Why do these authors ruin their series:

[bookmonk]

Weis: She has written a very unique but boring book about some harlot who leeches off Gods in dragon lance. I mean Mina is interesting,but she is weak willed, needy and whiney unless she has some God by her side. In The war of souls series this was clearly apparent, and in her own series now (why even give her her own series??) it is ringing obvious this girl is sad excuse.

Salvatore: In his latest series, which may be the last we see of Drizzt (love him or hate him), the first two books were strong but the third is a poor excuse for a farewell to Drizzt. If in deed it is the last.

Feist: Yeah yeah not too many fans of him here, but I am a huge fan. Nakor is awesome, anyways, again we have a pretty strong first two books in conclave of shadows, we are introduced to a new character, who is of course a cliche, but an interesting one. Yes he is a boy turned hero, but he is done in a pretty good fashion. My gripe is with the third book of this series, which DITCHES everything about any conclave of shadows for the most part, it ditches the charcter we followed for the first two books and basically forces us to read about the villian of the last book escaping his banishment LOL. This is so annoying! It is like if in Superman 3, instead of Superman, you watch how the 3 people find their way out of the piece of glass the whole movie lol.

 

[direstraits]

Would you recommend Weis and Salvatore? I've Weis's (and Hickman's) Book 1 of Death Gate, but never read it.

I've read Salvatore's Star Wars Vector Prime and was unimpressed. However, I've heard equal parts good stuff and bad stuff of his Drizzt. Should I or shouldn't I take the plunge? (Btw how would you pronounce Drizzt? It is Dritz, with one syllable, or Driz-zit, with two)?

And I dislike Feist. Read my impressions in the Magician threads here.

Enjoy and welcome to the Forum!

ds

 

[bookmonk]

first thanks for the welcome!

second, yes i would read weis and hickman, at least their original dragonlance and legends series, it is unbelievable! the dea5th gate series is cool to, but i woudl go get dragonlance right now. don't even wait.

As for salvatore, it ias pronounced drizt as in one syllable, which is even explained in the books ata certain point. yes i would read the drizzt books, the first 6 atleast, because drizzt is a very unique and thought provokign character. i woudl start with the homeland series first even though it was the secdn trilolgy, it was a pre-quel which telsl the story of Drizzt's rocky starts.

and finally Feist, well, it really was my first fantasy series that got me started, so it is hard for me to go abck and critize the series, even though now I see that it is a huge cliche, page boy turned hero.

 

[zen]

talking about ruining series......

can i add Robert Jordan and Terry Goodkind to this discussion?

i love both the WOT and SOT books, but i am really wondering if both of these authors will have finished these series before they die.

 

[Trick Silo]

I would recommend reading Salavatore's Drizzt series as well. I am currently not all of the way through it, but what I have read so far, I am currently in the "Paths of Darkness" series(The third out of four), it is really, really good.

As to Jordan's Wheel of Time. I have turned my attention towards that series right now. I am currently in the fourth installment(The Shadow Rising), and from what I have read on another forum, Jordan is planning on finishing the series at book thirteen. From what I have read so far, 13 is a number that holds weight in the book, so this sounds plausible.

 

[Brys]

Jordan's pretty much the most obvious example here - he went from derivative, but mildly entertaining and displaying some semblance of competence in his first few books, to a truly awful, plotless mess culminating in the disaster of Crossroads of Twilight. Jordan is planning on finishing the series at book 12, saying that he was going to end on book 12, no matter how long the book has to be, but I seriously have some doubts about that. I've lost what respect I had for Jordan because of books 8-10, and to tell you the truth, I'm starting to feel that parodies of WoT and simple summaries of what happens are actually better written than it.

As for SoT, I haven't read it, but from what I can gather is that it was less of a gradual decline, but instead the series just walked off a cliff edge into the abyss after the first couple of books.

Feist at least has the advantage of writing short series - his writing's declined terribly since Magician, but the Riftwar Saga was pretty good, as was the Empire series. He at least has some decent completed series, so despite the poor quality of some of the more recent books, it isn't a disaster for him. I think the problem he has is that he's run out of ideas - Jordan may be obviously trying just to cash in on his success, but Feist just seems too attached to Midkemia for his own good. He's not writing massive series, and he is trying to do something new with each one, but unfortunately, Midkemia's been overexploited, and should have been put to rest a long time ago. He needs to try something new, and maybe then he'll rediscover his earlier skill.

@Trick Silo - you've got one or two more books before the quality starts to fall. When you get to book 10, just skip it. Nothing happens in it, and if you're desperate to know about it, WoTmania has some summaries. Apparently book 11 was an improvement, but after book 10 I couldn't face another Jordan novel. For what it's worth, to some extent I enjoyed the early novels - I just didn't view them as masterpieces.

 

[ValkyrieRaven88]

Well, while we're talking about ruining a series, Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake Vampire Hunter series comes to mind...somewhere in the middle of Blue Moon the whole series takes a turn for the absolute worst. Laurell's idea of making it more interesting is giving Anita new lovers, but she never seems to be able to stomach getting rid of the old ones first.

 

[direstraits]

Laurell's idea of making it more interesting is giving Anita new lovers, but she never seems to be able to stomach getting rid of the old ones first.

So now Anita has many lovers? Isn't that, like, interesting?



ds

 

[abecedarian]

So now Anita has many lovers? Isn't that, like, interesting?



ds

Depends on your definition I suppose I'm not even so bothered by Anita's menagerie as the sheer wierdness of it all. It's like Hamilton is seeing how low she can push her character before readers throw in the crosses and quit caring.

 

[ValkyrieRaven88]

So now Anita has many lovers? Isn't that, like, interesting?



ds

LOL. You would think so, wouldn't you? But no, aside from being totally disgusting (the sex scenes have you screaming "ew! no!" like there's no tomorrow), the plotlines have been allowed to go completely downhill. Anita's personality is gone and she's whiny and makes no sense and I want to strangle her and replace her with the old, funny, tough Anita Blake.