What authors started out writing one or more genuinely good books – and then, either suddenly or slowly, completely and utterly lost it? I’m not talking about one-hit wonders who had one good book and then nothing; I want long-time authors with a lot of books under their belt … but after a certain point in their career, the books are all bad.
A few examples to get things moving:
Piers Anthony. The badness of his later books are almost proverbial. But early in his career he was genuinely good. Anybody remember Macroscope?
Robert Heinlein. A bit more controversial, perhaps. But there’s really not a lot to be said for most of his books from The Number of the Beast (or perhaps from I Will Fear No Evil) onward.
Ken Follett. I won’t say he’s “brilliant” but he had a good thing going with his early light adventure/espionage novels, and then he wrote a by-the-numbers historical (Pillars of the Earth and The Third Twin – one of the most ridiculous, unrealistic, cockamamie plotted novels ever. I haven’t read him since.
Joseph Heller’s first novel was Catch-22. Now, when your first novel is a genuine candidate for the Great American Novel you’re probably not going to top that later on. But I never found any of his other books even to be finishable let alone good.
Tom Clancy - He became big enough that he could ignore any editorial advice and his books became political fantasies.
Stephen King - A long spell of books written under the influence of drugs and alcohol.
Harry Turtledove - One I hate to say. But in my opinion he signed too many contracts and ended up writing a bunch of books by formula. The quantity of his writing hurt the quality.
Thomas Pynchon had the same problem. “Gravitys Rainbow” was so good that anything following would have to be very good or risk getting dismissed . They were not.
I’m in the rare position of being in complete agreement :). Tom Clancy WAS fun, but starting around debt of honor it began to seriously go downhill. i’m not sure where to draw the line with Turtledove, but there was a definite problem when he got into “yet another book on X” territory.
Well, I wouldn’t say * brilliant *, but Lauren K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series started off quite well. It could have been a Dresden Files quality franchise – mystery procedurals based on the supernatural. But she had to go and turn it into soft porn (and maybe not so soft) within a few books. Charlaine Harris is going down the same road with her Southern Vampire mysteries series, and in even less time. OK, we * get it * vampires are great in bed. Now tell the damn story.
And I’m going to say that George R. R. Martin is rapidly going down the road to custard with his Song of Ice and Fire series. Started out well, but the last one, A Feast for Editors (Nov, 2005), just rambled on forever with not much getting accomplished, and based on how long the next one is taking, I’m guessing he’s written himself (prodigiously) into a corner. (it’s been literally a year and a half since his last update and he was trying to get the book done by the end of 2007.)
I thought of Piers Anthony as soon as I saw the thread title. Up to about 1990, I’d read just about everything he’d written. Even then I was aware that his books had been going downhill. Then they got worse.
Orson Scott Card’s early works were wonderful. Ender’s Game and Speaker For the Dead are classics. His short fiction and lesser-known novels like A Planet Called Treason and Wyrms were bizarrely imaginative. He even branched out into computer games (the creative insults from Monkey Island) and created backstory for the characters in The Abyss.
But sometime in the early-to-mid 90s it all went to crap. Lost Boys was schmaltzy, the Homecoming and Alvin Maker series went downhill, and Lovelock was decidedly subpar. I gave up after being unable to finish Children of the Mind or Pastwatch.
He turned into a raving bigot too, which doesn’t help.
I came in this thread to say Card, though I’d date it slightly differently – I find Treason rather derivative (of Cordwainer Smith), but I adore Pastwatch (and give him kudos for doing Native American in SF… but that’s a whole other controversy), Lost Boys, and the later Homecoming books – though I admit that for both LB and the Homecoming series you probably have to have intimate knowledge of Mormonism to get the full effect (and be okay with C.S. Lewis-style theology-fiction mixing).
Now, I agree Children of the Mind was getting to be unreadable, and since then he’s had all these forgettable/really-just-plain-bad books like Magic Street and Enchantment, not one of which I’ve been able to finish without a whole lot of skimming. Some, though not all, is his succumbing to what I’ve heard called “LeGuin’s disease,” where he feels like he needs to explain his entire belief system in his books. Even if you agree with the belief system, you don’t want to be hammered about it in fiction, and if you don’t agree with it, it’s that much worse.
So I’ll throw out LeGuin as well (though I feel a little less strongly about her). The first three Earthsea books, and her SF such as Left Hand of Darkness, were great. The later Earthsea books, for example… there’s only so much explicit “Woman Power!” I can stand.
Oh. and Mercedes Lackey. She didn’t exactly start out good, but there was an appealing energy, forthrightness, and humor about her first couple of Mary Sue fantasies. A couple trilogies in, she started taking herself seriously… the kiss of death.
Also, I SO agree with the OP on Heinlein. I picked up Time Enough for Love recently, and could hardly believe that it was the same author who wrote the brilliant Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Custard, indeed!
