My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult.
Funny you should mention Haldeman. I just re-read Marvano’s adaption of his The Forever War, which I enjoy the hell out of. It has a great ending that is awesome in so many ways, but that’s not why I’m here.
Forever Peace sounds like it should be the sequel to The Forever War, but it’s not - even if it deals with similar themes and the heroes of both books have a lot in common.
The direct linear sequel to The Forever War is entitled Forever Free. The surviving veterans of the Human/Tauran war live on the planet Middle Finger, where ordinary humans are allowed to breed and live pretty much as they had in the 21st Century. However, they still must follow the law set down by the rest of Mankind, which is now at peace with the Taurans.
The veterans decide to commandeer a mothballed battlecruiser orbiting Middle Finger, and fly out at relativistic speeds such that by the time they return, 40,000 years will have passed. The hope is that maybe society will have gotten more to their liking by then.
[spoiler]As they rocket out on their trip, a god-like entity that has been caring for the universe decides he doesn’t like the direction they’re going in and saps their ship’s fuel supply. When the heroes return to Earth, they find this same entity has gathered up all of Humanity and stacked us up in some mountain caves for safe-keeping until we prove we’re not going to try to undo the universe with what we’ve got going on.
This makes Earth seem deserted, except for the ancient shape-shifting alien who’s also been observing humanity this whole time; he assumes the shape of a giant amusement park cowboy statue that resembles John Wayne when he reveals himself to the heroes.
Finally, at the end, when god agrees to thaw everybody out, Mandella finally gets his wish to quit soldiering and become a physicist because at the same time, god tweaked the physics of the universe so we’d have to go back and re-learn some of the very advanced things we thought we already understood.[/spoiler]I liked Forever Peace and Seasons so much more!
I read the first book in the Kinsey Milhone series. The killer was so obvious that it might as well been titled “So and so did it!” This sounds much more interesting.
This is probably a different variation of “WTF ending” than most people are thinking of, but I would nominate Neal Stephenson’s “Cryptonomicon”, which just sort of abruptly ended. As I was getting closer to the end of the book, I kept thinking “Hmmm, he needs to start wrapping this up.” Then with about ten pages left I thought “He really needs to start wrapping this up!” When I got to the end I thought “WTF! That’s no way to end a book!” It’s like he wrote a thousand pages and just decided “Ehh… That’s good enough. I’m done.”
(Reposting from another older thread):
3001: The Final Oddessy.
Frank Poole’s dead body floating in space is resurrected 1000 years in the future, where he discovers paragliding, engineered dinosaur butlers, and that women are grossed-out by circumcision. Turns out the mysterious Monoliths are…Alien Computers there to kill us based on 1000 year old information about how terrible we were in the 20th century. Frank gets in touch with Bowman the sentient computer ghost and convinces him to give the monolith a computer virus. Which he does. And which works. The End. Yes that’s right, the entire Odyssey series boils down to a Deus Ex Melissa.
I wonder how that’s going to get changed when the hallmark movies and mysteries channel turns it into the next "murder she baked "installment
in the last one they were just announcing their engagement when it ended
I really enjoy Stephenson’s stories, but it seems that he really has a problem with endings. Every one I’ve read so far seems to wrap up in a not very satisfying way.
My immediate thought upon reading the OP was Atlas Shrugged. It spends several hundred pages as a socio-economical commentary, then takes a left turn at the end to become a straight up science fiction novel.
I actually went and got the book because of this. 
Oh, I guess Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle would qualify.
Beautiful character piece about a poor Lithuanian family struggling to make it in Chicago’s Packingtown. First, you fall in love with the family. Then things get bad. Then things get worse, then everyone dies, your heart shatters into a million pieces, you’re like ‘‘oh god, cut this guy some slack!’’ but about three-quarters deep, he abandons every shred of integrity and becomes an embittered asshole. Will the climax feature him reclaiming his moral virtue while finally establishing a foothold in society? No. The climax will feature him sitting in on a thirty-page long academic dialog about how socialism will save everyone. His wife and child are dead, his sister in law has been forced into prostitution, he’s still poor and living perpetually on the cusp of death, but never mind them anymore, because socialism.
It’s one of the most blatant manipulations of a character to serve an ideology that I have ever seen, and I was not amused.
Dickens’s “Our Mutual Friend” has a simple-minded garbage man who inherits a bunch of money. Then he gradually starts to become more and more of a miser, until in the end…it turns out that he was pretending all along! In fact, he’s so committed to his acting that he pretended to be a miser even when there was nobody around! Yeah, right.
I thought Atlas Shrugged verged into science fiction territory when Dagny discovered the perpetual energy machine, probably around page 200, far from the end of the book. In fact, it was this discovery that launched her search for John Galt.
The second volume of “School for Good and Evil.” But the third volume made up for it.
Yeah, the ending was a big let-down for me, too.
I’d also like to nominate a short story of King’s: Graduation Afternoon, from Just After Sunset. Nice, sweet little tale about a graduation party at a suburban home in Connecticut. Then, out of nowhere, she, and others, see a mushroom cloud from an atomic bomb’s detonation over Manhattan, and everyone is incinerated from the blast)
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six is another good example of a book that just suddenly ends for poorly explained reasons.
Basically for those that don’t know, Rainbow Six is about a counter-terrorist unit who unknowingly stumble upon the plans of a cabal of rich radical environmental terrorists who plan to unleash a powerful virus on the world to kill off humanity so they can start civilization anew with all their science buddies as the new smarter people of Earth (which is incredibly similar to Drax’s plan in the James Bond movie Moonraker oddly enough). Using stolen biological weapons research they plan on unleashing a deadly virus and then hunkering down in a massive heavily fortified and armed underground bunker complex in the middle of Kansas that’s self-sufficient for decades and that they plan on starting the new world from.
The entire book is basically following the Rainbow CT team on their various missions with each mission being harder than the last and the stakes and challenges getting higher and higher with each new mission, so obviously the final battle is going to be be suitably epic as the Rainbow team is going to have to face-off against the worst opponents possible in a scenario that their biggest fear. The book constantly hammers home just how hard facing off against a well armed and entrenched enemy is, especially on their own territory, as in every scenario previously Rainbow either outnumbered or was about the same size as their terrorists foes, and now they potentially have to face off against two hundred or more well armed terrorists to their 24 soldiers at maximum.
So what happens?
In the very last two chapters of the book the eco-terrorists plan is foiled and instead of holding tight in Kansas to prepare for an event that would make Waco look simple in comparison, they instead have 30 of the top terrorist leaders flee Kansas to a tiny outpost in Brazil in the middle of the rain-forest to hide out where they’re easily tracked and found by Rainbow. Despite their dwindling numbers the terrorists still have the advantage of numbers and defensive positioning against Rainbow who they know have surrounded them but lack the numbers to assault them directly. So what do the terrorists do? Move out from their tiny outpost and engage Rainbow directly in the forest, and Rainbow obviously leads them into an ambush that kills off most of the terrorists with no Rainbow casualties. Then Rainbow blows up the terrorists supplies cache and leave simply leave the remaining 8 or so of them to rot in the middle of nowhere. Book over.
Just for comparison, the final firefight is about three pages long, while previously the individual battles Rainbow found themselves in spanned dozens of pages sprawling across multiple chapters. They wrap up the final battle in about a single chapter of a 60 chapter book which was quite heavy on the filler. It’s a complete dud of a climax that relies heavily on the terrorists suddenly doing everything wrong at once just so they can wrap it up quickly. It would be like if the final battle of Saving Private Ryan just had the American soldiers blow up the bridge they were suppose to defend and calling it a day cutting out the entire giant shoot-out at the end. The book went from being okay to being absolutely terrible because of that crappy ending.
She does do that (the book is, after all, a paean to “modern” technology), but it isn’t until she descends into the mountains through a cloaking device that things get really weird. Also, I think the military is already experimenting with “Project X” around this time.
I read the book in 1993, so I’m coasting on memory here.
What about the torture scene when something funny happened to the machine? That’s what made the story weird. Ragnar’s voice heard inland when in fact he was out at sea is plausible, same with Galt’s motor.
Nothing beats The Bear and the Dragon for WTF endings.
After the US and PRC come to within seconds of Doomsday and all of China is in political turmoil, students aware of what’s happening via the Internet storm the leadership’s offices in Beijing and the bigwigs, ashamed of what they’ve done after invading Russia, surrender to them meekly. After more than 1130 pages, the whole story is wrapped up in about three.
Holy crap! Not only would the leadership take pains to ensure **NOTHING **came in over the Internet, the army would have been called out to deal with the students the minute they started assembling in Tiananmen Square!
I came here to post this. I started reading it way back when knowing nothing about it. Beautiful writing! Interesting detective thing going on then really out of nowhere … hello aliens.
Sadly, ruined it for me.
Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers. You probably know this from one of the many film adaptations (there have been four official ones), but it started with a story originally serialized in Colliers’ magazine (!) in 1954 and published in book form the next year. It unwinds very much like the original 1956 Kevin Mccarthy/Don Siegel film, with the ruthless relentless Pods taking over people one by one.
If you know anything about the film, you probably know that Siegel originally wanted to end it with McCarthy running down the highway, warning people in every car “You’re next! You’re next!” The Pod People let him, knowing he won’t be believed. Siegel wanted to show the view from inside the cars, so people would see how crazy it looked (The finally got a chance to do it in the 1978 remake, which has McCarthy doing exactly that, and shows him being viewed from inside a care.)
The studio thought that too depressing an ending, and people wouldn’r come to their movie once word got out about the downer ending, so they shot an “optimistic” version in which the authorities learn about a truckful of pods being in an accident, so they finally take notice. MvcCarthy’s character gratefully slumps against a wall.
So surely the novel uses the original ending, right? well, no, it doesn’t use either of these. The book ends…
[spoiler]… with the pods deciding that humans show too much resistance, and they fly up en masse into the sky to seek out a less troublesome planet. Really.
The pods are mindless mechanisms in their pod form, so the idea that they can think and evaluate their situation as pods seems absurd to begin with (the story certainly doesn’t suggest prior to this that they are capable of thought). Furthermore, it seems to be group thought, since they al go together.
But it’s absurd also because the pods are winning, as in the film. Why should they go? (for that matter, how do they go? Those huge pods defy the rules of gravity in simply lifting off into space). The only reason for this happening seems to be that Finney wanted a “happy” ending, and gave his book one much more optimistic than even the revamped movie. And it happens pretty suddenly, as if he’d hit his desired word count.
People seem to think that Invasion of the Body Snatchers was some kind of original incorporation of this idea of invading aliens “taking over” people, but it’s because it is one of the first times this showed up ion mass pop culture. The movie got it from Finney’s book, but Finney’s book was already a late expression of the idea. Finney’s book appeared years after Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters, which handled the whole thing much more intelligently, I thought. And Heinlein apologized to his agent for re-using what he thought an already overused idea for his book. [/spoiler]
I’m not sure why this is funny, but I was just listening to Lehrer’s “We Will All Go Together” and the resonance cracked me up.