Sad but true. I read the first four books in the series in high school, and was so excited when the fifth book came out. Then I read the book. Jean Auel will not get another penny of my money.
Um, excuse me? THOR is from Norway. I’m not picking a fight with the freaking God of Thunder for no good reason. Are you TRYING to get a magical hammer shoved up my ass?
coughscaredycatcough
Oh, good grief. Just destroy Detroit and be done with it. No one could possibly object to destroying Detroit.
I grew up in Detroit - suburbs thereof - and I’m not objecting to destroying Detroit. Have at it.
But a real God-emporer wouldn’t fear Thor.
And risk the Wrath of Mom?!
Some slight attention must be paid to John Waters. He went from making brilliant transgressive art to “Pecker” and “Cecil B. Demented.” I mean, I understand the career arc (he’s said many times he doesn’t want to be “80 years old and making films about people eating their colostomy bags”) but that doesn’t mean I have to agree with it.
Robert Jordan, anyone? All of his characters became parodies of themselves by the 7th book. I fully expect Nynaeve to die of a bleeding scalp by the end.
I agree! Besides, he’s likely too drunk to hit the broad side of a barn with that hammer, even if he were inside it.
“With my mighty hammer I shall smite - oooh, butterflies!”
Of course, a real God-emporer would go for pissing off the real baddie of Norse Myth - old One-eye. Lots of good karma there.
Many good suggestions here: Anne Rice (who is unreadable for me), King, and MacCaffery and Pern etc.
I nominate Elizabeth George, for not only killing off the wrong character, but then writing a book about the killer (What Happened Before I Shot Her or some such thing). Gah-bad.
and Patricia Cornwell as well. May she be forced to read and reread her stuff in the afterlife. Autopsy shows overbrushing(of teeth), indeed.
Comedians are ripe for this cateogy as well, but I can’t think of any offhand.
Please don’t attack Norway. Detroit you can level at your pleasure. And Trenton–take out Trenton.
William Goldman, a number of years after writing his great thriller Marathon Man, decided to write a sequel called Brothers. Made no sense at all. Brought back a major character from the dead with practically no explanation, and the main plot was incomprehensible. There were some great set-piece chapters, but overall it was a sad mess.
Sob, tell me about it. And a more relentlessly depressing FOR NO REASON AND NO GOAL book than What Came Before He Shot Her you will not find.
I’d second Anne Rice - after the original vampire trilogy her work just descends into lower levels of crapness.
I beg to differ on Ursula le Guin, “the Dispossessed” was one of the best books I’ve ever read (although City of Illusions was fairly bad). Maybe if I read more of her books I’ll agree, don’t know. I didn’t like the Earthsea books at all, I got bored and gave up reading half way through the first one.
Terry Pratchett seems to only be going through the motions now, he seems unable to come up with an original idea. The same with Tom Holt who I used to love but now have great reservations about reading.
I don’t class the travesties produced by Anderson and Herbert’s son as related to his work, they’re just bad pulp sci-fi. Saying that the books after God Emperor weren’t so great either.
If we’re nominating places to destroy can I suggest Birmingham? It’s a complete shit hole.
This is for work that’s gone downhill over the course of a series. Jordan sucked rocks from book one.
I think “The End of Evangelion” needs to be mentioned again. I really liked the end of the TV series; the show was derailing itself quickly with its mess of confused plot threads and mishmash of symbolism, and to me it seemed like in the final two episodes the show managed to take a step back and save itself from an impending trainwreck. Leaving so much unexplained detracts, for sure, but the series end touched me. It felt like the director was saying “OK, I was getting pretty off-track there, here’s what this show was really supposed to be about.” It was a pretty brutally honest look at insecurity and loneliness, which were the crippling flaws of the (otherwise boring) main character from the very beginning.
Then along comes the movie. Or actually, it didn’t, since I’m quite happy pretending that “The End of Evangelion” never happened. I liked the show’s ending, and I’m not going to let the movie ruin it.
This one is far less egregious, but I’d also nominate the movie for Fullmetal Alchemist. Dammit, you were supposed to undo the series ending, not make it worse!
I wouldn’t get so bent out of shape with tehanu if I wasn’t a big fan of Ursula - the Dispossessed, the lathe and LHoD are great, great books from that time period. I’ve even read ‘Always coming home’, which takes some dedication.
I was in Birmingham at the weekend for a football match and thought it was great! Really nice city centre. It was at night, though.
i cannot hear this in any other voice but Milkshake’s.
As for the rest of the thread - I loved the Rama books, I’ve never been able to read Ursula K. LeGuin (although, to be fair, all I have is The Left Hand of Darkness. Every few years I pick it up and start it… and put it down less than 20 pages later.)
As for my own, this is a really short series, but I thought that Son of a Witch (sequel to Wicked) was a huge disappointment. Of course, the disappointment really started at the end of Wicked, but there was some stong writing and imaginative character development up until there, and so I was hoping for better in Son of a Witch. It was, in fact, much worse.
Funny, I think Pratchett is getting better with every book.
George Carlin. Bill Mahr. Dennis Miller. Any comedian who tries more for applause than laughter.
How can we have gotten to 78 posts with no mention of Bob Dylan? I was a fan of his for about one or two albums in the 1970s (e.g. Blood on the Tracks), but lost interest before he was born again, and haven’t paid any attention to him since.
But I happened to see him on some award show in the last month or two and he was awful. And these reports from a recent concert bear that impression out.
Of course, many people think he’s been pissing on his own music for decades, and I wouldn’t argue. But what else can you do when you’re legend in your twenties and don’t have the sense to die young, but hang around for another 40 years? Just imagine the shit that Mozart would have been churning out if he had lived to be 70. 
I don’t know if it was years after the original, but I’ll have to name Niven’s Protector, here. Ringworld was a masterpiece of epic scale, where you could just sit back (like, many AUs back) and gawk at the wonder of it all. Then he wrote Protector, and revealed that all of the protagonists of Ringworld were monumental idiots with the attention span of a lobotomized goldfish. Mind you, Protector was bad enough on its own merits (I’m not getting arthritis. I’m getting better! Also, I like sweet potatoes more now than I used to.), but the notion that Louis, Speaker to Animals, Teela, and Nessus and the entire Puppeteer race could all somehow forget about the Pak just doesn’t make any sense.
I read “Ringworld” and did the very thing of which you speak. Then I found “Ringworld Engineers” and did more of the same. From time to time, I still reread these great tales and enjoy them. I eagerly bought and read “Ringworld Throne” when it came out and wondered WTF and why did I waste my money? Does “Protector” come after? If so, I’m glad to pass it by.
CedricR.