Early on Orson Scott Card also wrote historical fiction (Saints) and humor – the Saintspeak Dictionary reads like a Mormon version of Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary (which it’s admittedly based on). He also wrote the scripts for cartoons based on the Book of Mormon. Diverse guy.
The story goes that sometime in the 80s a journalist asked Heller ‘Are you disappointed that in the 20 or so years since Catch-22 you haven’t published anything as good as that?’ and Heller replies, ‘No, because neither has anyone else’.
I can understand a lot of people had problems with Heller’s second novel, ‘Something Happened’, because it is intentionally very long-winded. One of the central ‘jokes’ is that the ‘something’ that happens only happens towards the very end of a whole big chunk of book in which nothing much happens at all, but this was Heller’s take on the staleness and emptiness that many people endure on a daily basis. I’m surprised Exapno found similar problems with Heller’s third effort, ‘Good as Gold’. It’s much shorter than either C22 or SH, fast-paced and full of good gags that don’t outstay their welcome. It also has a wonderful structure, but I won’t say more so as not to spoil it.
Sorry for the slight hijack re Heller, but he’s one of my favourite authors.
To answer the OP, one easy nomination would be J.D. Salinger. He did publish more stuff after ‘Catcher’, but nothing you can’t be comfortable missing.
Another good example would be Scott Turow. ‘Presumed Innocent’ was about as brilliant as it gets, but the follow-up was a long, majestic failure to recapture the magic.
Agree with Raspberry Hunter on LeGuin. She’d be an archetypal example for me, she has written a mile and a half of garbage since her heyday in the early 70s. It’s so bad that it’s almost retrospectively degrading her classic SF work in my mind.
A Wizard of Earthsea remains untouchable, of course.
I thought David Zindell’s first novel Neverness was right out of the top drawer - as good as something like Snow Crash, and that he’d go on to be a dominant SF writer. He’s certainly not turned to custard, but his subsequent stuff is disappointing. He seems to have gotten mired in writing mediocre series, I guess for commercial reasons.
Anne MacCaffrey (shut up).
The original DragonRiders and DragonSinger trilogies were fantastic, and I utterly adored the world she created. The prequel was enjoyable, but not as solid, and then she started going downhill.
I think she fell too in love with her characters and couldn’t allow anything bad to happen to them. She also couldn’t show them as flawed individuals with the exception of some mild idiosyncrasies. Her villains had never been very sympathetic, but they became absolute caricatures.
Wait, did you just use Macroscope as an example of genuinely good writing? As in, the book with a technobabble clairvoyance device that picks up alien transmissions of directions for how to travel FTL, but the transmissions are jammed by another alien race with mathematical symbols that will turn anyone smart enough to understand the FTL stuff into drooling idiots? And the FTL methods require that you melt and then vaporize yourself first, but that’s OK, because the transmissions are so clever that just viewing them enables you to do that (as well as all of the other tasks associated with interstellar travel)? But you have to be careful reversing the process because if you don’t, then you end up turning into a giant starfish, because after all, starfish are almost exactly like humans? That’s what’s being used as an example of good writing?
I can’t argue with Heinlein or Orson Scott Card, though.
I thought of Keith Laumer, but his work seems to have suffered after & due to his stroke.
I have finally been exposed to something more confusing and perplexing than Lost or quantum physics.
Thank’s for the thread McSpon, somehow before I clicked on it I just knew that Heinlein would be mentioned.
He is one of my favorites but he lost me with Stranger in a Strange Land which I found to be a horrid attempt to cash in on the free love '60’s. Kept waiting for it to get better, and it didn’t.
The later Time Enough for Love however is one of my favorites, mainly because of the independance of the Lazarus Long character, but it it a more conventional Heinlein work and ties into his ‘future history’ series. The Moon is a Harch Mistress was great. I also liked Friday.
To Sail Beyond the Sunset was just icky. And all the ‘World as Myth’ works were lame.
He fell prey to the cult of personality in which celebrities begin to think that the popularity of their art translates into a political following that wants to here your theories on sex, religion, politics, etc. There are many current examples of this today. In fact it seems that a certain level of fame almost requires one to speak out on the issues of the day, even though they have little idea what they are talking about.
I think RH fell into that trap. After I would read some of the later works I just wanted to scream, “Wait! what happened to the original hook early in the story?” Good story lines and plot ideas just disappeared into some ramble on society or religion. Fine, right a book, a different one, but finish the good book you started first!
Well, compared to what Piers later wrote, it was good.
Heck, compared to what came later, Sos the rope was fine literature!
ghardester writes:
> . . . a horrid attempt to cash in on the free love '60’s . . .
Written in 1961. You could make a better argument that it influenced the 1960’s. It’s probably just a matter of both the free love ethic and the novel responding to the same influences in American society.
I’ll second Laurell K. Hamilton. An interesting, flawed, protagonist (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter) in a love triangle with a vampire and a werewolf…then around book 6 they turned into wretched, bad porn where every character wants, and does, boink Anita. Boooring.
**Diana Gabaldon **started out really strong. But what started out as a trilogy is now 7 books and counting and is already 3 books too long. “Outlander” was so tightly written that I can’t believe how much plot she was able to squeeze into it. Subsequent books, especially the last few, are just the opposite. Very little plot decorated with lengthy, indulgent passages about things I don’t care about, such as Brianna’s breast feeding woes. I wish she’d just tell us how the damn story ends already.
I’m probably asking for trouble, but while I loved Chuck Pahlaniuk’s Fight Club, I’ve been disappointed by pretty much everything I’ve read of his since, except a few short stories and non-fiction pieces. And yeah, I read a couple more novels, so I guess they couldn’t have been that bad. But honestly, he reminded me a tad too much of teen horror author R.L. Stine, fake cliffhanger chapter endings and all. Or M. Night Shyamalan. I still maintain The Sixth Sense was great, but after that he really did/does seem like a one-trick pony.
I’ve always had the idea that most authors only have so many good story ideas. They come up with a really good idea or three and write their first story based on the best idea. It sells well and so they write their second and third ideas.
Then, after a while, they run out. But their publisher and their fans expect more. So, they start dragging out any half-assed idea they can just to get another book out. As time goes by they turn into a caricature of their early selves, just because they’ve gone to the idea well one too many times and there’s nothing left there.
YMMV, but I thought she more or less redeemed herself with Careless in Red.
Each new Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine book since The Minotaur makes me want to open a vein, though.
Isaac Asimov, wrote about 350 books, the first 300 of them brilliant, the last 50 not so much.
Douglas Adams, need I say more?
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I think that, when Turtledove writes stand-alone books, he’s still pretty good. (I thought In the Presence of Mine Enemies was excellent.) But when he gets into hung, sprawling multi-volume epics … I don’t usually bother looking at them any longer.
Great thread. I want to respond to just about every post in this thread, but I’ll restrain myself for all of your sakes. 
The difference is that Pynchon had started with V, which same people consider to be his best, and then wrote the cult classic The Crying of Lot 49 before Gravity’s Rainbow. That doesn’t mean his later work wasn’t lesser. It was, but overall it’s considered to be better quality than Heller’s later work.
All that about Heller could very well be. Many of the novels I read when I was younger were lost on me because I didn’t have the life experience to appreciate at the time. They might speak to me more deeply today.
But I have to disagree with you on Salinger. His shorter work is far better than Catcher. If you miss “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” you’re missing one of the greatest stories of the 20th century.
I gave up on Scott a bit earlier than you did. Even that doesn’t quite get to it. I hated his early period, when he was in every other issue of Omni, each story about grotesque tortures. He grew up a bit when he got married and had kids, one of whom had cerebral palsy, and that changed him. Some of the stories they inspired were fine. I was literally with him when he wrote one of his best stories. He went into the basement at a writers workshop and came out with a piece that stunned us. Even at that time, though, his nonstory comments were antithetical to everything I believed, and they’ve only gotten worse since. I haven’t been able to read him for years.
True. Understated, even. He wrote most of it earlier in the 50s and then went back to it to revise and finish it around 1960.
I bailed on him after the 60s. I know the fall in quality is often blamed on the problem that limited blood flow to his brain. I was at the infamous speech in Kansas City in 1976. He was the honored guest at an sf convention, followed by gangs of fans, almost worshiped. Then he gave his speech and had the entire crowd booing in hatred. I’ve always felt that was the real Heinlein.
It’s not always good to be around writers in real life. Ruins the magic.
This is also true and even understated. Publishers and fans want the same thing over and over past death. It destroys almost every popular writer.
Nah. A lot of Asimov’s early books are unreadable today. (At least by me.) His later novels were unreadable immediately. But most of his nonfiction stayed pretty good till close to the end.
Adams is a great example of a one-book author. Harper Lee knew it and could live with it. Adams took the money. I would take the money too if anybody offered, so that’s not a criticism, just reality.
Pastwatch was actually pretty good, imho, but in general I agree and came into this thread simply to make sure OSC was listed.
The self indulgence of Heinlein and Asimov in their last years was a bit much for me. ymmv
Larry Niven. For me, he peaked with Ringworld and The Mote In God’s Eye. Some post 70s stuff was OK (Ringworld Engineers, Footfall), but for the most part, his 80s thru 00s was sub par.
You missed the way the climax depended on horoscopes.
Those are whacked out ideas, yes. (Though I’ve seen weirder in books I’ve enjoyed. Anthony’s Prostho Plus was about interstellar dentistry. :dubious:) But I like to think that an author’s entitled to a bizarro premise if he follows through and produces an enjoyable book; and, weird premise aside, I thought Macroscope was decently written and worked pretty well.
Unlike the kiddie porn he was putting out when I quit reading him.
Agreed. I had such high hopes for her.