Oh no, your post was perfectly clear (you mentioned that you thought the other books were great). My post was one that might've been misleading. I was just listing a whole bunch of things where I agreed the series had gone down hill to be contrasted with one that really came out of left field for me.

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When I die I want to go peacefully in my sleep, like my grandfather. Not screaming in terror, like his passengers.

Part of it is that a series book, now more than ever (echoes of The Player!) is a necessity. Publishers want series, not stand-alone novels. Writers want to make money. Some writers will be in a position, through money or personal inclination, to say 'actually, that's all' -- but those writers are going to be a minority. If they're in the business of producing 12-book series, then they're professional writers doing a job that's predicated on the fact that the 8th book of a series is a better bet, financially, than a standalone book by someone no one's ever heard of. If people stopped buying series books, then there would be less bad sequels and fewer writers who have obviously run out of things to do with a particular universe or just don't want to go back there. There are lots of series, sf.f or otherwise, that are terrific -- don't get me wrong. But when every novel is expected to stretch to a trilogy and every trilogy to a duodecahedronology, then you're going to have some major suckitude.

Cheers, Jon

Here's an author who has disappointed me twice! Christopher Stasheff.

I found his "Warlock in spite of himself" by accident. A cross between interstellar-explorer and fairy-and-gnomes fiction it sounds terrible, but in fact was fun. Then I tried reading the sequels, "King Kobold" etc. Oh, dear.

But I also tried "A Company of Stars", said to be the first in a series, "Starship Troupers". With a name like that, it could be fun, I thought. The plot of the first book is:
Group of actors are recruited and leave Earth.
That's it, end of book, and it wasn't funny. It was so obviously an inflated first chapter, that I wrote to Mr.Stasheff, via his publisher, to protest. Honourably, he replied, but he was shameless and I've lost his letter.

JOhn

Ditto. I only got as far as Book 3 before I gave up.

I enjoyed the Dune series, but the first book was enormously superior to the others.

Asimov: I preferred the early Robot books to the Foundation series, which failed to live up to the hype.

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- Learn a lot teaching others.

Agreed. IIRC, the later books just got plain silly. They started to read like a child's bedtime story or something. Don't know if he thought he was being clever or what. . . :-?

Peter. I gottta agree with your #1 pick. That was the first series to leap to my mind as well. I don't think I made it past book 6 or 7 myself. . . What a shame.

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. . . My moustache is touching my brain!!!!

I just finished Homeward Bound (latest book in the Worldware/Colonization series by Turtledove) and I didn't know you could write a 600 page book where absolutely nothing happens!

The begining of the series was very good, but you are correct in saying he can't finish it. Just give us closure or something! And please, please when you write a 600 page book make sure SOMETHING (anything!) happens. 600 pages of sitting around the table discussing the political situation between the race and humans is worthless.

Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality series. I rather liked the first one, and read through to about the third or fourth book (whichever one is about Time) before I decided that he really couldn't sustain my interest.

I never got into Xanth - I've only read the first one.

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"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky

My vote goes to "Warworld". There should be some kind of award for writing that many books in a series, yet making every one worse than its predecessor!

To each his own. Gerrold's writing style did change a lot (although I'd say after second book rather than after first), but to me it was an improvement. I liked "A Season for Slaughter" best of all four books.
Is this what you are talking about? http://www.chtorr.com/books-chtorr5/chtorr5.htm

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

Put in my vote for the Thomas Covenant books as a bad series. I don't think I got through the first chapter.

In the SF ring, I started but never finished the Deathworld books.

Fred

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"For shame, gentlemen, pack your evidence a little better against another time."
-- John Dryden, "The Vindication of The Duke of Guise" 1684

That was at least two years ago, right? Where's the book? I liked the series myself, but I stopped holding my breath for number five some time ago.

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"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky

It feels strange to hear others bring up certain books,Cthorr series and Turtledove's WorldWar/Colonization series, because both I thought started off with great ideas. I found myself skipping many pages in the later Turtledove
series and really did not miss much in where the story was going. But especially in the Chtorr series, I kept asking myself "What in the hell happened to this story" I know this is just my opinion but the WorldWar/Colonization series in three books would have been much better. I began to worry about all the trees that had to die to supply fiber for the neverending Turtledove series.

We're talking about stuff that started good and then began to drink from the fountain of suck in the sequals, not stuff that was bad to begin with.

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"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky

Yep. His style was initially somewhat like Heinlein, which prompted me to pick up the second book, whereupon I picked up the third book in the trilogy to finish it out (Ha). It is not so much the change in style that bothers me about the series is that nothing ever seems to be resolved. The sidetrack into the general decay of society, his mother, etc was not really all that interesting. The free-sex commune when he was with the worm people could be turned into a Heinleinesque moment if one of the children in the commune time-travels and becomes Lizard. I also started his Star Wolf series, again, a series that petered out. This along with Alan Dean Foster's Flinx series that never ends, never seems to go anywhere except to have a deus ex machine genetic design superpower pop up in the last chapter to save everything has turned me off from getting into any serialized book or program until it is completed. More and more it seems that writers are viewing books as steady income via creating a series and never finishing it, each book is a chapter and not stand alone. Jack McDevitt has an interesting universe set up with the Omega Clouds and each book actually stands by itself as a story but Turtledove's alternate history books must be read as a set as do some of Timothy Zhan's books. Jim being lost in the Amazon jungle as his blimp crashes as a cliffhanger for a book is bad form when the next book is in question of whether or not it will be produced - just as having your main characters be dissolved in the final episode of Farscape. That was not the writer's fault but Sci-Fi, the publisher, as they cancelled on the contract to continue, so maybe it is not Gerrold's fault to produce but failure to find a publisher who will publish his work.

A series that the style has turned me off on is the Man-Kzin wars. The few books I have read have a very different feel to Known Space than the Niven feel. They just don't seem to fit in. I stopped reading them after the book where the Outsiders were explained as being aliens from another dimension sent to investigate this universe. I had always pictured them as biologically modified tnuctipun from the fleet that got away when they were conquered by the slavers.

Though I love the "Known Space" stories I never did read the Man-Kzin war books. The Outsiders were wierd enough when they were just from a gas giant - they don't need to also be from another universe.

To go back to the major theme of this thread, I think there are very few authors who can consistently produce good quality fiction, and since science fiction and fantasy are only a fraction of the writers out there (though seemingly a growing fraction) it stands to reason that there won't be many authors who can keep churning out book after book.

Authors writing series are under the additional restrictions of trying to write "the same but different" - the new books have to be similar to the original volume in a series but different enough to not be a simple rehash. That's a thin line to walk.

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"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky

My vote for "worst book series" has to be the Rama series! Rendevous was interesting, but it just went downhill after that. Rama Revealed has to be the lamest ending of all time. I mean, come on, a being (God) who created a whole universe needs a fleet of giant spaceships to check on it to see if it's working out alright! Gimme a break!

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Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

Wow, I loved those books. Same with McCaffrey. :-? [-X 8)

But, I would have to agree with Hubbard's massive pile of dreck.

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"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known." Carl Sagan

I didn't think that anyone had actually read Hubbard's books

What about any series that you did like all the way through?

I really enjoyed The Fionavar Tapestry by Guy Gavrial Kay (excuse my spelling, I don't have the book in front of me). Plus, he's a Canadian author =D>

I am also liking Harry Potter (discussed here before), but am finding that she is getting a case of Robert Jordanism...books getting longer without any reason

Later

Pete

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PJE

There's so much I don't know about astrophysics. I wish I had read that book by that wheelchair guy.

I disagree vehemently. The books are getting longer and better.

There's NO way you can compare her to Robert Jordan. First of all, his books aren't actually getting longer. The print is getting bigger.

As for book 10, I've never come so close to ripping a book to shreds in my life. I finally came to the conclusion that if I had to read about some Aes Sedai folding her arms and looking serene and a detailed account of her clothing ONE MORE TIME, I was going to break something.

And, now, to discover that he's blaming his editor when he took the time to write a prequel instead of finishing this freakin' series. And then there's the fact that he pretends he wasn't inspired by Tolkien at all and doesn't know why anyone compares them. Ugh. I've never been so put off by an author in my life. #-o

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"The oxen are slow, but the earth is patient."

Speaking of "I'm not ripping off Tolkien!"-ism, the whole "Jerle Shannara" arc by Terry Brooks stinks if The Sword of Shannara was any indication... The background was rather interesting, but the whole "human race splits up into different species so I get a fantasy-type environment" business was extremely forced, there was no character development, and even the monsters were about as original as a potato chip (with the exception of the machine-beast, whose attack relied far too much on Allanon's endless supply of stupidity).

Admittedly, The Sword of Shannara had the potential to be excellent, but I found it to be a disappointment. It didn't suck like the whole Pern series, but it wasn't that great, and was inspired way, way too much by Tolkien.