Have you read ** A Lick of Frost**? Cel is not a problem at all, we have 5 books telling us that Prince Cel is a great threat to Merry and poof nothing.
[spoiler]The great horror that one of her Ravens is going to have to die is a shocking revelation? And not even really die, just not be around in human form to help raise the child.
If Merry is the personification of the Goddess, of course her Consort must be killed. He is the Horned God; his purpose is to be sacrificed to ensure the fertility of the land.
I fully expected all the Ravens were going to be killed when Merry got pregnant. That would have ensured the fertility of both Courts. [/spoiler]
I am so glad I read the last 3 books in the bookstore, they were not worth buying even in paperback.
Also, I’ll defend Orson Scott Card’s Giants series on one note. You have to read it as a standalone. It’s really just a new series. I thought as a possible-future-scenario series it was really interesting, it doesn’t carry too much of the original point of Ender’s Game, but it wasn’t meant to, IMO. On the other hand, everything after Speaker for the Dead simply doesn’t exist, in fact, I didn’t even READ Children of The Mind.
Y’know they’re making an entirely new re-telling of Evangelion? I forget if it’s another anime series, or a manga, but it’s called “Rebuild of Evangelion.” Frankly, I wasn’t much of a fan the first go around, but the more I read about the different endings from different movies, special releases of the series, etc., not to mention the alternate cannon versions in the two manga series, and now this? Kind of glad I never got too invested.
On that note, I’ve never read or seen anything of Dune after the first, and I only read the first three Hitchhiker’s books (HHGTTG, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and Life, the Universe, and Everything). Maybe I could read Clan of the Cave Bear and stop there, or read just the first three Dark Tower books?
My vote goes to Douglas Adams for “Mostly Harmless”, which he admitted he wrote in a bad mood with the intention of destroying all the characters. Gladly, the BBC radio adaption alters the ending…
I really liked DK2, but maybe that’s because I expected it to be dramatically different than the first. Batman got older and turned into a cranky old man rather than trying to revise his Batman role at simply an older age. Brilliant contrast from the small multi paneled pages in the first one to magnificent two page painted scenes in the second book for dramatic clarity. Except for the final sequence which was tense and had a slight twist.
Mika, one of my new Evil Plans to Conquer Humanity and Set My Doper Friends Up As Viceroys involves keeping Ireland whole, and since supposed to be ruling…um…well, I don’t remember,but someplace–you’ll have to nominate someplace else to be obliterated.
Although I am (grimly and doggedly) slogging my way through Stephen R. Donaldson’s Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant as they are released (it took me weeks to read Fatal Revenant because it’s so lousy), I wish to GOD that he had stopped after the original three books of the first Chronicles. Linden Avery has been a disaster since she first reared her ugly head, and I say this as a woman who is more than painfully aware of the scarcity of decent female characters in fantasy.
Also, allow me to jump on the bandwagon of those who absolutely wish U.K. LeGuin had put her pen the hell DOWN after she wrote the original Earthsea Trilogy. Her only other decent book was The Lathe of Heaven, which is, of course, NOT an Earthsea book.
Mark Twain.
He wrote Tom Sawyer, which was well-received, and was immensely popular in his own day. Then he wrote Huckleberry Finn, which excited some contempt (It was banned from its first publication by the Concord, Massachusetts library and reviled by Louisa May Alcott. Nowadays it gets banned for its use of the word “nigger” and for heavy emotional scenes), but which did amazingly well, and has been called “The Great American Novel”.
Then he decided to pick up some extra money by using his characters in other settings – “Tom Sawyer, Detective”, “Tom Sawyer Abroad” (whgich puts Huck and Tom and Jim on a trans’Atlantic balloon. Huh?) These works were panned in his lifetime, and haven’t been widely read since. He also started (but never finished) “Tom Sawyer Among the Indians” (which didn’t see light of day until 1968) and a story about Tom and Huck in old age (which he himself tore up). He talked at one point about doing a whole series of “Tom Sawyer in ________” books, which he fortunately never did.
I read Earth Sea for the first time relatively recently, and honestly I couldn’t tell any particular difference between Tehanu and the earlier books. I would suspect that if there is any difference, it’s between reading the books as a child or young adult, and reading it as an adult. The books themselves are pretty basic fantasy, and don’t really stand out if you’ve already got a lot of fantasy under your belt, so I could see having your childhood vision and then encountering a new book and finding it to be loathsome though it’s not any different in technical terms.
