Oberon is iffy for me - sometimes he’s exactly like a talking dog, others he’s like a neurotic guy shaped like a dog. I love his inability to understand time.
Granuaile is more consistently annoying with her daddy issues (bio and step) and SJW vibe; she’s largely why I’m ready for the series to end. It’s like a friend with an annoying mate - I’m glad he’s happy, but I won’t be around as much, thanks.
That’s the original short story, I think (which I haven’t read). The prose series is Seventh Son/Red Prophet/Prentice Alvin
(and nothing else. Nope, no further books at all … la la la la la…)
The David Robicheaux series by James Lee Burke. Highly entertaining in the early and middle going. Problem is, he writes these books in real time, i.e., the characters get older with each succeeding book. This would be okay, but eventually, he reaches a point where his leading characters have got to be in their mid-60s and he has them still being bad-asses, getting into bar fights and generally wreaking havoc. It just doesn’t work.
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You know why I gave up on the Dune series?
It was the goddamned retcons.
Not the retcons of Kevin J. “Star Wars hack” Anderson and Brian Herbert. No. Retcons in the 2nd and 3rd books, written by Frank Herbert himself.
First, do you remember the description of the guild navigators we got at the end of the first Dune book? They looked like ordinary people, except with the very deep blue-within-blue eyes of heavy Melange use. And this was a surprise to everybody. Even though the Spacing Guild had been using navigators for around ten thousand years, no one had noticed that they depended on Melange to do their job. (Nor, for that matter, had anyone noticed in all those millennia, that the single most valuable substance in the universe was produced as part of the life cycle of giant worms that lived on the same planet. But that’s a rant for another thread.)
Well, we’re not one chapter into Dune Messiah (the second book), and suddenly Spacing Guild navigators are these hideously deformed, mutation-bred monstrosities that barely show a shred of their ancestors’ humanity, floating in tanks of Melange gas that everyone in the goddamn room can see. And everyone always knew that this was what Guild navigators were like. Not only did they look nothing at all like the navigators from the first book, their extreme Melange addiction was a known facet of society, and had been since the Guild first formed – thereby reducing the big reveal at the end of book 1 to a big headscratcher and “what the hell, Herbert?!” moment.
Second, do you remember how Other Memory was first portrayed in Dune? It was essentially a download of one Reverend Mother’s memories into the mind of another Reverend Mother. Jessica ended up with the memories of the Reverend Mother she’d done the trance with, as well as the memories that that Reverend Mother had downloaded from an earlier Reverend Mother, which she’d in turn downloaded from her predecessor, and so on, all the way back through the centuries.
Well, in Children of Dune (the 3rd book), Herbert forgets all about that. Now Other Memory is a purely genetic trait. Alia and Leto II (the second Leto II, anybody remember the first one who died in the first book? Of course not) have the memories of everyone in their genetic lineage, including people who were never Reverend Mothers. Hell, Alia even has the memories of Baron Vladimir von Evil, for crying out loud. No download took place. Those memories exist in their minds because Gene Magic™.
I couldn’t finish Children of Dune, even as an audio book to listen to on my long commute to work. 
In addition to Pern and Dune, I got pretty sick of Diane Duane’s Young Wizards. I enjoyed the first 5 or so, but they got thin and boring.
Have just seen this thread (been away from the Dope for a while). As regards “Emberverse”: my response somewhat similar. I found the first three books in the series, compelling reading; while feeling a bit queasy about the nastiness and huge scale of the circumstances of the Change (95% of humanity dies – more often than not, horribly) – suspect that at heart I’m a wimp who really prefers stuff about rainbows and kittens and people practising love and peaceful coexistence. After that – as with yourself, tripthicket, for me it speedily went down the drain in becoming progressively more heavily magical / mythological / mystical. I pushed on to the end of book 5, with ever-lessening enjoyment, and stopped there: have not read another word of the author’s Emberverse stuff, and don’t intend to.
For a couple of years I considered myself a keen S.M. Stirling fan; but it seems that I only really relished his “middle period”: the “Island” trilogy, and Conquistador and The Peshawar Lancers – all, for me, pleasingly upbeat. Tried his “Draka” books, and – last thing that I’d have expected, from all that I’d heard about how spectacularly evil and out totally for their own ends, the Draka were – found them a bit dull: read the first two, never mustered the interest or desire to go further.
You mean they’re not spectacularly evil and out totally for their own ends, or that the author somehow manages to make unmitigated evil dull?
I still love the series, but after blowing some cash on his graphic novels, I aint gonna waste no more $$ on them, just wait for a *real *book to come out.
For me, it was when Anita turned from Vampire hunter to vampire fucker.
When Robert Jordan, S. M. Stirling, and especially GRR Martin decided to string us along with overly padded books to never end a series.
I love Neil Gaiman, but despite what he said, GRRM *is *our bitch. We bought the first couple of books with an understanding. If GRRM had said “Well, here’s a great book, but I will drag out and slow the writing of the series so that I will most likely die before you get the denouement” no one would have wasted their money on the first 2 or 3 books.
No, the first 2 or 3 still arent bad, they are fun. Just that they are hard to read if you know of the horrors to come.
*Neil Gaiman famously told a reader tired of waiting for the next installment of A Song of Ice and Fire that “George R. R. Martin is not your bitch.” Though Mr. Gaiman said many fine and humane things in his post, he also erected a straw man argument that such readers think authors shouldn’t do anything except write the next book. “No such contract existed. You were paying your ten dollars for the book you were reading.” Neil Gaiman being Neil Gaiman, the internet greeted this with a chorus of amens. Someone even wrote a song, which is great, except they’re all wrong. Part of what entices us to buy a book is the promise conveyed in the title. “Gragnar’s Epic Magical Dragon Quest Trilogy: Book 1” promises there will be two more books. Whether through the title, or interviews, or through a note to readers at the end of a book that says the next book will be out in a year, when an author makes that kind of commitment, maybe technically there’s no contract, but there is an obligation.
And do you know who’s hurt when that obligation is broken? Not the multimillionaire authors, but the mid-listers who are in the middle of a series, barely making it, who hear readers say, “I don’t start a series anymore until all the books are finished. I’ve been burned too many times.” This is not an attack on GRRM. He’s easily my favorite author; he’s certainly done the field far more good than harm, and I’m sure that he’s been working hard*
Largely the latter, I suppose; though some Draka struck me as relatively decent sorts, including by the standards of more normal societies – for instance, the principal male Draka character in the first couple of books (I forget his – and everyone else’s – name; it was a good few years ago). But mainly, it just turned out not my cup of tea; partly in that after having been assured by various Stirling fans on the Net, that it would be the most horrific thing in fiction that I had ever read – in comparison with that hype, I found it a bit tame.
Maybe with fiction as a whole, I’m hard to please, and don’t try as hard as I might; but then, all of this stuff is “entertainment, not religion” – if I don’t struggle diligently to “see the light”, no significant harm is done to me or anyone else.
nm
Thinking back about what I’ve read over the years, the most common cause for abandonment has simply been due to outgrowing authors. Some books are great when you’re ten. Less so as an adult. I don’t remember most of the titles or series names, but authors in this category include:
David Eddings
Piers Athony
Brian Jacques
Ann McCaffrey
Terry Brooks
Tom Clancy
Harry Turtledove
Authors who might fall in this category but I discovered too late to even finish the first book include:
Guy Gavriel Kay
Stephen R. Donaldson
Glen Cook
The only series I recall abandoning (after reading the entire first book) because the writing was piss-poor was by Terry Goodkind. There are plenty of websites out there with excerpts if anyone is interested in samples.
I am greatly annoyed by the make-it-up-as-you-go feel that series often have. Think Stephen King’s Back Tower books. There are probably quite a few stories I should have abandoned, but it takes a lot.
I don’t know why I abandoned Dune. I read the first two and don’t recall disliking the second. I think maybe I knew we had a copy of the third so I didn’t want to buy another, and then never got around to it. Maybe I should add that to my backlog.
After having been strung along by neverending series, I now try to not buy anything that isn’t finished. I want to read a series in a week. Not over two decades.
I think my first rule for abandoning a book series is when it becomes obvious that the “series” was by accident. Hey, the first one sold! I have maybe one half-baked idea in that universe, so I’ll write 43 more books in it!
This rule applies to TV shows, too.
If the books were meant to be a series, fine. But don’t just string it along, and fir Ghu’s sake don’t try to interlink your entire output in your Golden Years (I’m looking at you, Isaac and Bob!)
I’m not sure that’s a good rule. Is there any evidence, for instance, that Pratchett intended Discworld to be a series when he wrote the first one (or maybe first two)?
Of course, he was also working off of a heck of a lot more than one half-baked idea.
There isn’t any evidence against it, and absent Pterry returning and telling us otherwise, I’m going to go with “Intended to be a series.” 
Actually, I* think* he mentioned that the first two were not intended to be a series, but after that, yes, that what he went for.
Sorry, but everything before Guards! Guards! was definitely the beta version of Discworld. Not that the early novels are bad or don’t fit what he later wrote but you can definitely see the difference.
There was a series I stuck with despite the author. I refer to Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein novels. The first book hooked me but it’s like Koontz was pressured into releasing a draft his was still revising. Characters and situations set up in the first book go nowhere and are dropped, the third novel was delayed four years after the second, and almost everything the heroes did was pointless as the conflict is solved by a deus ex machina. The fourth and fifth sequel novels are like Koontz wanted to start the series over again and was only partially successful.
I THINK I recall him, possibly on a con panel since I cannot find the quote anywhere (except where I previously quoted it on the Dope) talking about how he was amazed at the success of the first two books and realized “That if I played my cards right I’d never have to lift a finger again”
So I agree with DrDeth