All of his pre-9/11 books are good bordering on genre-defining, though as the Ryanverse continued it became somewhat less implausible.
Jack Ryan becomes the President of the United States at the end of Debt of Honor after a Japanese pilot avenges the death of his son and brother following the defeat of a Japanese nationalist who engineered an economic/military crisis to take over Saipan and Guam.
I’m sure I didn’t need to spoiler that, but you never know.
Anyway, the Ryanverse long ago diverged from real life, and in that universe everything progressed nicely. Until 9/11. Somehow we were jolted back into the real world, which makes no sense because
Denver was nuked by terrorists in The Sum of All Fears, but no mention of it ever happens again after 9/11
and it became about what everything was about after 9/11: Muslim extremism, Afghanistan, and Iraq. It’s as if he hit a wall after (see first spoiler) and he could go no further.
His last few books written by himself were decent but not great. His recent ghostwritten books have been pretty much phoned in. He and his co/ghost-writer can’t seem to stifle their political views. While they have never exactly been a secret, he expressed them through the characters’ actions. Now the characters editorialize and sermonize, and it takes you right out of the books.
The bottom line is that Tom Clancy is no longer a great author. He’s a brand, and with the 8 million spinoffs and videogames he’s riding the gravy train while the stuff that comes out in his name is sullying his reputation.
Re Charles de Lint: Everyone I know kept raving about The Onion Girl and how great it was and how much they loooooooved Jilly Coppercorn and could identify with her and on and on and on. So I read it and hated it more than any other novel I’ve read since American Gods. I had been working my way through de Lint’s works at the time so I had had quite enough of Jilly Fucking Coppercorn. She’s my least favorite character in the city he sets most of his work in. I much preferred his earlier works before Jilly took over.
I’m going to nominate Ellery Queen. I’ve always heard how Queen was the master of detective novels and one of the best. I’m reading my way through my mom’s old books right now and mostly they annoy me. Mostly it’s because the slang hasn’t aged well and neither have the tropes. I’m starting to wonder why the victims always tell the truth in their dying gasp. Why not lie? What are they going to do to you?
Wow. Well, I can’t say I’m surprised, but if anything I think even less of Dean as a writer now that I know she really was just padding for hundreds of pages and wasn’t just someone who had a very misguided idea of what her readers would find interesting.
It’s my recollection that the non-fantasy portion of the book didn’t even really have a story, it was just the mundane minutiae of college life and was unrelated to any plot. I kept thinking “Surely some of this will be important later, she’s not spending this much time on the heroine picking out which classes she’ll take next semester just to boost her word count” but no.
Different strokes and all that I don’t insist everybody has to like only what I like, though I really don’t understand people who like Hemmingway and Twilight. <shrug> As long as they don’t try and force me to read it, I am fine.
<snicker>
I also admit I don’t like some authors who pick their work to flog their hangups - I stopped reading Mercedes Lackey because it got to where I felt everything was going to be about either abused kids or abused women. Though Sharon Green went the other way and all her stuff was about dominance and submission. I found out later when talking to a guy she had dated for a little while that she felt that a date wasn’t any good if somebody didn’t end up with bruises and blood. :eek:
I hafta agree with furdmort - TMiaHM is nowhere near the place to start with Heinlein. Try Have Spacesuit - Will Travel. That was where this fan started. Stranger in a Strange Land can wait until you know if you have a taste for Bob’s work.
And whatever you do, stay far, far away from The Number of the Beast. I feel about that one the way you apparently do about The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
My Most Disappointing Author is F. Scott Fitzgerald. He just sucks as a writer, that’s all.
RE: deLint. I liked the first few books of his that I read back in the 1980’s well enough, but then they all started to seem the same, and I haven’t read anything of his since then.
Pamela Dean’s **Tam Lin **was supposed to be about going to college back in the 1970’s or so, with the folklore element added in. That was part of what I loved about it, the nostalgia factor. Also, I lived in Minnesota for a while and visited Carleton College and went to plays at the Guthrie, so that aspect of setting was fun for me.
For a much better take on a modern version of Tam Lin, read Diana Wynne Jones’ Fire and Hemlock. It’s quite different from most of her works.
You think that Mistress is his worst book? I take it that you haven’t read “The Number of the Beast-” then.
Heinlein’s juveniles were some of his best. I liked Mistress not because of the politics, but in spite of it. I thought that the respect accorded to women in a society where women were in short supply was an interesting concept, for instance. And was Mike a person?
Ray Bradbury. I read Farenheit 451 at a teen and thought it was pretty interesting. In my late 20’s I saw the “deluxe remastered” edition in a bookstore, grabbed it, and loved it. Bought the Martian Chronicles a year or so later and it was a completely different experience. The first story or two was pretty funny, almost Phillip Dick like, but after that the quality seemed to me to drop off sharply and I gave up about halfway through.
Asimov too, came to my party late and was a bit of a letdown after seeing how much reverence he’s held in by sci-fi fans. I don’t remember which of his books I read (I don’t think it was his famous Foundation series) but I didn’t care for them at all.
I also tried reading Kurt Vonnegut several times, thinking he’d be right up my alley. But I just couldn’t get into him.
However, it has been a while since I’ve attempted to read these 3 authors, and I haven’t completely given up on them. I do remember that back in high school I absolutely hated Douglas Adams on first read, but went back about 6 months later and thought he was one of the funniest authors I’ve ever read. So I’ll go back and try again before writing them off.
Clive Cussler.
I’m a fan of Michael Connely. When I finished reading all of his books, I was looking for another author I could get behind. I remembered reading some of Clive Cussler’s books when I was young. Wow. His main character Dirk Pitt; is a prick; and a borderline rapist. I’m now working my way through Richard Lee’s Jack Reacher series. I’m enjoying them so far.
The politics aren’t the problem. Most of his books are about politics in one form or another. The problem is that it is simply a train wreck of a mess of ideas and concepts, and then he kills off Mike at the end because Mike wouldn’t fit into his world of nobel libertarians. What good does it do to proclaim libertarianism as teh highest aspiration of man when a computer has handed the victory to your heroic libertarians?
It is near as bad as Rebel Moon - and that pile of turds at least had the excuse of trying to flatten a video game on to a sheet of paper.
A while ago, I heard for the first time on a message board which ranges widely over assorted sci-fi / fantasy, about the Hoka stories by, in collaboration, Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson. By the description of them there, they sounded potentially fun. I was disappointed to find that for me, this whole scene appeared pretty much a “one-trick pony”. The premise is that the Hokas – a space-alien race visually a lot like the Ewoks of Star Wars – are highly imitative: once contacted by the human race, the Hokas become captivated by all kinds of aspects of human culture and history, which they discover one after another, and enthusiastically mimic and re-enact. It’s basically just this joke, over and over again – a nice idea, but for me it quickly became stale.
The only “Hoka” story which I enjoyed and was amused by, was the very first one, taking place shortly after human / Hoka first contact. The Hokas learn of Wild West films and novels, and enact the material from those – but as all things human are very new to them: a lot of the Western stuff, they muddle up and get hilariously wrong. However, they are such skilled and able imitators, that very soon, they are getting spot-on, whatever is the latest human thing that they latch on to. It just gets, IMO, very repetitive and limited. And the sole full-length novel about the Hokas, “Star Prince Charlie” – I found that direly, embarrassingly awful: couldn’t finish it.
I’ve found Dennis Lehane novels disappointing. He writes well to a point…then his plots tend to get overly convoluted and the enjoyment peters out.
As for Wambaugh, his first couple of police novels were pretty good, but the rest have been mostly forgettable. His real strength has been in classic true crime books (i.e. “The Onion Field” and “The Blooding”).
aruvqan – had never before now, heard of “Little Fuzzy”. Googled accordingly – the series looks well worth getting into. My thanks !
As regards “aliens of teddy-bearish aspect”, my favourite kind has to be Harry Turtledove’s Roxolani; who despite their cuddly looks, are aggressive spacefaring conquerors (though as individuals, they come across as likeable enough).
The other three, actually, plus five Ringworld “prequel” novels with Edward Lerner now (although I really don’t know if you can call them “Ringworld prequels” when they don’t really directly involve the Ringworld). I may be the only one in the world who actually likes all of them (although I haven’t read the latest one, Fate of Worlds, yet).
I’ll add my vote to the Dresden Files. I read Cecil’s “Straight Dope Chicago” column about the Chicago Undertown way back in March 2009, and he made the books sound pretty cool – " think Harry Potter for adults, or Sam Spade meets The Lord of the Rings," he said. But even with James Marsters reading, the first two books still left me feeling, well … somewhat underwhelmed. I still bought all the rest of them, but I sure hope they get better.
I’ll add my vote to the Dresden Files. I read Cecil’s “Straight Dope Chicago” column about the Chicago Undertown way back in March 2009, and he made the books sound pretty cool – " think Harry Potter for adults, or Sam Spade meets The Lord of the Rings," he said.
I don’t insist everybody has to like only what I like, though I really don’t understand people who like Hemmingway and Twilight. <shrug> As long as they don’t try and force me to read it, I am fine.