I like to buy books in sale bins at book stores without knowing anything about them or their authors and read them. Sometimes, like now, it bites me in the ass.
Thank you Dan Simmons for making me read 725 fucking pages of The Ilium only to discover TO BE CONTINUED. Now I have to go out and buy Part Two.
I fucking HATE books that do this without any warning. It’s the goddamn Alex Kay Harry John Delaware Cross Scarpetta Bosch Corey PhD DCPD ME LAPD FBI bullshit fast food crap airport sequel books that drove me to my new “blind bargain bin” policy to begin with. I never dreamed a book this huge would do the same thing to me.
How about “Part one of an x part series” somewhere on the cover? Or on the back? Would that be too much trouble?
And really, you couldn’t wrap that up in 700 fucking pages? You couldn’t maybe have toned down the bombardment of Trojan and Achaean characters a tad to save space? Not even some semblance of tidying up loose ends so that I’m not FORCED to go buy the next one? You couldn’t wrap anything up at all? What is this, Lost?
Oh, and thanks for demolishing my dwindling recall of Homer by throwing in some organic crab robots from Io and Quantum Teleportation. I can’t wait to use that on Jeopardy.
I used to buy used books without looking too closely at the specific book were - if it were on my list of titles or authors I was looking for, I’d pick it up. And if I knew it was part of a larger series, I’d leave it til I got the rest of that series.
Which is why my sister happened to find my copy of Patricia McKillip’s Riddle-Master of Hed on my unread pile. I knew there were two more volumes in the series, and I was waiting for them to show up in the used bookstore. She didn’t know this.
And about 12 hours later she barged into my room, telling me that I had to hand over the next book. Or else.
I then explained to her that I not only didn’t have the next book, I didn’t know when I’d find the next two books in the trilogy, because I hadn’t seen either of them in the past two times I’d been to the store.
She then sputtered for a few minutes trying to figure out what she could do about this.
I calmly pointed out that if she’d told me she was going to borrow that book, I could have warned her.
This did not noticeably calm her down.
She then left my room muttering about “Someone screamed. And I can’t find out who!”
(For those who haven’t read the Riddle-master of Hed books - the first book ended with a cliffhanger, and with a sentence that was, I think, “Then someone screamed.”)
That kind of crap pisses me off, too. All I can offer is my sympathy for the OP.
I fell into that peril a few years back with some secondhand fantasy novels. Always would up with say, book 2 of 5. Never to find the others. It was a bugger.
I sometimes buy a book without knowing anything about it or the author, too. But if it’s part of a trilogy, I buy the other two parts at the same time. So I end up wasting three times as much money when it turns out to be a piece of shit :mad:
I felt that way when I went to see The Golden Compass. I knew the book was part of a series, but I thought it’d be like Harry Potter & the Philosopher’s Stone- a set up for sequels but also self-contained. The particularly irritating part was that I didn’t care enough about the story or the characters to read the books so just left with a sort of “that’s a placeholder til I see a complete movie” feeling.
Don’t bother with part two. I finished Ilium with the same WTF!-sensation and then bought part two (Olympos) only to find it riddled with typos and weird transport passages. It looks like a draft, not a finished novel. It also looks like a draft that an editor should have shaved off to about half before allowing it to be published. Blegh.
I used to like Simmons a lot, but reading Olympos was like waking up one morning to realize that hot guy you’ve been dating is really a knuckle-dragging slob and you were only temporarily insane.
I had a friend who would not read books that were part of a series until he had all of them. He was always getting annoyed at authors who took years to finish writing trilogies.
And OtakuLoki’s post reminds me that a friend lent me her copy of a trade edition of the complete Riddle-Master trilogy, which I really should read one of these days.
I’ll admit that since SF/F authors don’t seem to be *even remotely * interested in writing stand-alone books anymore, I’ve gotten in the habit of checking the end of the book for signs of the dreaded “To Be Continued” turd.
I’m three quarters through the Hyperion tetralogy. It’s very clearly a set of four, although you could get away with just reading the first two, he at least puts an ending there.
If you don’t want to start that series, I can summarize the first book for you:
Some people go to Hyperion.
They tell stories.
They get to where they want to go.
The End.
I left one spoiler out, but that’s pretty much it, it’s step 2 where the bulk of the plot lies. It is pretty blatantly set up for a sequel. Really do your research before starting something, at least read wikipedia minus the Plot Summary section.
This is why I now make a point of checking the end page of the book, before buying. I thought I was safe with omnibus editions. Until I got the two Gaunt’s Ghosts omnibuses by Dan Abnett… and found out that there were more books. Some not yet published (or written, probably).
applause
I’ll have to re-read my book, later, but from what I can recall it is pretty obvious that it is Morgon, who shouts (something he hadn’t been able to do very well), at the shock of discovering who the High One was. It might be, though, that the identity of who the High One was isn’t revealed to the reader…
But that’s been out for decades. Any decent public library will have all three books bound together in a single hardcover.
There is a bit of hanging at the end of the first book, but at least Hamilton’s ‘steam trains and wormholes’ schtick is entertaining. Simmons, like Turtledove, just seems to have gone to hell in recent years.
Sorry, I should have been more clear - this was back in the early to mid 80s. The only omnibus edition was the SF book club one, and it was cheaper to cruise the used book stores.
(And my local library, at the time, was not exactly kind to SF/Fantasy fans.)
The first two books of a trilogy, as far as I can tell the third volume was never published. And the second volume ends in a cliffhanger.
A two volume fantasy: The first volume was incredible, easily one of the best fantasies I ever read. The second volume was crap with an ending which made me feel as if their was supposed to be a third volume.
I thought the book flap on *Ilium *describes it as the first of a two-part epic? Or did you buy it without a cover?
I hate it when a paperback novel includes an excerpt from another book at the end. You’ll think there are 20 pages left to go in the story, and suddenly it ends on the next page.
Very disappointing.
I’ll have to re-read my book, later, but from what I can recall it is pretty obvious that it is Morgon, who shouts (something he hadn’t been able to do very well), at the shock of discovering who the High One was. It might be, though, that the identity of who the High One was isn’t revealed to the reader…
Maybe. I just wanna know who wins.