For a birthday when I was younger, a friend got me Eric Van Lustbader’s The Sunset Warrior trilogy. Except it wasn’t a trilogy; it was only two books. Although it came in a presentation box, it was only volumes 1 and 3. Like after starting it and finishing it, I’d rush right out and buy volume #2, anxious to find out the bit in the middle.
I never did.
My mom buys books for me all the time. She never bothers to check to see if its part of a series. Sometimes she buys me part two (without part one). Then she’s offended when I don’t read them.
I don’t really end up having this problem, but I read a lot more “self contained” literature and nonfiction than the “to be continued” variety of fantasy/SF stuff, and I tend to use the library more often than I buy books. (There’s a serious lack of good bookstores in the nearby area. Damn tourists!) I will admit, though, that I had a major letdown over the first two books of The Sharing Knife series. Honestly, I am not totally enthused about romance dressed up as fantasy when the fantasy part is lacking.
I’ve got Books 1, 2, and 3 of a nominally four-part manga series (Alichino, by Kouyu Shurei). Books 1 and 2 have lovely art and crap writing. Book 3 has lovely art and a real, compelling plot! Book 4… has yet to be published, and may never be, seeing as the magazine that originally published the manga has gone out of print. Grumble.
Nope. This is the same cover as mine. Nothing inside other than “other books by this author” - which didn’t list Olympos.
Blurb on the back about the plot and “Hugo winning author” - nothing anywhere on my copy to indicate that there’s another one.
Oh, goody.
I agree with Grammanaut – Olympos was almost unreadable. “Turd stuck in your Ilium” – 
Beware also of big fat hardcovers that are split and published in two paperback volumes. That happened with Speaks the Nightbird and with the Legends anthologies. Not such a big deal with Legends unless you were buying it for one or two authors and they weren’t in the volume you bought.
It needs to be said again: Simmons has a history of this. Hyperion is a brilliant book, wonderfully written with a great sense of wonder. And then it suddenly cuts off on the last page and it turns out that the great 600 pages you just read were little more than a prologue to a much worse book. At this point I’ve stopped reading him until well after the fact and if the comments on the conclusion are absolutely glowing.
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“No,” he whispered. “Oh, no.” then he felt the word well up from some terrible source, tear out of him, and the barred doors of the High One’s house split from top to bottom with the force of that shout.
There’s no question that it’s Morgon who shouts the Great Shout*. He shouts because of what he has just learned. What exactly has he learned? That’s not revealed until the next book.
I read the second book and wished I’d stopped with the first. I didn’t even know there WAS a second book - the first one was so blatantly following the format of Canterbury Tales that I assumed the open ending was deliberate.
I’ve run into this problem with Yami no Matsuei / Descendants of Darkness.
I don’t think the author ever finished it. I’m up to volume 10 or 11… and then it just peters out. Author went on hiatus (in 2003, so sayeth Wikipedia) and I have not heard a peep since. It’s been long enough that I’ve forgotten most of the story details anyway, and I would have to reread the whole thing if any more ever came out.
[The post below contains vague spoilers for the Prince of Nothing series. I’m not boxing them because there are no specifics of the plot mentioned, only the overall quality of it.]
Man, I know exactly what you’re talking about, Morbo. I’ve completely given up reading sci-fi or fantasy books unless I know that the series they’re inevitably a part of is completely finished. If I start a series that’s not done yet, I always lose interest in it by the time the next book is coming out. Also, if the whole series is done before I even start reading, I can’t be tricked into reading ten books just because I want to know how the thing ends. Only a trilogy? Sign me up. Decalogue with prequels? No thanks.
Enter R. Scott Bakker. His book The Darkness that Comes Before has a flashy cover so of course I am intrigued, but it clearly states “The Prince of Nothing, Book I” on it. Thus I don’t even consider wading in; to do so would violate my policy. Several years pass. Then I see his latest book, The Thousandfold Thought, that proudly advertises itself as “the conclusion to the Prince of Nothing series.” Hot damn, I think to myself, I can finally crack open this flashy cover and sink my teeth into a complete, self-encapsulated whole. And so I did.
Now, without spoiling anything specific, let me opine for a second.
To say that the third book, the soi-disant “conclusion,” wraps up absolutely none of the storylines is an understatement. Not only does it fail to even mention the cliffhanger at the very end of the second book, it wallops you with an even bigger one. Not only do none–none–of the characters have their conflicts with themselves or one another resolved (unless they end up dead), we get about three new major conflicts in the last chapter. And most egregiously, not only does the main story arc of the whole trilogy end pretty much resolved-in-name-only (i.e. not resolved at all), the book’s ending tries its hardest to make that whole arc irrelevant.
All of which, to be honest, would be basically fine with me if the book itself didn’t actually state it was “the conclusion to the series.” I mean, what the hell kind of conclusion is that? Surely this cannot be. A misprint, maybe? I frantically searched the web for some sign that this was not the actual last book of the series. And this is where R. Scott Bakker subverted my fantasy series policy.
It was the last book. Only now the author has started another series. That’s set in the same universe and about the same characters and takes place after the events in the last book.
Under what bizarre definition of “series” do these shenanigans make sense? As far as I can tell, this whole Prince of Nothing “trilogy” was merely a ploy to lull me into complacency, to make me think the series was finished and thus buy this guy’s books. Well, it didn’t work: I got them from the library.
That’s weird, that’s the same cover I have, in hardback, and on the back below the blurbs it says, “The epic begun in Ilium will be concluded in the forthcoming novel Olympos.” The plot summary on the back flap states this also. It really stinks that they left this out in your edition.
I found this one book at a used paperback bookstore. This group of people, some short ones, one with pointy ears, one rough and tumble outdoors-ey type of guy, one bearded really short guy, a normal human, and some other magic guy had to go to this far away mountain to throw away some kind of ring or something. It was pretty good, but, when I finished, they didn’t destroy the ring and the group got disbanded. I was so pissed. And, to add insult to injury, the book is so obscure I haven’t been able to find out the other two books in the series, even at full price. It was something like Lord of the Dance by Alice B. Toklas or something. …
Yeah, Dan Simmons is notorious for this. I start off almost every book excited and end up with “NO! You bastard!”
Try The Terror- it’s a stand-alone, I swear to God!
Maybe there were so many complaints that the publisher added that in later editions. Does it also say “NOT Hyperion! Two books only!”
So were Carrion Comfort – very good – and Summer of Night – which I hated.
For one horrible second I thought the title was a swipe at the Dave Simmons sticky :eek:
I thought that when I saw the thread and when I opened it, and for a few minutes of reading it. Then I realized it wasn’t, and that David Simmons had merely recommended this book that pissed Morbo off. It wasn’t until Just Some Guy said that Simmons had a history of this that I figured it out.
I don’t know. On the rare occasion I find a sci-fi/fantasy book good enough for me to actually finish, I’m happy to learn that another one just as readible is is about to come out. You have to count your blessings.
You’d think that, but my public library only has Tad Williams’ The Dragonbone Chair. Not even a hint of the other two books in the trilogy. And I didn’t find this out until I went hunting for book 2. :mad:
My dad once got me Terry Brooks’ Morgawr for a Christmas present. I read it anyway and then went out to get the first two books in the trilogy. (I wasn’t upset about that because I’d never read any Brooks before besides Hook and I didn’t know if I’d even want to keep it.)
