Mmn. Can’t really disagree with you. Mind you, GJatRQ isn’t bad. It just isn’t anything to fire the imagination. It felt to me like an extended character study, where Bujold was playing with the intersectionality of biology, identity, and technology; a theme that runs through all of the Vorkosigan Saga. And seeing if she had any more stories to tell about Cordelia. As you point out, the conflicts are all internal, and there aren’t any villains to defeat (save maybe the sleazy plascrete contractor). I wasn’t to impressed by the big reveal about her history, simply because it felt like that came out of nowhere. It’s always fun to see Miles in a state of crogglement, though.
As good as the Vorkosigan Saga is, my very favorite LMB stories are the World of the Five Gods tales, especially the Penric and Desdemona novellas. It’s a shame that the success of Game of Thrones means that it will be years before anyone can make a series of The Curse of Chalion or The Paladin of Souls, without being accused of ripping off George R.R. Martin. Complete nonsense, of course - the Chalion books are wildly different in tone than GOT.
That said, I found The Hallowed Hunt to drag, quite a bit, and Ingrey and Ijada not as compelling as Cazaril, Iselle, Ista, or Penric.
Haven’t read King Rat yet, and maybe I won’t after your comment. (Which is probably the best description of Mieville’s style that I’ve ever seen.) So I’d have to rate Iron Council as my least favorite Mieville novel. I generally liked the New Crobuzon stories, but I had to force my way through that one. And even Perdido Street Station and The Scar didn’t rise to the levels of Embassytown or The City and the City.
I’d expect just the opposite - the success of GoT meant that a lot of people are looking to replicate its success, which makes it more likely that someone is going to take a look at Chalion and try to turn it into a TV show. Fear of being accused of being a rip-off didn’t stop the Witcher from getting adapted, nor Shannara, nor Sword of Truth. Nor, for that matter, GoT itself, which likely was largely greenlit because of the success of the Lord of the Rings movie.
Goodbye California had a Nero Wolfe like protagonist and a ticking bomb. I didn’t finish it.
A friend of mine insisted that his decline began with putting headlights on a formula V in The Way to Dusty Death. I’d say the decline began with Breakheart Pass. He write great stuff up until then.
Sorry if I gave the impression that I began with The Number of the Beast. I started reading his juveniles back in about the 1970s (The Man Who Sold the Moon; Starman Jones; Have Spacesuit, Will Travel - things like that).
I haven’t heard this about Cujo. However, I know King had admitted this exact thing with regards to The Tommyknockers.
I haven’t read a ton of Heinlein. I did manage to make it through Stranger in a Strange Land, although I didn’t really like it. But I just could not complete Time Enough for Love. I think that’s the only book I ever put down in the middle. I gave up once the incestual kiddie-diddling was front and center.
I’m a big fan of fantasy writer Guy Gavriel Kay, obviously, but his 2007 novel Ysabel - AKA, *My Provence Vacation Tax Write-Off *- was virtually unreadable.
(His subsequent books were a bit better, but nowhere near the level of his 1990s masterpieces).
I hope I’m wrong and you’re right; I’d like to see a Chalion series. I’d be interested in how the screenwriters translate the theology of the Five Gods, which is integral to the story, onto the screen. I’d just be afraid viewers would think, “Castles, swords, magical gods, slightly odd titles of nobility, a young queen struggling for her throne – eh, we’ve seen this before.” Despite Iselle and Cazaril being nothing whatsoever like Daenerys and Jon.
I’d really love to see Paladin of Souls made into a series, because that would be something truly unique – a medievalesque swords-and-castles fantasy where the hero is a middle-aged grandmother who rescues the hero, rediscovering her agency and her sexuality in the process. But Paladin really doesn’t make sense unless you’re familiar with the events of Curse of Chalion.
Mark Twain - The Prince and the Pauper. Just boring, tries to be overly clever, lots of dreary dialogue about complicated, but ultimately uninteresting situations. I know he was making points about class distinctions etc, but he did it far better in A Connecticut Yankee[/I*].
I’ve been surprised by how much his son’s books have been Francis-esque. Right down to all the cliches that I like: the innocent guy with a character flaw… out of his depth when faced with evil, but of course finds just enough resolve to overcome his oh-guess-it-wasn’t-quite-a-fatal-flaw.
It helps that I’ve been listening to them… the books by Dick, then Dick With Felix, and now Felix… and they use the same classic Brit narrator (Simon Prebble? Martin Jarvis? One of those blokes).
And as if I am compulsively contrary, I must say that I rather enjoyed “The Children of Húrin”. it is one of the audiobooks I have kept on each of my iPhones.
So much hate for Heinlein’s Number of the Beast, and nobody has even mentioned To Sail Beyond the Sunset? Although, in fairness, I gave up on that one fairly early.
I’m a big fan of Tana French – her first two novels recently appeared on TV as Dublin Murders – but I was severely disappointed by her latest, The Witch Elm. For the first time she told the story from the suspect’s POV instead of the detectives’, and I found it impossible to believe any of it. Plus it was bloated as hell.
These are the books that came to mind when I saw the thread title. The original book in the series Rendezvous with Rama by Clarke is a masterpiece of suspenseful, clearly written and well thought out science fiction. The three sequels are set in the same Universe and have the same idea - mysterious alien spaceship flies through the solar system and is visited by humans - but are just awful. They are full of treacly, mauldlin emotion. There is a lot of political stuff and some weird interpersonal relations - at one point a thirteen year old girl marries a much older man and this is seen positively.
I can’t say they are unreadable, because I did read them. But I wish I hadn’t.
I didn’t include them because I don’t consider them as being written by Clarke.
And you are too kind. The lead character in the first book is, IIRC, an Olympic athlete, Nobel prize winner who has an affair with the King of England. I don’t think even Lionel Fanthorpe could come up with that one.
No to mention Catholic Gentry imposing his religious nonsense on Clarke’s universe.
There is a sentence in Cradle which I think is the worst sentence I have read in any book. I’d find it and quote it, but the Internet would crash.
TSbtS is nowhere near as bad as NotB. It makes sense. It rambles unbelievably, but part of it is part of Time Enough for Love told from a different POV.
PG Wodehouse’s first Blandings Castle book, Something Fresh, was published in 1915. It is excellent. Wodehouse was working on the last one 62 years later, when he died. I have read a version of the last one, and it is at worst pretty good, so I would say that is a lengthy series that didn’t get stale. It certainly did not descend to unreadability, like some of the examples here.
My favorite author is Terry Pratchett, for example, and I could not finish Raising Steam. I found it much worse than Unseen Academicals.