There are book series that go on and on and never quit until the money stops coming in. I’ll leave you to fill in those for yourself.
But for me there have been some short series, or stand alone books(sometimes by authors who have done the LONG series) that I’d like to read more of, or see continued in some fashion.
I’d like to see more of Harry Turtledove’s Basil Argyros, in his alternate Byzantine world.
S. M. Stirling’s Conquistador left me wanting to know what happened after that new portal was opened, right at the end.
Would like to have seen more of Fawlty Towers, but I also appreciate that John Cleese didn’t want to continue at a lower quality. He felt it wasn’t possible to sustain it at the level they did the two existing seasons.
Frankly, I wish there were more stories (especially movies) that did NOT continue. As much as I was fascinated by Hannibal Lecter, I wish Thomas Harris had stopped after Hannibal. Going into Lecter’s past demystified the character too much. Ditto for Star Wars - that series has made an absolute fetish about not leaving anything unknown.
The example to emulate here is the Sopranos episode “Pine Barrens”. We don’t really know what happened to the Russian guy and never will. More fun to imagine than to know.
In a 2000 interview, Dean Koontz was quoted as saying “I’m half way through Ride the Storm, the third Christopher Snow story.”
Christopher Snow is a fascinating character. He has a rare (but real) disease called XP (xeroderma pigmentosum), so he explores his tiny coastal town by night. The audiobook versions of Fear Nothing and Seize The Night feature a brilliant pairing of protagonist and narrator. Best I’ve ever heard, and it makes waiting for the third installment even harder.
If you ever listen to audiobooks, try Fear Nothing. All alone, on a quiet drive, at night.
Timothy Zahn wrote Triplet in 1987. It was clearly intended to be followed by sequels. But for whatever reason, Zahn dropped the series. Which is too bad as it was a well-written book and the central idea of the story was solid.
While there are stories I would like to see continued, or at least the world of that story expanded, I agree with Llama. Right now the trend is to extend stories way to far, and they do so very poorly. (star wars being the most egregious offender to date).
I would like to see the world of the Harry Potter stories expanded more, I would LOVE LOVE LOVE absolutely freaking LOVE more details and back stories for many aspects of LeGuin’s Earthsea (sigh, most certainly not going to happen unless she knows the word of unmaking:mad:)
An obscure one. Canadian author Dave Duncan wrote a long series of multiple trilogies about a band of knights called The King’s Blades, which were okay for a while but got a bit dark and heavy for my tastes. But in the midst of that were some livelier simpler tales written for YA audiences called The King’s Daggers. He only wrote three of them, but I would’ve loved to have seen them continue. Apparently they didn’t sell well.
Sharon Shinn is a fine fantasy writer who has written a number of series. One of them is called the Elemental Blessings series and features five families each of which has a leader who controls one of the five elements: earth, air, fire, water, and wood. She has written four books in the series, each built around one of the first four elements, but not about the family of wood. That last is potentially the most interesting of all, but I wrote her (an email form is on her web site) and she replied that she had no intention of doing so. Come on, just one more book to complete this fascinating series. A couple of the characters are just about the most sympathetic ones I have ever read in fiction.
I am also hoping that Steve Brust gets around to complete the Vlad series. But he has done over a dozen of the projected 18 (I think it is) books, again one for each nobel family (of which there are exactly 17) plus one more as a wrap.
I’d like to see Jasper Fforde finish his Last Dragonslayer and Shades of Grey serieses. And I would have preferred another couple of dozen Discworld books.
I’d like to see more of the HBO series Carnivale. It really became an interesting story by the end, and I’d heard at one point the creator was hoping to do graphic novels or something to continue to story, but ownership of the story/series belonged to HBO, so he couldn’t.
It’s my belief that Basil died at the end of the last episode. He had just presented the health inspector with a live rat[sup]*[/sup] in the cracker box, keeled over, and Polly and Manuel are dragging him out of the dining room while Sybil says “I’m afraid it’s started to rain again.” That’s exactly how Basil would die.