Similarly, I would have said the same thing about Meg Cabot’s the Mediator series. She lamented for years that she had intended to write 8 books but due to poor sales her publishers demanded she wrap it up in six. The sixth book came out in 2004.
…and a novella came out in 2015. Then a 7th novel in 2016 
I don’t know if there will be an 8th book but it seems much more likely than it used to.
I could be misremembering, but I thought Larry Niven was going to write a 3rd (and final) book set in the Integral Trees/Smoke Ring universe. I think that ship has long sailed.
I’m going to throw John Ringo under the bus for two series that I enjoyed (well, at least at the beginning, less so later on…)
Which bills itself as a novel covering the early days of Earth’s exposure to the Schlock Mercenary (YEAH SCHLOCK!) Universe, with Howard’s approval. It was a good mix of predatory capitalism, scifi, military fiction with some decided comedy as well. Since we’re avoiding spoilers here, let’s just say we got to a spot where everyone in multiple planets and species is screwed up with no resolution in sight. And nothing since 2011. Now we were never explicitly promises a specific number of books, but I do not feel this was an intended end.
Secondly
Which I am much more ambivalent about seeing an end. This is a far future novel where life on earth is at the ‘indistinguishable from magic’ phase and a civil war breaks out over the future of humanity, and what humanity is. Think swords and sandals (or pre-industrial military fic) with a Sci-Fi twist. The first book is excellent, but the quality dropped off dramatically after. Ringo’s fascination with female sexual submissives (not judging, but pointing out since it’s shown up in several of his works) kind of takes over the actual plot in some ways, which left us at the final book with the main issue unresolved.
There have been hints that he’ll do a big time skip to deal with the ‘final resolution’ based on the ending of the last novel, but the first 4 books came out from 2002 - 2006. Nothing since.
Yeah, “The Ghost Ships” was to be the title - Larry said in 2003 that that one is not coming http://www.larryniven.net/larryletters/larryletter16-03-03.shtml
I met David Gerrold at a local sci-fi convention a year or so ago and asked him about this during a meet and greet. He said that the current books should be available online within the year (didn’t happen) and that we was working on the book. But he’s been saying that for 27 years, so it’s obvious that they will never be finished or published. He’s a really wonderful person; it was great to meet him. But he’ll never finish that series.
Such as the new Heinlein that was published this year…
Update: More than 11 years after J.D. Salinger died, his son still has not released Salinger’s unseen works.
“[We’re] going as fast as we freaking can,” Matt Salinger told the Guardian in 2019.
That’s absurd. There is no earthly reason why preparing manuscripts for publication should take this long. Something about this process is clearly dysfunctional.
Salinger’s career flourished from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. By and large, the readers most emotionally invested in seeing his unpublished writings are the ones who read him back then. They don’t have an infinite number of years left to wait!
On the way. (He also recently finished the The Last Dragonslayer series.)
Hooray! Thank you for sharing that. I’m sad to learn that Fforde had to deal with long COVID, but I’m glad to see that he seems to be doing better.
Don’t tell me that! I’ve already preordered my copy of The Milleres Tale II: the Vengeaunce of Absolon!
I waited many years for Alexei Panshin’s Universal Pantograph , the fourth Anthony Villars novel. Now that Panshin has died, I guess I should stop waiting.
Reviving this dormant thread to report the reviving of a dormant series.
S.M. Stirling released The Sky People in 2006 and In the Courts of the Crimson Kings in 2008. And then he moved on to other series.
But the third book of the trilogy, The Lords of Creation, has been written and submitted and is scheduled for release next month.
I just thought I’d point out in this resurrected thread that The Last Dangerous Visions has ben published since it started. It includes a lengthy explanation by editor J. Michael Straczynski explaining why it took so long. (It’s lengthy because, as JMS points out, it was more complex than “Harlan couldn’t find his typewriter ribbon”). The existing collection differs from many previously-cited lists, because many authors withdrew and new ones were added.
Thanks for that! It’s now on my Kindle.
I got Harlan to autograph my copy of ‘Again, Dangerous Visions’ back in in1975. He noted it was an SF book club edition copy and griped about how he got little money from that deal. Classic Harlan.
Still waiting for the ‘A Nest for Nightmares’ and ‘A Method for Madness’ by David Gerrold. I don’t expect to ever see them, but hey, it seems miracles do still happen.
There is usually work going on for releasing unpublished works of dead authors. New stuff by J. R. R. Tolkien is regularly coming out, The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond, came out in 2024. It appears that Alexei Panshin didn’t write any substantial amount of The Universal Pantograph that anyone else could finish.
Some of which went on far too long IMHO.
‘Dies the fire’ was a good start, but he dragged it out and morphed it from mostly SF to mostly fantasy… the last few books were pretty meh…
I’m wondering if Jim Butcher is really ever going to write another Harry Dresden episode?
He seems to have written himself into an impasse. Harry used to have a sort of everyman relatability, but in the last couple of books he has rather become transformed into a semi-supernatural being?
Maybe-
But yeah, accepting the Mantle of Winter Knight was a bad move - for the series, anyway.
Man, I hope not. The last couple of books were stinkers, and I can’t think of any way he can deescalate the conflict to a level that’ll be interesting.
Butcher’s great at the “light yet stupid” genre of modern fantasy. Nothing’s ever gonna beat Butters the one-man-band necromancing a T-rex into battle with a little bit of oompahpah. That was sublime. But Grizzled Wizard Fighting a God? Snooze.
Start a new series, with level 1 characters, see how it goes.
The next Dresden novel, Twelve Months, is due out in January 2026.
