I didn’t give up on the Harry Potter series, but I agree that Book 5 (Order of the Phoenix) represented where, IMO, Rowling started to struggle with her story, and started to retcon plot points in order to reach the arc’s conclusion (an issue which only got worse in the last two books). If memory serves, Book 5 is also the one which was delayed in publication, when Rowling needed more time to complete it.
Huh, that’s funny, book 5 was one of my favorites of the series. I thought the biggest disappointment was book 7, though of course I wasn’t going to give up on it at that point. Though to be fair, that’s partly because, before then, any time a thread wasn’t resolved, you could just say “well, maybe that’ll be resolved in the next book”, and so it wasn’t until the last book that those threads were definitively abandoned.
In the sphere of “authors who change the rules/world mid-series” there’s Dmitry Glukhovsky’s Metro series of books. The premise is that, after a nuclear war, a population of people reside in the shelter of Moscow’s metro network. Although they’ve scratched out tenuous living in the major stations, the upper world and the dark labyrinthine tunnels of the subway are crawling with nightmarish monsters and bizarre psychic phenomenon. Large stations or groups of stations also have cultural/political differences: there’s a group of communist stations, a network of capitalists, some wanna-be Nazis, etc.
Metro 2033: A strange new type of monster is threatening the Metro. Protagonist goes on an epic journey threatened by man and monsters to figure out how to stop the creatures
Metro 2034: A strange threat has shut down one of the major stations. Protagonists go on an epic journey threatened by man and monsters to solve the issue.
Metro 2035: No more monsters. At all. In pretty much a single sentence, Glukhovsky says “There’s no more creatures” and anything about the paranormal weirdness of the tunnels is wiped out without explanation. Mind you, these books all occur (as the titles suggest) within a year of the neighboring novel. The rest of the book is about politics between the stations and “Who’s really pulling the strings of society?” stuff.
It was bizarre. Like getting to the third book of a high fantasy trilogy and being told “Also, there’s no dragons, elves or goblins and magic isn’t a thing any more and we’re just going to talk about political treaties between two mundane medieval-era nations”
Add me to the list. I think I lasted longer than most of you, hoping Hamilton would turn it around eventually. I was about a quarter through Dance Macabre when I finally lost patience. I closed the book, walked to the library, and donated it.
Glen Cook’s Black Company series. The first three books were tightly written, fresh perspective reads. Then the series fell of a cliff, turning into simplistic serial cliffhanger tropes.
I think I have a problem with book series in general. I mean I read Dune. Twice. Enjoyed it. I have no interest in the sequels. I am quite satisfied with the resolve of the book, as it were. More, I think, is that I get a little cynical. I figure if an author just pumps out five or ten books with the same characters in the same universe, he’s just being lazy. Or he can’t come up with anything original. Hyperbole, I know, but it steers me clear.
There were a couple of other series I dipped a toe into that I got bored with by the second book or so just because it was more of the same. Alex Delaware, the *Prey *series mentioned above, Dead Irish, whoever wrote that (I can’t remember the author or the main character now). I need fresh blood to hook me.
Well, there were a lot of factors. I saw the series as good mystery books with a heavy anti-bullying theme and a fun but goofy fantasy setting. I didn’t believe there was a serious story arc between the books until they became incredibly successful, and then Rowlings started to shoe horn one in.
She mastered her writing chops with Azkaban. And she had moved Harry from miserable orphan to a famous wizard and then given him a new father figure to take care of him (an uncle I think.)
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone - 76,944 words
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets - 85,141 words
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - 107,253 words
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - 190,637 words
uhoh. With the fourth book Harry was back to being abused by his foster family, the word count had almost doubled, and (in my memory… it’s been a long time since I read them) the first hundred pages of Goblet was just repetive farting around. Any attempts at significance seems out of place in the series. Writing decision were being made in order to string things out.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - 257,045 words
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - 168,923
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Approximately 198,227,
Anyway, I stopped in the middle of the 4th book.
I don’t know if its a series but ive given up on Mercedes lackey in general … everything I have ever read by her includes some sorf of physically or mentally abused or molested teens …
Even the book/series that started her career off the heroine was mistrusted by her Mormon style family because one of her half brothers bullied and hurt her and they didn’t know if she threw the rock that killed him or if he actually fell on it while yet again trying to rape her (which she never specifically mentioned to them ) So when the magical horse/unicorn picked her as its chosen one they didn’t cry much when she left
even when she wrote a short story for a witchworld anthology the two girls in it were neglected and ones guardian tried to grab her when he was drunk
I’m going to cheat here and name a comic book series but one that supposedly takes itself seriously.
There’s a comic called Uber that has a very interesting premise, What if Superheroes were in World War 2, and what if the Nazis invented them first? So basically during the Battle of Berlin Nazi Scientists in literally the last minute of the war unveil their new creations and save Hitler and Nazi Germany from the invading Soviet Armies. With the momentum now shifted back to Nazi Germany the war drags into 1946 as the Soviets, British, and Americans all separately desperately attempt to make their own superheroes to beat back the Nazis who are once again advancing on all fronts.
It was an extremely interesting comic that was very serious and dark but realistically so, up until I began to realize in order for the very story to function, you had to basically give the Nazis every single advantage, and make the Allies completely incompetent for the story to not just end once the Allies got their own superheroes. Seriously, every single decision the Nazis make is right, every single decision the Allies make is wrong. Germany somehow skates by while the Allies tear themselves apart trying to see who can screw up and prolong the war longer. It’s very obvious that the writer had enough ideas for the first 30 issues, then when he got an extension to write more he was like “Okay, how much longer can I drag this war out?” I stopped reading at issue 30 but I wouldn’t be surprised if in the current arc Nazi Germany has a space station shooting lasers down at various undefended cities while the Allies just hang back and debate who the real monsters are, them or the Nazis?
I don’t object to the recent changes in the Dresden storyline because my understanding is that Jim Butcher is working his way to a conclusion for the character and the storyline. The following is just my wild-assed guess, but a constant theme of the stories has been Dresden having to fight above his weight against hopeless odds yet somehow winning and emerging stronger than ever. What I think is going to happen is that Dresden will turn out to be destined (possibly by his deceased mother) to take on some giga-menace, someone or something that could thwart God himself, and that Harry will basically have to save Creation from being conquered.
Someone somewhere on this board once remarked that a good editor could have turned the first five Gor books into a decent trilogy.
Actually ive been told that the first 3 or so gor books weren’t even supposed to be published as they were written as a gift for the authors S&M style mistress … she said they were good enough to be published and set it in motion never checked out if there was truth to it
His name on the cover made me give up anything by Tom Clancy before Red October made it to Norfolk. Nearly gave up on Travis McGee when Meyer revealed he hung out with the Chicago school to try to “help out” Chile after the coup. Gave up on Ross Thomas when he died. Actually, still re-read him every 3-4 years.
I don’t know about something that’s a threat to God Himself, but his mother did contrive to make it possible for him to kill Outsiders, which is normally impossible in that setting.
Oh, this. Every time Kay Scarpetta investigates a murder she will find that …no matter how remote the circumstances are from her, no matter how clear the probable motive might seem — the REAL motive was that the killer was sending a message…to Kay Scarpetta.
And her friends and family are all secretly plotting against her and out to get her. I half expect the series end to reveal that she had a full blown psychotic break and had the delusions that her ordinary niece was some sort of super-genius high tech millionaire and that her husband faked his death and went into witness protection when in reality he left her because she was crazy.
I read the Harry Potter books and really enjoyed them. Quidditch aside, the only misstep I recall was Dudley Dursley’s inconsistent characterization. Not trying to marginalize anyone else’s opinion, different strokes and all that.
Don’t know if any dopers have heard of Greg Bieck, but xist does he suck! A “friend” thought I might like his Arkadian series because of a supposed Lovecraftian feel. Lies! The heroine was the most beautiful woman ever and you could see how intelligent she was in her eyes. By the time I got to the chapter with them explaining how the hero had been able to unlock the “full potential” of his brain to do things no normal person could do, I could feel MY brain atrophying. Oh, he was also the greatest Special Ops soldier ever as well.
I think I read that one. I’m not sure. It seemed to me she had two sets of fans. One set that liked the books because they were good procedurals set in a realistic supernatural world. The other set liked it because Jean Claude is dreamy. She picked the wrong set of fans over the other.
I couldn’t finish the first GoT book. In theory it should have pushed all my buttons, plus I’d read and enjoyed other works by Martin, but no. After a while I would happily have lined up every single character against a wall and walked along chopping heads. The only survivor would have been the Halfman, who would have gotten a close haircut but been left alive because he was the only one who seemed to have a braincell anywhere.
Later, watching the series, I realized why. I enjoyed the series much better; still not enough to keep up with it through moves and changes of schedule, but it didn’t fill me with fury at the complete mindlessness of a cast of characters whose reasoning seemed to boil down to “I am [of the house of Blahblah/name/profession]!”
There is a difference between occasionally using “I am Polish” as shortcut for “I come from a big family with a complicated lastname; most of my many relatives are Catholic and there are a handful of women who have everybody’s contact address or can get it in minutes” and responding “I… am… Polish!!!” when someone asks what will His Lordship want for breakfast. The books felt like the second. And Tyrion escapes that because he actually spends time talking to people, instead of just yelling “I am A Lannister!!!11!!!”
Doesn’t seem likely – the S&M is practically nonexistent in the early Gor books. It’s the later ones that get downright fetishistic.
I gave up on Game of Thrones when I realized halfway through book 2 that I was not having any fun. I felt like it wasn’t worth caring at all about any character.
I went on hiatus with the Dresden Files when I started a book and realized that Dresden’s life is just misery. I don’t like just hanging around while authors think of worse and worse things to do to characters. It makes me feel like I’m watching psychological torture porn.
I stopped reading Harry Turtledove’s new stuff when I was looking at a book in a series and wasn’t sure if I had read it. I started flipping through the book to see if it was familiar, and I couldn’t tell - some blocks of text seemed familiar, but maybe not, and there was a lot of padding around any of the main story’s action. I really like his short fiction and his earlier series stuff, but it’s clear that he’s turned into ‘people will buy this crap so I’ll churn out as much as I can’. (I don’t fault him for that, I’d probably do the same thing in his position, but that doesn’t mean I need to read it).
I gave up on the Dune continuations after the first non-Herbert one. I liked the Dune series, although they get more weird towards the end, but the ones I read that his son and Kevin Anderson did just don’t fix the world at all. People keep casually inventing things (when invention was a slow process in the time of the original book), which should have world-altering effects, but get completely forgotten about. (For example, the Baron Harkonnen has magical earplugs that filter out the Bene Gesserit voice ability in the prequel. So why does he keep Jessica gagged, then send a deaf guy to guard her in Dune when he could just pop those in?)
Yeah, Weber seems to have just suddenly lost it. He did the same ‘build up to a battle, then cut to after the battle’ thing in multiple places in the Honor Harrington series. It went from good high adventure space opera with quick plots and some useful writing to a long plodding mess that gets less interesting over time. Like one of the early books used a conference to great effect to let you see behind the scenes of the bad guys and understand their conflicting motivations. By the later books, conferences seem to be half the book, and there’s even multiple pages dedicated to why they picked a particular material and shape for the conference room table. Also because I liked the series I looked in on what people said about the later books and it turns out he’s just adding deus ex machinas all over the place, and blatantly contradicting the worldbuilding he established early on. (Like instead of being a non-League world that makes a lot of money from tariffs, Manticore is now a non-League world that outright owns the majority of League shipping, oh and they were also all of Haven’s shipping too, even though the two were at war in the early books).
There also seems to be a shift towards more ‘fanservice’ stuff; the early Bazhell books were these great quirky fantasy adventures with a protagonist getting annoyed by a god, the last one I read seemed to dwell a bit too much on the warrior women who had a multi-page justification for why they have to fight in leather bikinis, along with the lesbian escapades they get up to. I’m not opposed to beautiful bi babes in bovine-skin bikinis as a thing to look at or throw into erotica, but they really glaringly don’t fit into the world.