Otherwise known as the **Midi ** (for midichlorian) award.
Every so often, an artist decides to revisit a previous work, years after its original release, in such a way that the new product is much, much worse. This is the thread to bitch about that.
My own nomination: Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind.” The original version, about Marilyn Monroe, was beautiful, moving, and smart. The remake, about Princess Diana, was so incredilbly banal and insipid that even the fact that it was for a funeral gets it no sympathy points.
Just from the thread title, I knew it was going to be the “Lucas Award For Lifetime Achievement.”
My nominee(s) is/are every author who has tried to push the limits of a series past its breaking point, or ever attempted to kludge together a bunch of completely different works into a “Common Universe” so they could make more money. Larry Niven, I’m looking at you! Isaac Asimov, ghost of, step right up. Many more can be named. Rather than leave their excellent creations as they were, they had to write prequel aver prequel and sequel after sequel until the whole mess collapses under its own weight.
Dishonorable mention to those authors who start a series and never finish it. And no, death is not an excuse!
I may be interrogating the text from the wrong perspective, but the degeneration of Laurell K. Hamilton’s “Anita Blake” series into furry gothic soft-porn probably counts, in my opinion.
Ray Davies, for not leaving greatest-album-ever The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society alone. Instead he decided to release the pseudo-sequel Preservation Acts 1 and 2, a sprawling and practically incoherent political/sci-fi rock theatre epic that recycles characters and themes from the original album’s songs.
Ursula Le Guin has to be mentioned here, with her fourth contribution to the Earthsea series of books - Tehanu. The Earthsea trilogy is really special - written for younger readers but put together with such beauty and skill that it’s universally admired (and copied ). It’s an exquisitely balanced set of books, you could pick it up tomorrow and it would not have dated at all (it was written in the late 60s). I guess a lot of members know it well.
Now, take the themes and ideas in this mighty work and twist them. Then stretch them. Then thin them out. Then undermine and over-interpret and bad-mouth and laugh at them. Replace a gentle, subliminal hint of gaia - just a barely perceptible nimbus of the earth-mother - with a didactic, hectoring harpy who STAMPS HER DISTOPIC WORLDVIEW INTO YOUR CEREBRAL CORTEX. Then take the whole bloody afterbirth of a book, a book that cannot even achieve its objective of ridiculing her readership because it’s written with such graceless cack-handed ineptitude, and serve it up to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America - such that it wins the Nebula award (1990).
Truth to tell, Ursula K. Le Guin hasn’t written a sentence worth reading since 1976. She is the archetypal author who has, in the words of the OP, for various complicated reasons, decided to piss all over her own work. It has been an incremental pissing exercise that has lasted thirty years. Each new book representing an as yet unexplored hinterland of shrill mediocrity.
That she is revered as the grand dame of literary SF and fantasy is, nonetheless, entirely appropriate. Earthsea is that good, that perfect a set of books, that none of the above really matters.
Dean Koontz is now just recycling his own cliches in book after book after book. If anyone else in the world submitted the manuscript for Life Expectancy, it would have been passed around the editors for laughs and then summarily turned down.
I wish Joseph Heller had not decided to revisit Yossarian et al.
In Closing Time, not only did Heller fail to recapture the magic of Catch-22, but (for me, at least) he diminished the appeal of the original. Now, when I reread Catch-22, thoughts of Closing Time sneak in and mess things up.
I actually had someone treat me like the Chosen One when I mentioned in passing that I had never read past the first Dune novel. IIRC, he called me “You Lucky Bastard” for like 2 weeks straight.
Hey that was gonna be mine! Take the wonderfully ambiguous mythic ending (“Nobody knows what happened to Ged after he sailed away, some say this, others say that”) and spell out exactly what happened, then have it not be very interesting. He fell into a coma and had to lay still through a strident 100-page Women’s Studies 101 lecture!! He was probably faking the coma just waiting for his caretaker to shut the hell up.
OK… how about Philip Jose Farmer? Riverworld was a great series when he tied it all up in a “Gordian knot” (his words) at the end of Book 4. Book 5, Gods of Riverworld, sucked. Bunch of characters yacking and debating, one chapter of story, more yapping.
And U2? What’s with using crappy alternate mixes of most of the Pop and Zooropa material on the 1990-2000 greatest hits package? Give me the versions that actually were hits and leave the goofy stuff for the B-sides companion disc.
Never read the series, but I’m wondering if maybe they’re shouldn’t be a rule like “If your sci-fi/fantasy work didn’t already have gods-as-characters, making a book titled Gods of _____, God-Emperor of ______, or _____ Messiah, etc., is an automatic shark-jumping.” What do the dopers say?
I’d say that God-Emperor was by far my favorite Dune book, and that I don’t consider the first “trilogy” separate books at all, really. I think I only read the first Riverworld book – and that damn Sciffy movie bargled all my memories of that.
Although I enjoyed both series (for different reasons), I’d have to say that Zelazny’s second Amber chronicles seriously sucked most of the impact right out of the first Amber chronicles.
). It’s an exquisitely balanced set of books, you could pick it up tomorrow and it would not have dated at all (it was written in the late 60s). I guess a lot of members know it well.