Niven’s Ringworld
Opening up the Known Space universe to other authors was a good move, tho.
What are The Dark Tower and Dune, Alex?
I also have to throw in the Testament series, by God.
I mean, creating a book written by different authors at different times is an interesting concept, but it creates a sort of Rashomon-like situation which is never wholly resolved in a satisfying way.
The first one is somewhat overly long, repetetive and disorganized, but there are some truly memorable action scenes as well as some very interesting philosophical concepts, and if you can push through to the end, it concludes on a rather charming note of restitution.
The second one starts out seeming to indicate a more straightforward and modern narrative style, but quickly devolves into a mess. Four different stories about the main character, Jesus,who then disappears halfway through! And even while he’s around, the philosophical arguments turn out very one-sided because all of his companions are painted as rubes, a disappointing change from the characters in the first one who actually wrestled with angels.
Yo, God, “dialog” means two people communicating, not one person yapping and everyone agreeing with them. Didn’t work for Plato, doesn’t work for you.
Plus, he’s such a pacifist that the action is severely limited. Once you’ve had some cities collapsing due to the sound of thundering soldier’s feet, others disappearing in a hail of fire and brimstone, babies sliced from their mother’s bellies, and a man sending chopped up pieces of his murdered concubine to all his kinsmen as a call to war, you have to admit that driving moneychangers form a temple and slicing off a single ear are something of a let-down. Even the crucifixion scene is undercut by the fact that the protagonist didn’t even stay dead!
God only manages one more narrative section before giving up on the story entirely and the whole thing devolves into an epistolary work, with heavy emphasis on a character who was’t even part of the initial narrative. Then it all ends with some wild-hippie freak-out prophecy as a sap to the fans who enjoyed the extensive prophecy sections of the first book.
I hear the third one was such a disaster that it’s only really popular in Utah.
I would have said, the Pentateuch (first five books of the Bible), by Moses or JEPD or whoever.
The first book in the series starts with a poetic prologue and eventually turns into a marvelous family saga, with sex and violence and scheming and trickery and all sorts of twisted, messed-up family dynamics, and a tear-jerker feel-good ending.
The sequel’s not bad either: plenty of drama, conflict, and kick-ass special effects. But the second half bogs down in way too much tedious detail.
By the third book in the series, just about any reader will have lost interest completely. Who wants to read whole chapters of regulations about mildew and infectious skin diseases?
Patricia Cornwell has been phoning it in for at least the last 4 or 5 books.
I also could have done just fine without The Last Battle in the Chronicles of Narnia, and to balance things out philosophically, the last book in Philip Pullman’s * His Dark Materials* kind of sucked, too.
No one has mentioned Tom Clancy and the Jack Ryan series?
The Hunt For Red October and the other early books with Ryan are excellent.
The Bear and the Dragon is a thousand page right wing hack job with bad pornography.
Dragonfly in Amber was the second one. It doesn’t start out how you think it should, but once you get into it…I cried like a baby at the end. I’m sorry you didn’t like them. I treasure them and read Breath of Snow and Ashes as quickly as I could. You’ll find a small but devoted group of Jamie and Claire fans here.
I was also hugely disappointed in Shelters of Stone. I waited 12 years for this? She changes the spelling of one of the characters for no other reason than she wanted to? The highly anticipated catfight between Ayla and Marona turns into nothing more than a practical joke that backfires. Ayla goes into her geneology with EVERYONE she meets so much I wish she’d invent writing and just hand out business cards.
I also enjoyed the Kent Family chronicles as a teenager, but I couldn’t get into his later books. Did you notice that every female in the Kent books had been raped? I liked North and South, but I will never forgive him for killing off one of the two main characters and shipping off one of the daughters to California, almost like so he wouldn’t have to worry about developing a story for her.
Agreed. The first three books were superb, even with the cannibalistic Episcopalian subplot. But the last three disappointed me horrendously. He turned Mary Ann into a complete shrew! Horrible!
I have to agree that Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker Trilogy sort of went straight in the crapper after the first volume. It doesn’t help that it works much better as a radio drama than as a book.
It seems to me that Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey-Maturin series took a dive after the first four of five books. Once Steven decided to be an international man of mystery and we got all involved with Malaysia and the East Indies there was a loss of focus and narrative energy. It may be that O’Brien (or what ever his name was) sensed the cold breath of the Grim Reaper on the back of his neck and just whipped off a series of stream-of-consciousness pot boilers. Initially the series was the fun offspring of a midnight assignation between Horacio Hornblower and Jane Austin. Later is just was tedious. I can only hope that the children or grandchildren of O’Brien’s abandon family got a share of the profits.
I gave up after the Edward book, Obsidian Butterfly (I think). I ended up taking the next one back to the bookstore for my money back. I didn’t even check the last one out of the library after skimming it there.
Her Farie Princess/Merry Gentry when downhill with the second book. The third was an absolute disaster. Nothing is resolved in either the overarching theme of the series (Merry is no closer to siting on the throne, she has no other allies (she manages to keep the goblins and demi fae but that’s it) she still fears the Queen, and the Queen still loves her son more than Merry) nor in the mystery of the novel (drag someone around by their intestines and they will admit to anything) The book is: interesting farie something, Merry and the Ravens having sex, gross farie something, Merry having sex with one of Queen’s Raven who then becomes her Raven, Merry having sex with the Ravens, interesting farie something, one of the Ravens cries, Merry and that Raven have sex, Merry cries, gross farie something, Merry and the Ravens have sex, interesting farie something, more Ravens cry, Merry and the Ravens have sex, all in less than 30 hours.
Have to disagree about the Patrick O’Brian books, but YMMV. I’ve listened to the books several times and still find them compelling.
However, I avoid the final books. Once POB’s wife died, he decided to kill off several major characters in very offhand ways, and it simply will not do.
OTOH, my wife found “A Stroke of Midnight,” Hamilton’s last book in the Merry Gentry series, almost completely pornographic (this from a woman who devoured the rest of the books and bought them in HC). I’ve taken to calling it “A Strokebook At Midnight.”
Rita Mae Brown’s mystery series started out well with some interesting concepts, with her main character on the outs with the rest of the town of Crozet, Va., over her divorce. She also had a fundamentalist old lady who was entertaining in her condemnations until the MASH flu struck and turned loveable. Then, the divorcee plot petered out and, after the third book, Brown abandoned constructing a mystery plot and writing an interesting story in favor of her usual liberal rants and anecdotes about the cute animals.
Loach and I did. Clancy direly needs an editor to tell him to cut novels down to their proper size.
And if you think The Bear and the Dragon was bad, you should see the books he’s written since then - thousand page right wing hack jobs without any bad pornography.
Hmm… I must be the only person that actually liked “Mostly Harmless”. Now I didn’t think it was as funny as the rest of the books, but it was a pretty engrossing story from what I can remember.
I, for one, hope Evanovich keeps Stephanie going for a while longer. Maybe it’s because I read the last book first (it was sent by a book club and I didn’t realize it was the last in a series until after I started reading), but I haven’t yet burned out on them. Of course, I just had to go to the library and check out all the rest of the books, and I haven’t been disappointed yet (except that I didn’t win the “name the next book” contest–shucks! Maybe next time!).
Andrew Vachss’s Burke mysteries and Kinky Friedman’s Kinky mysteries are both getting very thin. The idea of “a hipster/antihero hanging out in NYC with a bunch of weird characters solving crimes” only goes so far.
I’d add Sue Grafton to the list, but since I couldn’t finish her first book…
Donaldson’s second Thomas Covenant trilogy, people. Did we really need him to take someone from our world back to The Land with him? Kind of invalidates the whole thrust of the original series. I shudder to think of what the rest of this third series will do (but I’ll end up going along for the ride.)
I had forgotten about this thread. Since it started I’ve read ‘the next ones’ in two of the series mentioned and was pleasantly surprised by both of them.
Cliffy – you were right about Dragonsblood. It was pretty darned good – the best one in years, really. I think going back in time was a good idea. This way we can have Pern, but without the messing-around-with-already-well-established-characters stuff that ruined Masterharper. I’ll definately read the next one he writes. So, thanks for the recommend.
I also read the latest Asprin/ Nye collaboration in the Myth series – Class Dis-Mythed, it was. It was quite fun, I was pleased to discover. It had a lot of the flavor of the earlier books in the series. I will read the next one in that series too.
I’m not sure my two entries count, as neither of them seems to be active these days. Nonetheless…
Wild Cards, edited by George R.R. Martin, written by a cast of thousands. Nothing new for 7 years, then a single book of short stories in that universe, then nothing else for the last 3 1/2 years. Also, almost all of my friends who read the series said that it got darker and more hopeless as it went along (I don’t disagree, but that didn’t necessarily make it worse for me). Although, that’s not the same as fizzling out, depending on your viewpoint.
The War Against the Chtorr series of books, by David Gerrold. He got through 4 of the planned 5, with the fifth never materializing, to the best of my knowledge. I think that one did fizzle, to the point where even the author didn’t care to see what happened next…
“S is for Silence” is out and it sucks. I kept thinking I’d already read it–it’s like she grabbed her other books and randomly grabbed various events and plot devices and just cut and pasted. Really, really disappointing.
Now that you mention it… Even several of the supporting characters (the plantation mistress, for example). Also, every gay character is a deranged villain; I can’t remember their names but there’s the naval captain (who was conceived through brother-sister incest just for extra derangement) who tries to seduce Jared (before having his face seared off by a hot cannon barrel), later there’s a Prussian officer who’s dastardly and has a boy toy, etc… Plus, he kills them all off in early middle age because he can’t think of anything else to do with them; I think the oldest member of the family in several generations makes it to about 50.
I read a historical romance series called Windhaven when I was a kid. I chose it because it was set in Alabama and, though I haven’t read it in 26 years, I liked it at the time, to begin with. The first was well researched, covered about 50 years and was a multigenerational family saga about the forging of a plantation out of the wilderness. The second covered 30 years (including the Civil War) at lightning speed and every member of the family was either Snidely Whiplash or St. Francis of Assisi, no subtlety or nuance. The third book moved the family mostly out west and continued their canonization and by the fourth it was basically softcore histo-porn and the series went on and on and on and on to about 20 books, all written over the course of two or three years. Just absolutely dreck by the end. I think it was a case of several authors using the same grandiloquent nom de plume, ala Wagon’s West (which also went to about 9,000 books and was pretty awful). Ah, how young the teen years are when that stuff seems readable.
I’m surprised (unless I’m overlooking it) nobody has mentioned Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter novels yet.
Red Dragon was good for what it was- a crime thriller with a fascinating cameo.
Silence of the Lambs was even better even though it was basically the same story, just switch the gender of the protagonist and include more of HL.
Hannibal- it definitely had its moments, but overall it was a big mess as it tried to glamorize and romanticize and, worst of all, explain Hannibal and convert him from the remorseless murderer of the first two books (in which his victims were NOT all rude or villainous themselves) to a suave brilliant anti-hero with a tortured past. WHO KILLS AND EATS PEOPLE!
Behind the Mask hasn’t been released yet, but the fact that the novel and the movie entered production at the same time doesn’t bode well for its quality, plus the new book’s a prequel and for a character like Hannibal less can be more. He simply does not work as a protagonist.