Are they milking us?

I love to read. More importantly I love to read science fiction and I just started reading some fantasy. However, I have come to the realization that a large portion of my time will be invested in reading fantasy. With school, work, and balancing a social life, I am torn between starting to read an epic fantasy series or just cranking out a lot of single volume books. The Dark Tower series is seven books long. The Sword of Truth, The Wheel of Time and many other books recommended to me are multiple wolume works. My question is, are they worth it? Or are the authors and publishers just trying to squeeze more money out of us?

I know what you mean. It can be disheartening to pick up a promising book and then be told that you'll have to read 15 more to find out how it ends. And I do suspect that some authors simply stick to their own money-making formula rather than diversifying.

I find I get on better approaching a series of books that has already 'closed' - that is, there will be no more. Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials' is a good example. Three medium-to-long books, with a definite beginning, middle and end.

An exception to my rule would be Pratchett's Discworld novels, however. Because they are inexhaustible so long as he can manage still to be funny...

I know what you mean. That's why I rely on feedback from sites such as this one to tell me which books are worth my time or not. It has already been established in many a thread that fantasy works are mainly derivatives of each other, so it's a little difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff. So I definitely agree with you - they are trying to milk monet from us.

Having said that, I'd recommend the following people whom you shouldn't mind giving them our milk (sorry). Guy Gavriel Kay writes high quality single volume works that are simply too brilliant to describe. Matured fantasy with a hint of familiarity if you are into history as well. Start with his Tigana or Lions of Al-Rassan. He also wrote one trilogy and one duology. Both brilliant.

Another one are the Earthsea books by Le Guin. Brilliant. Start with A Wizard of Earthsea.

ds

The Wheel of Time certainly is. As for the others I don't know. What I've heard of the Sword of Truth series is that after the first couple of books it gets very bad, very fast, and each book is apparently a repetition of the last, with more philosophy in it though. Raymond E Feist's just using many series, rather than one or two long series, but the effect's the same.

That said, there are lots of writers who continually produce quality novels - Steven Erikson, for one, who's writing a ten book series, and each one has improved upon the last (he's published 6 so far - I've only read the first 5 though). George RR Martin's another - his A Song of Ice and Fire is 7 books, of which 4 are published, and the first 3 are all amazing, and while the 4th took a long time to come out and wasn't quite as high quality as the last, it was still excellent and certainly not evidence of Martin just trying to milk his fans for more money (otherwise it wouldn't have taken 5 years to come out). R Scott Bakker has written an excellent trilogy with the Prince of Nothing- but we'll have to see if the quality begins to fall in the next one. Guy Gavriel Kay keeps writing excellent standalone novels

Outside of epic fantasy there are lots of authors writing continually excellent standalones - China Mieville, Jeff Vandermeer, Graham Joyce and some older writers continuing to write well such as Gene Wolfe and Michael Moorcock.

I don't know as much about science fiction, but I'd expect similar trends to fantasy. Either way, there are still hundreds of excellent briefer, older novels in both genres.

good question.

i think some authors would be far better off thinking of their readers and staying with shorter series, or at least definite endings every three or six books in case a reader has had enough and doesn't want to read 25 more of the same stuff to have a story line end.

it's just ridiculous these days.. yes, i think they are milking us. especially SOT and WOT.. good grief, give us all an ending.

I agree with Green Knight, I never start reading a series until it has been finished. At least then you know what you're getting yourself into. And I always buy just one book at a time. Not all fantasy writers are worth spending your time and money on, but if you find a good one it's great to know that you have all of that ahead of you. As ds said, check ouy booksites e.g. Amazons reviews etc to see what other people think. That's usually a good guideline. And you can often find excerpts from books, either on Amazon or the authors or publishers websites, to get a taste of what the book is like.

thanks alot guys, really appreciated. Earthsea is what im going to read.

It may be that or maybe some authors have built up such an epic that they can't figure out how to end it. That's how I felt about Wheel of Time. The last books I read seemed to have a few big major key events with lots of filler story leading up to them.

Blame Tolkien's publishers for splitting one book into three. Now, given the genre's incestuous nature, they all seem to think a book needs to have multiple volumes.

It should be noted that just because a story is stretched out over numerous books doesn't mean it's going to be time well spent. You could probably just derive as much pleasure from a 150 page novel as anything with bloody pixies.

I came to realize that most of the multiple books series are science fiction, right? Hence, it might be that you never know how are you going to end a science fiction novel until you reach a certain stage. After all this is my guess, I don’t write science fiction novels, maybe soon .

Samerron said:

I don’t write science fiction novels, maybe soon .

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Urgh! Who wants to write science fiction. It's that sort of thing that gets queues of spotty, fat geeks chatting in binary with Star Trek t-shirts bearing jokes in Klingon wanting your signature. Erotica is where the women are at; but that's a different sort of fantasy.

I don't mind a long series. I do quit reading though if the quality starts goin downhill, then you know it's just a moneymaker and they could care less what they are writing about.