We're never going to see these books, are we?

Cafe Society
1

Harlan Ellison
*The Last Dangerous Visions *
current status: Originally due in 1972. Ellison died in 2018. Some stories from the book have been published separately

David Gerrold
A Method For Madness and the rest of The War Against the Chtorr series
current status: The first four volumes were released in 1983, 1985, 1989, and 1993. There have been excerpts published since. Gerrold insists he is still working on this series.

Robert Jordan
The rest of The Wheel of Time series
current status: Jordan died in 2007. Some of the unfinished books in the series were finished by Brandon Sanderson. The main series is concluded but Jordan had planned on writing at least five other books in the same setting.

Donald Kingsbury
The Finger Pointing Solward, sequel to Courtship Rite (1982)
current status: Kingsbury says he has been revising it. Since 1982.

George R.R. Martin
The conclusion of A Song of Ice and Fire series.
current status: The first five volumes of the seven volume series were published between 1991 and 2011.

David R. Palmer
The final book in the To Halt Armageddon trilogy.
current status: The first book, Threshold, was published in 1985. It seemed like the series was dead. But then the second book, Special Education, was published this year. So who knows?

Melanie Rawn
The final book in the Exiles trilogy.
current status: The first two books were published in 1994 and 1997. But Rawn has moved on to other series and the third book, The Captal’s Tower, was never written.

C.S. Forester
Hornblower and the Crisis
current status: Forester died in 1966 so this one is looking increasingly unlikely. His outline was published and some authors have written a full version but there’s no official book.

George MacDonald Fraser
Flashman’s Civil War book
current status: Fraser talked about Flashman’s adventures during the American Civil War but he finally admitted he had no plans to write them out in a complete book. Then, to emphasize his point, he died in 2008.

Other examples are welcome.

2

My comments: Gerrold is never going to finish the Chtorr stories, and that’s not a bad thing. They were getting worse as it continued anyway, and I’ve got no faith in his ability to turn the quality around now.

Martin’s never going to finish a Song of Ice and Fire. I think he intends to, but the road to hell etc.

Wheel of Time: C’mon. Sanderson wrapped the series - do we need to go all Chris Tolkien and milk every footnote and mention related to it?

3

The last two volumes of The Historical Dictionary of American Slang. The first two volumes were published in 1994 and 1997. It’s an awesome resource, as long as the word you’re looking up starts with A - O.

4

I hope not.

I love Brandon Sanderson, and he gave a great effort to fill some BIG fucking shoes, but the tone and voice of his contributions just didn’t feel right. It doesn’t help that A Memory of Light had too much jammed in one book. It feels like he was artificially constrained in the number of books to finish it out, and it ended up as a “Hey, tie up all the loose ends!” book.

I still bawled like a baby when I finished it; that series defined my formative years, read and reread from ages 10 to 30. Knowing I was at the end was rough.

But at least Amazon is going to be there to destroy my fond memories (I kid… Maybe the series won’t suck, but thus far I’m worried…)

5

Patrick Rothfuss
Final book in the* Kingkiller Chronicles *trilogy.
Current status: the first book came out in 2006, the second in 2011. It’s obvious by now that he’s lost focus and wandered off on side paths, and that he’ll probably never figure out how to finish his story - or, for that matter, how to start it.

First of all, I prefer Sanderson’s writing to Jordan’s, so if there was a change in tone, it was for the better. Second of all, considering some of the preceding books, I’d much, MUCH rather read a book with too many things happening to a book with too few. “Too much jammed in one book” is something no Robert Jordan reader has said, ever.

(As an aside: I’m meeting Brandon Sanderson today! He’s holding a book signing near my house, and I bought a first edition of The Final Empire just for the occasion).

6

Orson Scott Card - the last of the Alvin Maker series.

However, the books since Prentice Alvin have become increasingly weird, and OSC himself seems to have turned into a complete loon, so this may not be altogether a bad thing

7

I’ll admit I would have put Irontown Blues in this thread up until recently. John Varley said he was planning on a three book series. Steel Beach was published in 1992 and The Golden Globe was published in 1998. Then he went off and started working on other books and it seemed like he was finished with his Eight Worlds work. So I was surprised when Irontown Blues was published last year.

8

And the novella The Slow Regard of Silent Things came out in 2015.

I’d somewhat agree Rothfuss might be a bit sidetracked, but my impression has always been that, like Thomas Harris (Silence of the Lambs), he writes slowly.

9

Clive Barker’s Third Book Of The Art.

*The Great and Secret Show *was in 1989, Everville came out in 1994.

10

I think we’ll get the next GRRM book, but I’m not optimistic for the final one(s).

11

I read somewhere -askamanager.com, of all places, I think - that Melanie Rawn is finally starting on The Captal’s Tower. How true that is I have no idea.

12

Would I be jumping the gun if I declared this the understatement of the day? LOL

13

C. J. Cherryh: another Morgaine novel. The last one [Exile’s Gate]ended on a cliffhanger, and it’s been almost 3 decades since it was released.

14

Yeah, I’ve given up on that series as well. It’d be nice if he’d just come out and say it’s dead in the water, though.

15

Eh, I kind of wish he had left it unpublished. It’s a terrible end to what had been a very good duology. Incredibly short, mostly a retelling of the end of Steel Beach, boring main character.

16

Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone, the ninth Outlander novel. It was supposed to come out this year. Diana Gabaldon is so busy with the TV series, she probably won’t finish it until she’s under the gun for the script for the corresponding season.

17

Who wrote “a full version” of this? The only person to try to flesh it out that I’m aware of was C. Northcote Parkinson in his The Life and Times of Horatio Hornblower, but his suggestion of the way that “adventure” ended (which differs from the notes in the published edition of Hornblower During the Crisis, and may well be the “twist” that Forestyer intended to throw into his book) isn’t at all a “full version” of the story. Did other people publish “completed” versions?

By the way, Forester wrote three more Hornblower stories that aren’t part of the “official canon”, apparently because they aren’t consistent with the official series of novels* – “Hornblower and His Majesty”, “Hornblower and the Hand of Destiny”, and “Hornblower and the Charitable Offering”, all published 1940-1.
Asking when a book will be finished by an author or editor now dead is sort of like Beating a Dead Horse. By this logic, we’re all going to be disappointed forevermore because Charles Dickens never finished The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Others have written extensions and completions of it, but they’re not “official”

*Not that the complete set doesn’t have inconsistencies, as well. In The Happy Return/Beat to Quarters (published in 1937) Captain Hornblower is said to have just met Mr. Bush when taking up command of the Lydia, whereas in Lieutenant Hornblower (published in 1952), they meet when they are both Lieutenants.

18

I loved the end of WoT. Actually, if pressed, I would say I enjoyed Sanderson’s books more than Jordan’s because he did a yeomen’s effort to rein in plot lines that were all over the place and bring everything to a satisfying conclusion.

Add in the fact that he made Mat Cauthon even cooler than he was before and Sanderson wins in a route.

19

Ken Grimwood was supposedly working on a sequel to “Replay” when he died, so we won’t be seeing that one, at least not in this timeline. However, Greg Benford’s recent “Rewrite” and Blake Crouch’s “Recursion”, both recently published play in the same sandbox.

20

Rothfuss wrote himself into a corner by saying that Kvothe’s story would take exactly 3 days to tell then proceed to fill the first two books a lot of (highly entertaining) trivial stuff that didn’t move the story forward very far or very fast. Now he has 1 more book left to conclude all of the plot lines that have been alluded to but not explored (he still hasn’t discussed what’s supposed to be the main plot line, his parents killers) and I don’t think he knows how to do it.