In my post on A Million Open Doors I mentioned the advice give to someone on rec.art.sf.written when they asked about the reading order for the Dune series. “Read the first one. Then stop.” In the comments, R. Fife said:
I feel your pain. I have not read Barnes in particular, but I have read the first three Dune books. After the third one, I was left with a kind of disillusioned aftertaste that has led me to not finish the other three. Same with Sword of Truth, where I forced my way to Naked Empire then gave up (and had to start forcing after Faith of the Fallen). Heck, The Dark Tower by Steven King did it to me after Wolves of the Calla (read two pages of Song of Susannah and threw the book).
So, is it better to have loved and lost than never loved before? Is it better to pretend the series could still be good and never read the disappointing sequels, but still know they are out there, somewhere, and possibly even why they were disappointing, than to experience it first hand?
I think that’s a very interesting question. And there’s a related question—is it worth reading the early good books, if the series isn’t going to live up to its promise?
There has been no case in the whole of my history where somebody has told me not to read the sequels and I have listened to them. I have always gone on to read the disappointing sequels, and been disappointed. Occasionally, I’ve read the sequels and liked them despite the consensus. But mostly the consensus is right, and I just haven’t listened. Once I stop, I stop, I don’t keep on and on if I’m no longer enjoying something. But I’m hopeless at not seeking out sequels as long as I have enjoyed the series up to that point.
So, better to have loved and lost?
I think a lot of it depends on the way in which the sequels are bad. If there’s an initial brilliant volume and then the sequels fade off with less and less originality until they’re just going through the motions, then I haven’t really lost anything. I’m thinking of the Pern books. I haven’t read all of those (goodness me, there’s one called Dolphins of Pern!) but I’ve read enough of them to be able to tell you than none of them is Dragonflight, but they’re all perfectly reasonable extra helpings of books with dragons and weyrs. None of them are going to spoil the experience of Dragonflight, except perhaps by diluting is a little. And you can’t really get back the experience that was Dragonflight, because let’s face it, you have to be twelve. If I was camping in the rain and there was nothing to read but Dolphins of Pern, I’m sure I could pass a happy enough afternoon with it. The same with the sequels to David Feintuch’s Midshipman’s Hope. I’ve read all of them. I’d urge you to stop with the first book, but the sequels haven’t done me any harm.
Where there’s a real problem is when the sequels spoil the original book.
The books about which I feel most strongly negative are all sequels to earlier books that I really like, and which spoil those earlier books. I’m immediately thinking of Card’s Xenocide, and Mary Gentle’s Ancient Light. In those cases, I can’t re-read the earlier books without the memory of the later books coming between me and the page. I know the Ender series has gone on far past Xenocide, and though, or perhaps because, I loved Ender’s Game and Speaker For the Dead so much, I haven’t been able to bring myself to read them, and I can’t really re-read the first two either. With Ancient Light it’s not so bad, I have after many years been able to forget it sufficiently that I can re-read Golden Witchbreed. But I’m afraid Xenocide has poisoned the universe forever for me.
I think my problem here was that part of the fundamental pleasure of reading SF for me is putting the hints and clues together and extrapolating where they’re going, and in re-reading seeing how they go together when I know where they’re going. I can’t do that if I have to turn my eyes away from where they’re going. I honestly wish I hadn’t read those books. When we were talking about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I said that if Lacuna was real, the thing I’d have wiped would be my memory of Xenocide. “But then you’d read it again,” Sasha said. And he’s right! (In fact, the only way I know this hasn’t happened already is that I read Xenocide about three days after it was published.)
So, why is it worse when this happens in a sequel?
When a writer takes a book in a new direction, it can feel jarring, and if it’s a direction I don’t like and which doesn’t fit with what has gone before, I won’t like it. But it’s happening while I’m reading, and though I may be invested in the plot and the characters and the world, it won’t disappoint me as much as when this happens in a sequel, where I may well have read the first book(s) several times before the new one comes out. There are a number of books that I think go downhill in the last third, but I don’t start foaming at the mouth when I think of them. But when it’s a sequel, and when I already love all of the earlier books and have read it and read it and read it, sometimes when I hear there’s going to be a sequel I’m as afraid as I am delighted.This happened recently with Regenesis.
I think whether it’s worth starting a series that goes downhill depends very much on how self-contained the good books are. In the case of A Million Open Doors and Dune that isn’t a problem. The books stand alone. With something like a fantasy series (I haven’t read either of R. Fife’s examples of King and Goodkind) it’s a lot less clear-cut, because a series like that is very much a voyage where you want to feel sure of your destination. A lot of this is a problem with trusting the author. If I trust the author, I’ll put up with a lot, but once I start feeling distrusting, I start picking fault with everything.
And a lot of it is individual taste. Mostly when this has happened to me, I’ve started the series before all the books are out. I know there are people out there who won’t read series unless they’re complete. But what do you do? How do you react if someone says “Read this one, and then stop”?
I’m poorly read as a sci-fi/fantasy fan. (Yet I’m a huge TV/movie/comic fan. Weird.) I tend to trust what people tell me when they say “skip this” because reading is a larger investment than just watching a show. So while I’m tempted to read everything in a series that I am enjoying, I trust that when people tell me to skip something, they’re usually right.
I wish I’d had someone watching out for me when I got into the Dune series. I kept going with that for hope that it would get good again. Then the last book and a half was about competing bands of space whores. And I didn’t even learn my lesson then because I went on to read three of the prequel books. My aversion to Kevin J Anderson is now firmly protecting me from repeating past mistakes a third time, but I still read House Corrino.
Of course I keep reading. I keep reading even if they are awful (we will please not discuss how many Pern books I’ve read). It helps that I read fairly quickly (I have a whole personal category of books that I call “if this book took an hour and a half to read, I’ve wasted 45 minutes”), but I’m not sure that that really matters. I keep reading because I care about the characters, the universe . . . because hope springs eternal and maybe the author will get back on track . . . sometimes just because I can’t stop myself.
I’ve read an awful lot of bad books that way. I honestly can’t think of a book that was destroyed by its sequels, though–a series, yes, but as you point out, that’s not the same thing. For some reason, I seem to be able to hit the “reset” button on rereading. That’s just lucky, I guess; I can certainly understand the opposite reaction.
Recently I’ve made the (informed) decision to stop watching both Veronica Mars and Heroes after the first season (in the former case, making up my own ending to the lame season-ending cliffhanger).
I agree with you that books like Xenocide really do tinge your reading of their prequels; with television it’s more frustrating when a series runs out of steam because watching TV for me is a much more serious time commitment than reading even the thickest series. So I think I think I’m much better off for it. Thank goodness for ubiquitous availability of full-season DVDs!
(Funny, watching the TV series is a larger commitment on the part of the viewer, but waiting for the series to appear on DVD is usually a much shorter commitment.)
Well, I’ve never had anyone say that to me about a book series, but I’m about 3/4 of a season behind on Battlestar Galactica and a good friend of mine did say ‘watch everything but the last episode, the last episode makes the series worse than never having happened’. Of course, I’ll watch the final episode when I get there, mostly because I’m curious to see just how bad it actually is.
Now, are there series in which I’d say that? Sure. I’d tell people to read the only through The Vampire Lestat of the Anne Rice vampire books. On the other hand, despite having enjoyed the first half-dozen or so of the Anita Blake books by Laurell K. Hamilton, I’d tell people to avoid the whole series now, mostly because the author is fond of telling her fans to frak off.
I wouldn’t actually tell people to avoid the final book of the Weis/Hickman Death Gate Cycle, but I will tell them to prepare to be annoyed. The first six books in that series are great, though.
Ane then there’s GRRM’s A Song of Ice and Fire, a series I used to whole-heartedly recommend, and now recommend avoiding, simply because he’s never going to finish the damn thing. He’s now the prime example of why you should never read a series before it’s done, and completely published.
So what was it about Xenocide that made it ruin the earlier book? I found it merely dull, whereas Children of the Mind was terrible. I thought I was done reading it then, but I did get suckered into reading Ender’s Shadow… which was pretty good! But not good enough to get me to read anything after it. None of this has ruined my appreciation of Ender’s Game.
Other big let-downs: Arthur C. Clarke’s Rama books after the third one, and all of the sequels to 2001. What these have in common is a mysterious, even mystical object at the beginning of the series, which is later revealed to be something totally lame. I don’t think I can read the first two Rama books any more and enjoy them: knowing what the Rama spacecraft actually is just takes the fun out of it.
I also nominate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy after book three. So Long and Thanks For All the Fish was annoying, and Mostly Harmless was a disaster. Stick with the original three.
Oh yes, what a dilemma. Oddly–at least given the SF/F/H context here–the example of this situation I immediately think of is the series of Len Deighton novels that feature the recurring character named Bernard Samson.
Generally, you have three trilogies making up nine spy novels, with a “possible” tenth being the historical novel Winter (published in 1987, it features Bernard’s father in a small role along with, from what I’ve been told, the ancestors of some other characters who appear in the nine “main” novels):
Berlin Game (1983)
Mexico Set (1984)
London Match (1985)
Spy Hook (1988)
Spy Line (1989)
Spy Sinker (1990)
Faith (1994)
Hope (1995)
Charity (1996)
I’ve read the three novels that make up Game, Set, and Match and loved them. I own Spy Hook and Spy Line but have yet to read them. Faith, Hope, and Charity is generally regarded as a letdown, though some would say it’s still worth reading despite that while others would say it’s really bad.
(Deighton fans generally point to the gap in publication between Spy Sinker and Faith as an indication that the end of the Cold War forced Deighton to rethink what was going to happen next in the series. Some people consider the way he ultimately dealt with that real-world historical event to be rather silly and far-fetched.)
But I’m not even considering the last trilogy yet, given that I can’t seem to figure out what I’m going to do about Hook, Line, and Sinker.
I don’t own Spy Sinker due to its rather controversial position in the series. Out of the nine novels (excluding Winter), it is the only one not told through the first-person perspective of Bernard Samson. Instead, it retells the events from the previous five books, focusing on Bernard’s wife Fiona. It’s ostensibly her point of view, but it’s not quite as simple as that, since Spy Sinker is not in the first-person but the third-person.
I’ve had people tell me I should just stop where I am now, with London Match. Some people insist on reading the entire series, including (even especially) Winter. Others are more moderate, letting me know that I should read the other books but to prepare for disappointment anyway.
One comment I’ve read, however, talks about Spy Line not as the middle novel in the second trilogy but the conclusion “of an awesome five-book story.” (I refer to this in message 3 in the link above.) Despite being just one comment among many, this was why I bought Spy Hook and Spy Line, just so I can read it as part of that “awesome five-book story.”
But somehow…that seems “wrong.” I’m still on the fence with Spy Sinker, which is an interesting experiment, but which many say is less than successful, to say the least. I’m not even sure if it’s worth it, because general consensus has it that Faith, Hope, and Charity doesn’t exactly bring things to an explosive close.
(I’d talk about Harlot’s Ghost, too, and how the late Norman Mailer wanted to continue that epic novel of the CIA at some point, but I’ll just leave you with Deighton.)
What, nobody’s mentioned “Riverworld”?
“To Your Scattered Bodies Go” is magnificent, but by the time you get to “Gods of Riverworld” you wish for the mystery back again. Farmer’s World of Tiers merely drags on, but it didn’t hit the heights at the start.
Regarding Deighton: The last four are still worth reading, but they’re not as much fun. They definitely tie up a lot of loose ends. “Sinker” is the low point — it reads more like a contractual obligation than anything else, explain what happened on the other side of the conversations and plans, and you realize just how doomed Bernie has been his whole working life.
“How do you react if someone says “Read this one, and then stop”?”
I generally read that one, then stop… Or don’t read any at all. There are tons of books that don’t come with warnings, and I could spend my attention as profitably on them.
I’m in a book-purging stage of my life, having picked up a ton of books that don’t make the cut of “I will want to reread this” and my hope is that I won’t even waste the time to finish a dreary book.
When I was young I read some incredibly depressing evil twin fantasy book from someone shelved near Zelazny; I’d heard there were two books in the trilogy and then the author had died. Midway through the second, I had an insight about how everything could yet come out alright if there was a third book… And then I read on and forgot it. Dreadfully irritating.
I was about to mention the Riverworld series, but was beaten to it. After reading the first book, I immediately went out and bought the rest of the series and have regretted it ever since. I still haven’t read the last book.
With me, that’s been the Outlander series (Diana Gabaldon). The first one (Outlander) was fantastic, the next three (Dragonfly in Amber, Voyager, Drums of Autumn) were good (well, okay, I rarely pick up Voyager again but I did like Drums), and then… I don’t know what it is, but Fiery Cross was sort of “eh” and then Breath of Snow and Ashes left me cold. Perhaps it’s because Gabaldon has…
ah, wait. I’d better rot13 this bit.
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And yet I will probably still read the next book/s in the series to find out what happens to the characters. (And I find that yes, the next book will be out this fall. Perhaps, however, I will wait and get it from the library…)
I definitely agree that Sinker is the low point on Deighton – the first three were brilliant and I’d have been happy just reading them – and maybe Winter which stood alone well enough for me.
I’m on the read the good books and then stop side of the line. I don’t finish a lot of series and I’ve never found it took away from the enjoyment I had had when reading the books I did read. Of course I also think being a comic fan may help with that attitude – I know I’m never going to read all of Batman so I just enjoy the sections of the overarching story I do read.
(An argument can be made that the entire combined output of DC and Marvel since 1939 can be considered just strands of a single story – but that’s deserving of its own post).
First thing that came to mind when reading this was the Matrix. “Watch the first one. Then stop.” I haven’t read the Dune series yet, but I think I’ll take this persons advice and only read the first one. Just as I pretend to have never seen any sequels to the Matrix.
For those of you who won’t start a series unless it’s finished, let me recommend something to you. Robin Hobb’s trilogy of trilogies (9 books total) starting with Assassins Apprentice and ending with Fool’s Fate. Absolutely brilliant.
I use to really enjoy reading this website, but I’m slowly discovering that the bloggers (and many commenters) are ridiculously critical and full of themmselves.
Xenocide was probably the worst of the entire series, but it was still perhaps a 5 out of 10. And its not like it was bad, just uninteresting. The idea that it would somehow “ruin” the other books is just ludicrous. Especially considering that Ender’s Game is quite possibly the best Sci Fi book ever and Speaker ranks in the top 10 as well.
What a waste of a topic. Just an excuse for bitching because an author didn’t do exactly what you wanted. “I pretend to have never seen any sequels to the Matrix.” “Mostly Harmless was a disaster.”
Get over yourselves.
I’m mostly in the camp of “better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all” because I haven’t run across a horrible sequel that in any way ruined my appreciation / enjoyment of the original.
Ender’s Shadow is the closest to this because despite not completely sucking it did essentially invalidate much of Ender’s Game. Yeah, there’s a conversation to be had as to how it did not really do that, but that was the feeling I had reading Bean’s story. It’s like Card wanted to one-up everything Ender did with Bean.
But even ES doesn’t change my delight and awe in at how good Ender’s Game was. (and the Shadow sequels – they get progressively worse)
The danger, like Jo said, is in a fantasy series that we have to wait multiple volumes to approach an ending. I still think I’d be okay. My take would be: “the first book is great, the next three are still good, and then it goes downhill…but man that first book was a good read”.
Along those lines. I’d be disappointed by a bad ending / horrible book taking the series in a dissatisfying direction, but I’d still appreciate the joy of Book 1.
You guys hated Xenocide? I loved that book! The ethical density of the plot rocked me like a hurricane. Xing-jao was one of the first villains I read that was more than a two-dimensional caricature – the hard decisions each “side” had to made seemed somehow justified, and it just made the book in general a very fufilling experience.
I do concur, however, on Song of Susannah – the second half of the book isn’t so bad, but the first half… Christ.
I’m amazed no one’s mentioned Piers Anthony’s Incarnations of Immortality, the first one in the series is not a great book, but it was a fun read (I was young, what can I say? that’s my only excuse).
Starting with the second book, it just keeps plummeting in free fall. Thankfully, I never finished the series, and avoided Anthony like the plague ever since so my youth was relatively unscarred by Xanth (there’s another series from hell for you) having only read the first and part of the second.
I did plow through 6 Dune books, but have no interest in reading any of the others. Unlike most folks (it seems), I’m willing to re-read the second and third but none of the others. No interest in reading the prequels.
Another thing that greatly disappointed me was Asimov’s tying together of all his stories with his later books. It was lovely when the occasional throwaway sentence (usually no more than on in a book and then, only once in a while) hinted that maybe all his books could be set in the same universe, but stating it loud and clear just ruined it for me.
And you can’t really get back the experience that was Dragonflight, because let’s face it, you have to be twelve.
That’s pretty much it; I read too many poor sequels as a teenager, but now I’m too stingy with my time to be so smitten.
Xenocide was a mess, but it had one redeeming feature: an adult Peter Wiggin. Fortunately, someone warned me that Peter mellowed considerably in Children of the Mind, so I never had to read it.
I realized, as I started consciously choosing to give up earlier and more often on works that weren’t satisfying me, that I’d previously slogged through a lot of unrewarding reading and viewing out of a sense of duty – that, having begun, I owed it to creators to keep right on until the finish. Not true, of course. I owe the work honest attention, but when it becomes clear that it’s simply not rewarding, I can stop and needn’t feel guilty about it.
Of course it’s easier to say that than to never ever still feel a pang of guilt. :)
Given that I often don’t agree with others’ evaluation of books, movies, etc., I usually take advice like “read the first one, then stop” with a large helping of salt. And I can think of several series which started to go downhill, but that I kept reading, because there was something interesting there, if not one or more really good books.
I confess to having read the whole “Riverworld” series and deeply regretting it; on the other hand I don’t regret having read all of Barnes’ “Giraut” books, and plan to read the last one if he ever writes it. I agree with all the criticisms of the last two books, but there were still enough interesting ideas and nice touches to keep me entertained.
Then again, sometimes the later books are even better than the first. For instance, Charlie Stross’ “Merchant Princes” starts out well, but gets even better, IMHO.
“Don’t read the next one”: yeah, right. “Don’t buy the next one”: good tip.
My personal enraging example is Maria Doria Russell. The Sparrow asks some big questions about Christian faith. Big, difficult questions without easy answers. And the sequel Children of God … answers them. Now I can’t read The Sparrow without knowing the answer she had in mind all along. Horrible.
Had to chime in on this subject.
Erdick – please read Dune now – single best SF book I’ve ever read. The sequels are meh, and get worse the further you go but the first is a must and you probably should read at least the next two for the good parts in them. Also read Dosadi Experiment — kind of a sequel to Whipping Star (which I didn’t like that much) but stands on its own well.
To several of you that mentioned Xanth – I was going to post about that. First book is very good, second is good, third and thereafter are too punny for words. Note that I may be an old fart by try to hunt down early Anthony – Macroscope is mindblowing (and a single novel to boot) and the Omnivore trilogy is strong throughout.
Re Enders Game – I haven’t made it beyond Speaker for the Dead because I’m afraid of the quality drop off.
Re Riverworld – read the full series and liked most of them, but agree it got tiring towards the end.
Re Hitchhiker’s Guide — Yes!! After book 3 falls off the deep end.
Re Heroes – that is best example given on this post so far of “sequels” messing up the original. First season of the show was sublime except for the last episode. Second volume was half good and half showing troubling signs of sloppy writing and a failure to understand the “rules” established in the first year. The last few volumes have been gross disappointments (I have kept watching) but the problem is that the writers came up with stupid new rules (i.e., some of the powers of characters were given via injection) that have signficantly impeded enjoyment of the show. Still hoping for a turn around but holes have been dug that will be hard to climb out of.
Finally, re GRRM. I read all four last month and am now fully stuck in that hell hole of knowing that I have years to go before I can put them to bed….
Rob
Yes, in spades on the Ancient Light/Golden Witchbreed issue. Furthermore, it’s seriously put me off reading other Mary Gentle multi-part series in case the same stunt gets pulled on me. For me the sticking pointis the creation of a wonderful, engorssing world which is then going to be torn apart apparently just because the author can (in which context, incidently, I wonder how many people like me have Puffin copies of the complete Chronicles of Narnia, every single one of which is falling apart from love and over-reading except for The Last Battle which barely has a crease on its spine).
Urth of the New Sun really put me off Gene Wolfe, even though I’d been crazy about the New Sun series. Suddenly Severian was TSTL – he barely seemed like the same character, in a way that had me reconsidering whether the earlier books were as good as I’d thought. It’s frustrating, because I want the answers I know the sequel offers, but I just can’t get through it!
“And then there’s GRRM’s A Song of Ice and Fire, a series I used to whole-heartedly recommend, and now recommend avoiding, simply because he’s never going to finish the damn thing. He’s now the prime example of why you should never read a series before it’s done, and completely published.”
First, whole heartedly agree with all of that. I will read the next book when/if it comes out. At the end of the book I have no doubt in my mind that I will still be in the same frame of mind I am now. (Why does he kill off everyone, where is this story going, etc.)
The real question there is, Is GRRM going to reach a climatic series ending book? Or will this turn into another book after book after book series?
I would think there would have to be a ending to the series, mostly because that GRRM will not live forever and at this pace maybe three more books could be squeezed in (that is probably the cold heartest thing I’ve said in a while, but Im a realist).
Hmm, have to vehemently disagree about Heroes. I missed part of season two, but I loved season one and am loving season three, 100%.
I don’t think the painful and “ruinous” decline of books comes from twists and turns or destruction of characters, etc. I have read books and watched and loved movies with complete and utter downer endings. I think what is needed, though, is a sense of common direction. Just like hairpin turns in the road are annoying to drive, they are annoying to read/watch as well.
Sometimes, I think authors can get so engrossed in needing to have some big reveal or get worried about needing something “fresh” that they can make logical leaps and leave the reader behind.
Likewise, sometimes I think the author can feel a need to hammer a point home, such as getting preachy, or having every character go through the same “harrowing” experience. Or, perhaps, they even feel a need to explain where we don’t want explanation. Sometimes “it just is” or “it’s magic” are fine enough, long as not overused for the sake of plot.
I’ll chime in here with some sacreliciousness:
I couldn’t get through the later books in Niven’s “Ringworld” series or Art Clarke’s later “Rama” books. In both cases, they seemed to subvert the awesomeness of the originals.
On a related note, I don’t like to get into neverending series books like the Wheel of Time, having a preference for standalones or at most trilogies. But I’m intrigued by SM Stirling’s series starting with “Dies the Fire.” Would those books fall into the category discussed in this post?
Legionseagle: That would be me with the barely creased Last Battle.
I don’t tend to have a lot of patience these days because there are just so many things to read and I haven’t got the time to waste on bad books. My general rule is that if something is a trilogy, I’ll probably read them all no matter what. If it’s longer than three books, I stop when I stop enjoying them.
That said, I don’t think I’ve ever had a sequel “ruin” a book for me, simply because I’m quite good at mentally blocking the new information. The author retcon is something I’ve become increasingly familiar with over the years, and quite practiced at ignoring at my leisure.
Though you did get me thinking about a related question: if someone raves about a series, and you read the first book and then absolutely despise it (or even receive it lukewarmly), do you keep reading? This happened to me recently, and though I was assured the rest of the books got consistently better, I just couldn’t do it. The first book killed any interest for me.
There’s a huge difference between a “series” and a “serially published big f***g novel”, and I think that’s strongly reflected in the various lists above. Bluntly, those multibook series tend to be worthwhile only when (relatively) completely planned from the start… not when, as in the paradigmatic case of Dune, the later books were written at the behest of the publisher. Conversely, there’s a much better chance of the later books being worthwhile if they’re “later books” primarily for publishing, not artistic, reasons, such as LOTR.
Of course, that doesn’t help much when the “plan” is inept; it’s only a partial filter. Otherwise, we could not explain either series that suck and it was obvious from the first volume (limiting myself to stuff not published by the sponsor of this blog, the H___ H____ crimes against the Hague Convention… and, indeed, most military SF not written by veteran officers) or series that have a decent plan, and perhaps even a decent execution of the initial work, but an author who does not have the skill/knowledge/health/whatever to follow through on the plan (again, limiting myself to stuff not published by the sponsor of this blog, RAH’s tales of Lazarus Long).
Torie:
That was actually me with Wheel of Time. Eye of the World lost me after halfway, and it took me 4 years to pick it back up, and to date it is still not exactly mone of my favorites. Course, I love WoT (as seen by my obsessive posting in the re-reads), so yeah.
On the other hand, I have yet to get into GRRM’s stuff because I got halfway through Game of Thrones and lost interest. Perhaps one day I’ll force myself through it. I’d say my rule of thumb is: if its a trilogy, I’ll try the first book and drop it all together if I dont’ care for it. If its a series, I’ll try the first book a few times (to get to the end), and if I can, I’ll try the second book. After that, it’d get dropped if I am not feeling it yet.
In response to Really Tired, perhaps we should start listing all the sequels that were as-good-as or better than the first novels.
Part of the problem is that often it’s hard to explain why the ending of a series retroactively ruins the ones that came before without spoiling the whole thing, which I prefer not to do.
The principal example of this for me is The Dark Tower series, which really does cast the entire series in a completely different light. A slightly different example is Kage Baker’s Company series (sorry Ms. Baker–I really loved _Anvil of the World_!), which I think goes off the rails in a really bad way, and so all the stuff leading up to that now reminds me of the ending. But in either case, I would literally have to spoil the entire series to explain why I hated the endings.
As for Torie’s question, I won’t keep reading a series that I despise the start of, but I may keep reading a lukewarm series if I’ve been warned that it starts slow but picks up by people whose taste I trust.
Sequels as good or better? Kirstein’s Steerswoman books. O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series. Novik’s Temeraire books (I think the fourth and, particularly, fifth are the best by far). Bujold, Brust, and Pratchett.
How about: books other than _Regenesis_ for which the annoucement of a sequel delights and frightens in equal measure? For me, the first that comes to mind is _Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell_.
Torie, my response at times like that is “Show me some.” What with previews and, er, informal distribution and all, it’s not hard to get hold of a few pages that let one show a skeptical friend, “See, this is why you should keep at it.” It’s not always feasible, but I will listen to a good argument about just what it is that warrants my attention.
Sequels as good or better than the first volume…
The Two Towers, at least for me.
I think Stormbringer fulfills the promise of Elric of Melnibone.
Endymion + The Fall of Endymion form a worthy sequel to Hyperion + The Fall of Hyperion.
Under the Yoke is a real masterpiece of alt-history horror, and maybe Steve Stirling’s best book.
Greg Keyes’ Age of Unreason series maintains its high quality throughout. The first part of the fourth volume felt slack, but then it tightened right up again.
Hmm, Dance of the Rings by Jane S Francher kept me coming back for more. I think LotR got better as it went on, Wheel of Time is a bit of a roller coaster. Memory, Sorrow, Thorn by Tad Williams is a nice uphill journey, so to speak.
And yeah, I think a caveat to my earlier response to Torie is that I need to be warned the series has a bit of a slow start. If someone is raving about the first book being wonderful, and I find it lukewarm, etc, then I trust learn to not trust that person’s taste as much.
Case in point for me here was The Malazan Book of the Fallen. (Why do I keep picking on Tor books? I must have a deathwish. *ignores red glowing dot on forehead*) I think if I had picked it up without a glowing review, I would have approached it better, and I may yet give it a second chance. But the person who recommended it to me hated Tolkien and Jordan for being too wordy and descriptive, but lauded Erikson. I think she was slipping something in her coffee, as Erikson is /very/ descriptive, but eh.
The ‘Rama’ sequels are the ones that do me. ‘Rendezvous..’ was and remains one of my favourite SF novels and the sequels completely failed to capture the same magic. I can’t say they spoiled the first one for me as they were co-written and so I was able to ignore them. On the whole I don’t find this an issue and am able to seperate my favourite out from the rest. The ‘Ender’ series being a case in point. ‘Ender’s Game’ is my second favourite SF novel and I didn’t like any of the sequels. For series that improve/maintain I second the Aubrey/Maturin books by Patrick O’Brien, the James Bond novels (though they get a bit odd as Fleming got more tired of his creation) and the ‘unnamed spy’ quartet by Len Deighton (‘The Ipcress File’, ‘Horse Under Water’, ‘Funeral in Berlin’ and ‘Billion Dollar Brain’) and Dorothy L Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey books. Hmm, none of these are SF/Fantasy. Probably irrelevant, yet maybe…
You know, this does seem to damage TV shows more for me than it does books. I love the X-Files but the dismal series finale really colored the entire series in a bad light for me, and I’m only now able to really enjoy them again at all.
Heroes…yeah, hated season 2 and haven’t watched season 3 yet. I might come back if I hear it gets so much better. Otherwise, I won’t lose any sleep over it.
I really hope LOST can figure out how to stick the landing.
But books are different. I still think Wizard’s First Rule was a lot of fun, even though the next few books kind of sucked and I (happily) stopped reading. And yeah, Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead still rock in my book.
I might read the second and third Dune books, but probably won’t read more than that. I will read the Sparrow. Maybe being a comic book fan has made me NOT be a completist. That said, I will read the last two Dark Tower books, though. One day :)
Clovis: I don’t think it’s irrelevant. I think it’s easier to ask satisfying questions than give satisfying answers. Often in SF the first volume is asking the questions and the subsequent volumes are giving answers, and when they’re disappointing answers, you have a problem.
So far, of all the examples I have read, what’s got better is the writing. Sayers is the best example of all, Sayers wrote these little clockwork mysteries with cardboard characters, and then she wrote a real book. The SF series that come closest to that are Brust’s Vlad books and Bujold’s Miles books. In both of them you start off with something that’s good fun and with good questions and then deepens.
In the case of the Thousand Cultures books and the Ender books, I think the authors decided on different answers part way through the series, and the answers weren’t satisfactory (to me) because they hadn’t been implicit from the beginning. Or it may be that I’m just not a good reader for those books. That happens too. And there’s a certain element of truth in the “fanboy” accusation of thinking I know better than the author what should have happened.
Still, sometimes writers change so much over time they can’t really connect to who they used to be. This has happened to me. I don’t think I’d be fit to write sequels to my early books now and be true to the books.
When Auden moved to the US he rewrote lots of his early poetry that had rhymed in British but not US English, so that it would rhyme in US English. A lot of time had passed since he wrote it, sometimes as much as twenty years. If you read both versions together, it’s quite obvious that the older poet was sometimes completely changing the intent of the younger poet as he changed those rhymes. There’s one poem where the original end couplet is:
“Whose white waterfalls could bless
travellers in their last distress”
and the new version is:
“From whose cold caressing streams
none may drink except in dreams”.
The first version is clearly about reaching the waterfall and dying, and the second is clearly about nobody being able to reach the waterfall ever — and it’s this sort of change that I’m talking about.
I know I loved Dune so much I have never even been tempted to look at the sequels (and it has been forty years since I first read Dune!). I wish I had never seen or heard of the second and third Matrix movies, and don’t get me started on the final season of Battlestar Galactica! But then there are other things that just seem to work, like Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. And LOTR was just one big book for Tolkein,so it does not really enter in, I suppose. Outside of sci fi, I think of the Forester’s Hornblower series: I love every one of those books as much as the first. I think how I feel about Dune is a kind of key: it was such a complete whole as a work of art that it seemed to me to be superflous to continue it (same way with first Matrix movie: it is a WHOLE, it is complete). Good questions to think about: thanks.
Funny, I’m currently reading all the Dune novels *except* the first at the moment, and enjoying them. The thing is, the first novel is a coming-of-age story, and an adventure story, and a story about a hero triumphing against overwhelming odds. And the rest of the novels are political thrillers about the dangers of religious rule and dictatorship and the abuse of power. I’ve read Dune so many times that I can quote big chunks of it and I feel rather like Paul in Dune Messiah, with such a strong sense of prescience that I know exactly what’s going to happen next. But by not reading the first one, I didn’t get into the heroic adventure mode, so could look forward to a series of political machinations novels without disappointment that it wasn’t more of the first book.
The funny thing is that almost everyone says “Dune is brilliant, but don’t read the sequels.” But everyone obviously *does* read the sequels or they wouldn’t continue to sell in such large numbers! Where are all these closet Dune sequel fans? Do they have secret conventions in the presence of a Guild Navigator so no-one can detect them?
I actually do like the first 2 Dune sequels. I don’t like them nearly as much as Dune TOS, and in fact when I first read them I found them terrifically disappointing, but having re-read them many years later, I found they’re quite good as long as you’re not expecting them to live up to the original. (“Quite good” may be a little too strong for Children of Dune, which sort of degenerates into ridiculousness at the end, but it’s good enough as a pot-boiler along the way to make for enjoyable reading.)
Now, God-Emperor is an abomination, and the one after that…Chapterhouse of Dune?…turns the remarkable feat of being even worse than God-Emperor, which I would’ve doubted was possible. It’ll be a cold day in Minsk before I read any more in that series.
The awfulness of the later books in that series didn’t diminish my enjoyment of the earlier ones. The one case I can think of where that happened is Urth of the New Sun; I’m with overtheseatoskye on that one. I think what happened in that case is that part of what I liked about TOS was that it’s filled with this pervasive sense of enigma, with glimmers here and there that everything does make sense under the surface, if only you knew more about, say, what happens to Severian after he has his apotheosis, or whatever. Then you get Urth, where he has it, and it all just seems like gobbledygook.
Hmm, how to go on with this subject…
Well, first off, I am a stubborn person in many matters, and books happen to be one of them in some ways. If i start a series, i will ALWAYS finish the entire thing UNLESS you go and make the mistake (in my opinion) of changing the entire cast of characters for the series from what i loved before.
First thing, before i even get into the books, you need to know that i activly seek out grand or epic scale series of books. I can read a stand-alone novel and enjoy it, but i like a series better.
Lets take Dune for example. I loved Dune so very much, even though when i first read it i was perhaps too young to grasp the complexity of it properly, i still loved it. Dune messiah i enjoyed, but not nearly as much as the original. Children of Dune i enjoyed nearly as much as the original. Then God emperor of dune was kinda what you might call a push (blackjack term). Overall i loved it, but i loved the original best. I would not have avoided the 3 after the 1st if i new ahead of time, but i have not nor probably ever will re-read them. I will, and have, re-read the original multiple times.
Then we can take the dragonriders of pern. I read the original trilogy in the early part of high-school (only been 5 years since graduating, for time scale), and loved it. I have also read “all the weyrs of pern”, and enjoyed it. I wouldn’t suggest anything beyond those, or even just the trilogy, but those filled my taste for that exact style.
We can take margaret weis and tracy hickman’s dragonlance books, and thats another great spot. The original chronicles trilogy was wonderful, as was the legends trilogy. The dragons of summer flame was a good and enjoyable book to jump into the war of souls trilogy, which was also very good.
King’s dark tower series was best for the first half and then kinda got a bit less enjoyable, but still good. I enjoyed it more because i have read many of kings other works and enjoyed how they are tied together in the dark tower. though i did think it a bit….odd?…for king to put himself as a character in one of them.
The sword of truth was also best up to halfway, then it kinda slowed down and got a little less engaging, but it redeemed itself in its finale very well.
The belgariad was very good, but the mallorean was…what i might say un-essential. it was good, but didn’t really add to the original as much as it might have.
I have only read the first of the shannara series, and may not continue. i enjoy the stand-alone book, but only if it is truly stand-alone. i dont much enjoy the thought that i was going to get characters i grew to love in the first book being absent in the next. if it will do that to me, then it should go with another world entirely.
The mistborn series is incredible, from the 1st to the 3r, good the whole time. the 3rd book wraps up so many things that you didn’t even know where important until they were dealt with, very masterfully done. a good reason why brandon sanderson is going to do a wonderful job finishing the wheel of time, or so i believe.
not much needs being said on tolkiens LOTR, just a wonderful series.
Same again with c.s. lewis’ Narnia, a well written series that i have re-read within the last couple years and still enjoyed.
Well, that’s all i can think of, i hope my rant will help other people to find a good series to enjoy.
If any of you are fans of Stephen Woodworth, you can read his thoughts on writing series novels here. And below his blog entry is a link to a couple of other writers writing about the same topic. One of them is Jay Lake.
I have one perfect series, two little words: Harry Potter.
Impossible not to finish :) Over and over and over.
kate @38… I actually liked the very end of the Dark Tower, with Roland and the door and the (mumble mumble spoiler twist). However, what I can’t stand is the horrible, disappointing, no-good very-bad confrontation with the Red King, the way that other villain(s) are dispatched so cheesily, and the deus ex machina. I was okay with the metafictional stuff at first, but it wore out its welcome.
I think you hit the nail on the head though: first books tend to pose questions, and last books tend to give answers. If the reader finds the answer dissatisfying, they’ll hate the ending and retroactively hate the beginning, too. Which sets up a more interesting question: what series can you think of that have the courage not to answer the questions they pose at the beginning?
The only one that comes to mind for me is David Brin’s Uplift Trilogy, which poses lots of questions about the nature of its universe, but only answers a few of them. In particular, the big Macguffin that drives most of the plot never is explained, and I assume it has to be deliberate.
What to do? Read them anyway, because as is apparent in the comments, tastes differ, & I would like to make up my own mind. This despite sometimes being terribly disappointed*.
I’ve read “Dune” and all the Frank Herbert sequels, and enjoyed them. I wish I’d stopped there instead of reading the prequels too.
cybernetic_nomad @18:
We have a rule of thumb about Piers Anthony books, the first of a series is almost invariably the best.
The idea of not starting a series until the whole thing is published might be better for one’s own mental wellbeing, but if we all did that, no series would get published; it’s the success of the first and/or second book that makes it worthwhile for the publisher to continue bringing them out.
My own personal regret is that Tony Daniel’s trilogy will not be completed. After the publication of “Metaplanetary” and “Superluminal”, his publisher declined to bring out the conclusion. What me? Frustrated?
kate @38:
I’ve enjoyed all of Kage Bakers stories I’ve read so far, including the conclusion to the Company saga. The ending was a bit contrived but I went in expecting to be disappointed; after that sort of buildup, there was no way the finish could ever meet expectations. I found the ending satisfying. But that is a series where my favourite instalment isn’t the first or last but one of the middle books. “The Graveyard Game” is for me, one of the best mid-series books ever.
*Movie example: I was warned, repeatedly, by more than one person, not to see “Highlander II”. But did I listen? No…
Tim Hartzell @@@@@ 48
Regarding Brooks’ Shannara series, I did, to my regret, read all the way up to the first or second installment of the Voyage of the Jerle Shannara trilogy. (It’s been a while, so I can’t precisely recall exactly where I gave up.)
While, generally, I am pretty reluctant to give up a series I’ve started, I simply got so fed up with getting invested in characters for a whole book, then having the next one pick up a generation or so later. Besides which, I found that, over the series, even the parts that had me engaged (the evolution of the particular magics in that world, etc) became less and less interesting.
My point is, the first few sequels have a few things going for them, if you can get over losing characters you may have come to care for, but I don’t think that Brooks’ world holds up as an interesting place to spend so much time and energy on after that.
This same reasoning has me pretty hesitant about the upcoming release of Jacqueline Carey’s newest novel. To date, I’ve quite enjoyed the Kushiel books, and I enjoyed the smooth transition between the first and second trilogies. Certainly, there were high and low points over the six books, but it was nice to see the original cast of characters still present and accounted for in the later books, even as the Imriel POV superseded Phedre’s.
In any event, while I can appreciate that Carey has probably tired of the time period in which she was writing and the people who inhabit it, I’m going to reserve judgment until reading Naamah’s Kiss. Jumping to the POV of a character several generations removed from a second tier character from the last trilogy may be a brilliant stroke to revitalize the series, or it may just lead to crushing disappointment. We shall see.
SoonLee @@@@@ #52: we do, at least, agree on this–_The Graveyard Game_ is my favorite Company book too.
I’m beginning to wonder if maybe there’s a limit to how many books a writer can write in a series and maintain the level of tension, suspense, involvement, etc., before the series just becomes boring an formulaic. I avoid series, especially ones with more than three volumes, because I can’t maintain the enthusiasm and don’t have the attention span for them. I generally get bored after two volumes, but can keep up with three. (One of the few exceptions was Piers Anthony’s 5-volume “Bio of a Space Tyrant” series.) If I get bored after two or three visits to a series, what must happen to the author?
Sandikal: But there are lots of series where the author clearly isn’t bored with it — Look at Cherryh’s Foreigner books, with nine out there and no decline in quality. Other times, yes, it does seem like going through the motions.
I see few answers here to the explicit questions – and many examples of why the questions recur and I suppose don’t have global answers but only context specific answers.
I sometimes have what I call “I could have had a V8” moments on finishing a book. I’ve also been known to think “that’s a funny once Mike” and not reread.
So for my money it’s better to have loved and lost – to borrow a phrase better to enjoy the peach of the early book and to ignore the rotten peach of the later book. I suppose my normal response to “and stop” is to overshoot by one but I have no shame about consulting some equivalent of Master Plots, Classics Illustrated , spoiler laden reviews or other hints as I shut down reading the series.
Mostly I’d start a series with an explicit intention of not finishing it either to see what the fuss is about or to be able to know what I’m talking about when I chime in – not that I’m above having an uninformed opinion.
For examples and context I enjoyed the Deighton all the way through as I do most of his books. I’d say there the plot and the atmosphere toward the end outweighed the story as force of nature – I read in some part to see how the author dealt rather than to see how the story ended for any particular character – affinity groups not individuals. I am reminded of STASI saying no hard feelings it was all a game in the period after reunification and so think of the team and not the players.
I’d consider the Eric Flint et al follow on to The Witches of Kerres as non-cannonical though I’d give a pretty penny to read The Karres Ventures.
X-Files, I’ll always wonder what background mythology inspired people to spend their lives for nothing I could ever see – as in the movie where an apparently normal and respected human being spends his life to ensure the bomb explodes – why did he do that and what organization could recruit and inspire such unselfish behavior -and stay secret – in the context of all the other silliness.
I’d say some writers develop such skill – fluid writing that they can produce great lengths of prose that is not in fact inspired or driven or moving the story forward – at most moving the plot. Dickson’s later Childe Cycle is IMHO a good example – I’d hate to pass up Soldier Ask Not but although I passed some pages of his last before my eyes I can hardly be said to have read them.
As noted Doyle tired of Holmes but I don’t think Stout tired of Archie and Wolfe – All in the Family is a late book and Lonely Silver Rain is a good Travis McGee – but arguably some sag in the middle and some sag at the end but most all sag.
I think Card is a special case because I think his early work is easily misconstrued and I think is misconstrued by some of the people who like it most. Folk of the Fringe is a different book for people who don’t know LDS.
As test I’ll never be able to administer I’d like to give a full blown live on stage presentation of Card’s Secular Humanist Revival to an audience that is not LDS aware and to an audience that is – I think the exit interviews would be quite different.
Laurrell K Hamilton’s Anita Blake series is a huge disappointment to me. The main character changed tremendously over the course of the books. The plots did too. Early books had a plot with a mystery for Anita to solve. Later book became plotless, softcore fanatsy porn (vampires, weres, and Anita the super-powered human who gained more powers from sex).
I stuck around longer than I wanted to hoping Anita and the plots who return to what I enjoyed in the first books. Now I check back every so often to find the same complaints – no plot, too much sex. Still some people love the books. I can only imagine those people who love them simply haven’t discovered mature fan fic on the internet because you get better stories there than in a LKH novel.
A couple of years ago I sold off the first 6 books of the series that I owned. Since I knew Anita becomes a slut, I no longer wanted to read the early novels knowing where it was leading.
I’m wondering, in review of everyone else’s views, if what pushed me to continue reading certain series (Anthony’s Xanth, Brooks’ Shannara, Eddings’ Mallorean) many moons ago, was not so much a desire to see if it got better after it started the downturn, so much as I a) had no one to warn me, and b) was a teenager who had time on her hands.
When it comes to series I recommend (and I *adore* Jordan), I usually give it a “it’s not for everyone, try the first book–if you can’t give it that much, at least stick with it for the first 150 pages, see how it grabs you.”
Goodkind’s Sword of Truth sure sounds like Jordan for the first two books (without the grandiose cast of characters), but takes a sharp turn–keeping some similarities but having a much different direction towards its conclusion.
Reading everyone’s viewpoint will probably put some warning asterisks on my “To Read” list, which is handy, but I will probably still try that tricky sequel… may not finish it, but I’ll try it.
tikitu @@@@@ 24: That’s probably the best tip, yes… perhaps not a “don’t read” so much as it’s a “don’t buy”–at least until you’ve discovered whether you’ll be revisiting that book.
I liked Ancient Light so much that I more enjoy not just Golden Witchbreed, in retrospect, but a whole slew of other brick-thick averting-the-apocalypse novels. I am often more convinced by the danger of apocalypse than I am by the cure; Gentle stepped right up and said yup, sometimes even the charismatic and well-meaning fail in the uttermost. Okay! The ‘telltale compression of the pages’ tells me less than it used to.
Cherryh’s Morgana (sp?) series feels about the same at a small remove.
Generally if I’m told to read a certain number of books in a series and then stop, my response will depend on who’s telling me. If it’s my sister, I’ll comply–she and I have very similar tastes. If it’s someone who I know likes different things in a book than I do, I may disregard their advice completely.
Good advice I was once given: when my at-the-time boyfriend handed me the first of Sara Douglass’ novels (I think it was the Wayfarer series), he told me to slog through the first 30 pages because it would get better after that. The first 30 pages were dreadfully dull, but he was right, it did get enormously better!
After reading all the above, I’ll stop feeling guilty that I never finished the Riverworld series. And I do like all the books in the Ender series, but some of them I had to read twice before I liked them at all. Speaker remains a favorite book, despite how I feel about Card’s recent essays on homosexuality.
Erdrick @@@@@ 13: I thought Hobb’s Assassin series was well-written, and gripping enough I had to finish the series, but so depressing that I’ll never read the books again.
Kiley @@@@@ 50: The only reason I re-read Book 7 is to get a sense of closure on the story–it seemed like Rowling became such a big name she was no longer made to put up with an editor’s suggestions, and the book suffered for it. I don’t know the facts of the matter, but that’s how the book read for me.
I liked Xenocide–particularly the scenes with the two girls of Path–but Children of the Mind pretty much ended the Enderverse for me. I did read the Bean books, but while I enjoyed the stuff with Petra squaring off mentally with Bean’s old nemesis, the Bean-one-upping-Ender killed the whole point of Ender’s Game for me. Undermined it. So now I just pretend the first three books exist and none of the rest do.
I got through all the original Herbert books, and two and a half books into the prequels, despite the fact that I agree with Tycho of Penny Arcade on the subject: “Frank Herbert, they are —-ing his corpse.” I think somewhere after Duke Leto’s dad died I gave up on the whole thing. (I read Dune obsessively, but I had to wonder if Brian Herbert read his dad’s books, or if he had access to a secret copy none of the rest had, because Duke Leto’s childhood? Lady Jessica’s time in the BG house? Totally not like what was implied in the first chapters of Dune. If I ever get published, I think I’ll have all my rights revert to Creative Commons or public domain or something upon my death. Unless I have any disabled kids who need the money. but then everybody can tinker with the works for FREE. At least nobody will have a monopoly on screwing over my worlds just because they were related.)
“well-written, and gripping enough I had to finish the series, but so depressing that I’ll never read the books again.”
perfect description of The Fionavar Tapestry by GGKay. while i loved the series & still recommend it to those i think will like it, they will get the warning that 1 character’s fate will quite likely be such a rage/depression inducing situation that they may not be happy with having read it.
If someone tells me to stop after a certain book, I won’t if I do like it. But if I agree that the next book isn’t any good, then I’ll stop with it. Whereas I’d likely read even the next one in the series if I hadn’t had any warning, just in the hopes that the author might recover the series.
A downhill series that I immediately thought of that hasn’t been mentioned yet is Elizabeth Haydon’s Symphony of the Ages series. I really liked the first three, but the next three were very hard to get through.
Aedifica @@@@@ 61: The Assasin series does end on a depressing note, but you really need to read through the LiveShip Traders and Tawny Man trilogies to get the full story. One of my absolute favs.
As for Pern…of course I’ve heard of the series, but I was so infuriated by McCaffrey’s short story in Legends where the main character fell in love and then didn’t even bother to finish her race on camera (ok, on page) that I knew I’d never start reading the series, not matter how much of a classic it was.
Unless it’s a strongly negative recommendation (“Don’t read under any circumstances” vs “don’t bother/waste of money or time”), I lean toward “read eventually” because I’ve rarely had a series ruined. “Bad” sequels often drive me to re-read the “good” first books. There’s an element of “what was I thinking?” in that exercise, but often I can recapture some of the original experience, too. (The LKH/Anita Blake books fall into that category for me.)
I *do* appreciate the advice, though – lowering my expectations makes it possible to better tolerate a weaker sequel in order to find out “what happens next”. I also won’t necessarily force myself to read to the on if I know it’s not going to improve. (I’ve been a few chapters into God Emperor of Dune and Xenocide since the 80’s.)
I can only think of one case where a sequel “ruined” a series for me. It was the end of a trilogy of trilogies, and I loved the first 8 1/2 books. Usually it’s a good sign when I stay up all night reading, get to the end, and start again at the beginning immediately. (“That was great! I wanna ride it again!”) In this case, I got to the end and started to re-read in hopes that the ending would be different the next time. (“Surely that was just a dream!”) Jo’s post about “bad endings” summed it up: “I felt betrayed.” I can’t be sorry I read the first 8 (well, at least the first 6) because they were excellent. But I can’t bring myself to re-read them. And I can’t recommend them. Highly frustrating.
This is all very interesting! I agree with most of you although I read all of Anne McAffrey’s books as an adult and some of them twice. The same with Marion Zimmer Bradley. I love reading about “holocaust” or “shipwrecked” type stories when people find a way to manage. I guess I like them so much because my life always seems such a mess.
One interesting thing about Ender’s Game and Orson Scott Card is that I thought Ender’s Game was so different from Card’s other books that it seemed like two different authors, as if the tension of Ender’s Game wore him out and he got a bit gentler.
Guy Gavriel Kay’s earlier books (The Fionavar Tapestry books) and those following shortly after are also excellent, much better than his recent series.
I’ve also read, and kept, almost everything C.J. Cherryh wrote. She and Kay have kept me up many nights.
And as for GRRF: I COULD SCREAM!!! And I did after that last book. I’ll only read the next if he promises to finish and not kill any more good guys. The man who got me started on that series said “If you read this, you will learn to hate!”
QuantumEve @@@@@ 64: Sorry I wasn’t clear–when I spoke of the Assassin “series” I meant all nine books/three trilogies.
And I screamed again after seeing that I mis-typed GRRM.
Varm: Ok, I’ll bite, *what trilogy of trilogies are you talking about?*
Oooh! Animated Captcha. Never seen one of those before. Neat!
Hmm, all of these conversations are definatly wetting my appetite for a new series. Its been a while since my last post, and i still haven’t gone back to the 2nd shanarra book, and i dont think i will. my appetite for a series far, far outweighs my enjoyment of a single book. and the thought that i was going to find a new epic series and was shot down really hurt the case. i’m gonna have to return them to my uncle, which is too bad.
now, does anyone have any suggestions about a new EPIC series to enjoy? And i mean like the wheel of time, which might be the most epic series i have ever read, and one of the very few i’ve gone back to seemingly at least every other year. hopefully my local library will have it too. if you have a good suggestion for me, please shoot me an email, at neorotoxin@yahoo.com!
When I’m told not to go on with a series, I can’t help thinking, “Why? What do you know that I don’t?” And then I’ll read the sequels, anyway, more often than not agree that it was an awful book, and then commiserate with the person who told me not to read the book over the various different points that made the book terrible.
If you want to be a serious literary thinker or hobby reader/fan, to be frank, you have to slog through a lot of garbage. In the end, though, it’s always worth it.
For example, I was very reluctant to go watch the most recent Star Trek movie. I had many misgivings, and was concerned that J.J. Abrams wasn’t even a fan of the series. But I went, anyway, and I hated it. The difference now, though, is that I can tell you why I hated it, rather than mouth some vague platitudes I read on a website, or that I fabricated out of my opinion of J.J. Abrams.
It’s a hobby just like any other; there are parts you’ll enjoy and that remind you why it’s your favorite hobby in the first place, and other parts that make you think, “Why, God? Why?” However, as someone posted before me, being able to read very fast does help.
There are some series that hold up, some that get lesser but are still readable and some where you just want to go wtf?
Great series are defined by how long and how good the quality is maintained. One I havent seen mentioned is the Flinx series. The first half dozen books are great, then it definately goes downhill. I do expect to finish it, and hopefully the sense of fun comes back to it.
I agree that the Anita Blake books have gotten out of hand, and she needs to get back to the basics of what made that series good, which was the mysteries.
The Shannara series started oOne thing that k but was terrible after 3 books.
Another series type that hasn’t really been mentions is the creation of a universe of stories, seemingly unrelated or not closely related but all the stories fall within that universe. The Known Space series by Larry Niven and Heinlein’s stories all fall into this category.
Frankly, in thinking about this I can think of hundreds of series that I have read. Boy, have I wasted a bunch of time! My addiction is reading, and its worse than smoking or AA…there is no cure.
David Brin’s “Uplift” trilogy of trilogies. Lots of set up glimpses of neat and breathtaking stuff, as well as several brilliant early books for an absolute piss-take of an ending.
And the sequel to “The Lies of Lock Lamora.” It was 800 pages of do whatever the hell the author wanted, for no particular reason, especially injecting a third-rate pirate story into the heist story, with the addition of a poorly drawn pantheon of second-rate Greek Gods.
Ate through all the good will he’d earned.
I’d say read the first two books in the ‘Dune’ series, but after that, it’s definitely downhill. IMO, not even set in the same universe as the first two.
(Note to authors: if you’re going to write a series, keep a record of your premises and characters so you won’t contradict yourself. Some of us notice those things.)
I’m very late to post here, because I just followed a link, but I’m a huge jo walton fan. I wanted to ask a different question–there are stand alone books that can be ruined by too many sequels, but there are also series’ that are ruined by the author being deterimined to overwrite and drag out what is merely a pretty good idea, or pretty good world. I far prefer the great stand alone, and try to limit myself and not look back. Dune, Enders Game (to a lesser extent Ender’s Shadow which was an interesting parallax view) and Robin Hobb’s Mad Ship books which certainly started out fantastically. Some series manage to keep my love and attention (Wen Spencer’s Ukiah Oregon, Tinker, the Vorkosigan Sagas by Bujold) but the various mass market series’ that are meant to be ongoing leave me cold.
aimai
I wish I’d been warned against McCaffrey. Grr! “Masterharper” introduces so many hopeless continuity issues … I notice that after this she pretty much dropped any “contemporary” stories involving any of the major characters (Those in “White Dragon”)
The events in “Masterharper” make the entire story line that starts in “Dragonsong”, and its main plot device, impossible.
Traditionally, girls can’t be harpers? Yet it seems Robinton’s wife was a harper. “I insist we deny no-one their rightful place”. Yeah, like his deceased wife?
Petiron’s stepdaughter was a harper, there was a whole college of female singers, but he never mentioned any of this, and nobody in Half Circle Sea hold was aware of any of it? The whole device of Menolly running away because nobody would take a girl harper seriously, just collapses and takes “Dragonsinger” (only girl harper in the hall) with it.
When the computer game “Myst:URU” was released, and reviewers were panning it, but giving a grade of “B”, I recall thinking that if this game had any other pedigree than the revered Rand brothers, it would have gotten the “F” it deserved. We do too much of that, forgiving writers for a real stinker because of prior work. And it’s not just SF: Hemingway’s “Across the River…” just bit it but nobody was willing to frankly say so at the time.
We need to be readier to say and think, “but what have you done for me lately?”, to be less forgiving and quicker to evaluate a story on its own merits rather than its ancestry.
I may hear in person, but just about never read a reviewer saying in print, “Don’t read this. It’s a disappointment and worse than a waste of your time, it will spoil the previous one for you”. Reviewers and/or their editors just don’t have the, whatever, to say that in print most of the time.
I wonder also if editors sometimes lack the courage to stand up to a writer and say, “I’m not going to publish this. It sux, it damages the series, it betrays your readers.” I know there’s just a whole lot more to that, lots to say on multiple sides, but it’s undeniable that books do get published which should not have been.
If you’re one of us forlorn David Gerrold fans, you know the agony of waiting forever for sequels, so that’s the opposite point, I guess. Is it better to endure a long wait, maybe never see the next book (I will never speak to James Clavell again, because he died before writing “Hag”), than to have the next book even if it is worse than disappointing? I dunno.
I do know that I would like the option, which I will not get if reviewers won’t write, or editors won’t publish, frank and forthright reviews that say, “don’t read this book”.
For me it depends on the series. Otherland, by Tad Williams, starts brilliantly. It ends badly. But is it worth if for the first book? It was for me. The images in that book still haunt me years after reading it.
Umm, Golden Witchbreed is basically a remake of Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, except not as good and with some extra stuff tacked on at the end. It was OK, but the “extra stuff” felt out of place. I haven’t read Ancient Light, but apparently I didn’t miss much.
While we’re talking about Mary Gentle, I couldn’t make head nor tails of the White Crow sequence and gave up halfway through the last book. I liked Grunts (not a series) the first time around, but the second time—when the novelty had worn off—I was so disgusted by the orcs’ behavior that I gave up. Granted, it was more realistic than your average High Fantasy novel, but disgusting nonetheless (spoiler: in the first chapter, the orcs attack the good guys’ supply train and rape the women and children).
Loved Ash: A Secret History, but book four (US edition) is unobtainium, or was the last time I checked.
Long and / or thick series that don’t disappoint: C. J. Cherryh’s Foreigner series; Peter Hamilton’s Commonwealth Saga and sequel-ish Void Trilogy (fingers crossed, third book isn’t out yet); Katharine Kerr’s Deverry Cycle; Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle; plenty of others that I either haven’t read or can’t remember off the bat.
I’ll just toss in another all-time loser, which was Beyond the Fall of Night, by Gregory Benford and Arthur C Clarke, the sequel to Clarke’s Against the Fall of Night/The City and the Stars. That book was so horrendously awful that I can’t even remember what was in it, nor whether I actually finished it.
Fortunately, my memory of it is so thoroughly wiped that I can go back and read the original again without any problem whatsoever.
I second (third, or whatever) the comments regarding Asimov and his really unfortunate efforts to tie all of his Foundation and Robot stories together. In fact, there was really no point in any Foundation novel after Second Foundation.
And, yes, everything after the original Rendezvous with Rama and 2001 was unnecessary rubbish.
I wonder what possessed Clarke and Asimov to mess with those classics? Lack of new ideas? Certainly not lack of money. Really, it’s not necessary to tie up every loose end and answer every question; life doesn’t work that way, so why should fiction? Sometimes it’s good to leave a mystery that doesn’t have a solution.
I am a bit surprised at the number of people who seem to like the sequels to Dune. I can remember quite distinctly at the time that a common comment from people who had read them and other novels by Herbert, such as Destination: Void and The Dosadi Experiment, was ‘Who on Earth ghost-wrote Dune?’
And I’ll just stay away from any discussion of sequels to Star Trek — whoops.
Oh, and then there were the two sequels to Colossus. I seem to recall the first sequel wasn’t too terrible, but that the third one was crap. Again, there wasn’t any point after the first one, really.
I tend to think that franchises have inherent problems. Aristotle was right when he observed that something has to be of a certain magnitude to be beautiful. Something really small can’t be beautiful because you can’t see it. And something monstrously large can’t be beautiful because you can only see part of it and not the whole. So literary works that are too short don’t hit the mark and literary works that are too large also fall short.
In the case of series that continue until the wheels fall off, I tend to think they’re just too large, too vast, to be beautiful.
I might add that, as far as I can see, you don’t find great artists dragging their works along until they’ve wrung every bit of energy from them. No sequel to Hamlet, for example.
The problem I have with the interminable series is the book that begins stuffing a whole new cast of characters into a list that is already immense. Wheel of Time did this, Game of Thrones did this, and another review book I read whose title I can’t recall did it in a major way. I read the book to reconnect with the characters that were in the earlier books. When they are sidelined for a entirely new slate of people, I put the book down and never pick it up again.
I tend to avoid the gargantuan series. A trilogy is not bad, five books is a lot, an unending trail of books is reason for me to walk past that section of the shelf.
I’m amazed no one mentioned the Amber books. I have been unwavering in my belief that the “Merlin” books (Trumps of Doom, on) were not merely mediocre books but that they actually cause damage to the “Corwin” books, making generic things which were unique in the first series.
Couldn’t disagree more about Mary Gentle’s Ancient Light and Golden Witchbreed. They have to be read as a pair, and they’re proper grown up fantasy as opposed to the pap served up by McCaffrey and Card.
(Hadn’t realised how strongly I felt about this until just now!)
If a series is a continuing senle storyline I tend to avoid them until the entire series is published. (I didn’t read Potter until book seven came out)
If it is more like Discworld where I can them in any order then I am a much happier camper.
Having been burned by David Gerald and the 17 year long (and counting) cliff-hanging I have little tolerance for series books.
and as for the sequels getting poor quality. I’ll stop when a story starts getting weak. Never got past the third Dune novel or the 1st book of triology two of Thomas Covenant.
Here is how much I hate series: I miss trilogies.
Here is a secret we need to remember: endings matter.
More than almost anything else in a book or movie, endings matter.
I am continuously pleased and impressed that Rowling actually held the Potter books to seven.
Perhaps I missed it above, but one should never, ever read past the original Foundation Trilogy.
EVER.
As for Dune, the first two books were, iirc, written as one work and published separately due to publisher fears. The third one is worth it; the others — well, it’s a bit like going back to your high school reunion and expecting people to not have changed at all, but they have….and not usually for the better,
I stopped reading Jordan’s series, because I wanted him to finish it first; it became painfully clear that he was stretching things out to milk the cash cow….
Donaldson should never have written sequels to the Thomas Covenant books either.
And who do we blame for all this?
Publishers, who are greedy?
Writers, who see the cash cow, and look at their hungry children and leaky roofs?
Readers, who keep buying the same book, over and over and over again?
Comics at least bring in fresh blood now and then, and revitalize the series. Occasionally, writers come back with new passion for their once-thrilling series (I hear Xanth got better at some point, and Tarzan fans tell me the same).
But here is a related question: what about series that keep getting better and better, so that the earliest books are the weakest ones? I think Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books become deeper and deeper — I made a dinner party roar when I said “once you get past the first 3 or so, they’re amazing…”
Bingo! If there were a way to determine the truth, I would bet cash money I know where he’d intended to go.