i have to disagree. I do see a general overall similarity in many of the works (especially the short stories), but to say “all the books were the same story retold” paints with far too broad a brush. The Black Mountain, to cite the most obvious example, doesn’t fit the pattern of any of the other books at all. It’s fascinating (and frequently irritating) precisely because of that. The Doorbell Rang, which you cited, also breaks the usual pattern, but so does The Father Hunt In fact, Stout seemed to get more experimental and creative in his last decade or so than he was in, say, the fifties.
All right, almost all the books were the same. There are 33 novels and 41 shorter works about Wolfe. About 65 of them followed the pattern.
I think Parker was one of the worst. Every single book he wrote was the same, whether it was Spenser, Stone, Randall or the cowboys. You could randomly switch the characters from book to book and it wouldn’t matter.
Two series I think did okay were Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone. Lightweight and stuck in the 80s, but pretty solid all the way.
Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder novels held up pretty good and, unlike the Spenser novels, Scudder grew and changed during the run.
As mentioned, it seems to be difficult to write many novel length books about the same character. Either you have them stuck in time or the series run so long you have to change the backstory or your character ages out.
Well, except for the Z book. That one didn’t at all hold up to the standards of the other 25.
Twenty plus twenty plus four, to be exact.
Anyway, I have two nominations that no one else seems to have mentioned yet.
First we have Alan Dean Foster, with the commonwealth series.
Between fairly sporadic publishing, and lots of discontinuity and bouncing around in time and characters, it became not only hard to follow for readers, but I think for the author as well. I read all that were available back in the early 90’s and kept following the series for a number of years after that, but haven’t gone back to it in a long time now.
Also his spellsinger series was fun, but it seemed he lost interest in that world entirely.
The second author would be Anne McCaffery and her Pern series.
What started as a fantasy genre with a light bit of hinted at science backstory kept trying to shoehorn in more and more “science” as part of the backstory, the less believable the whole thing got. Apparently she and her son still write them, but it’s just not very interesting anymore.
She died in 2011.
Right, but her son still writes them. I misspoke in how I phrased that, as they were writing them together, then he was writing them, and still writes them.
Anyway, I stopped reading them far earlier than her death, as they just became backstory for things that didn’t need backstory.
Donna Leon’s last Brunetti book was better than the first, I thought. But most were. She’s up to 30. And at a certain point if the character is good enough the back story is as least as interesting as the plot.