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Saturday Book Discussion: When a series goes on too long



Authors have always written sequels in response to public demand. Don Quixote is actually two volumes, published ten years apart; Miguel de Cervantes wrote the second part after the first one proved so popular. Ongoing series featuring a repeating cast of characters and a consistent setting were not as popular before the era of pulp serials, but Anthony Trollope's Barchester series comes to mind, and of course one of the most successful series of all times, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock Holmes is also possibly the first example of an author trying to put his series out on an ice floe: Doyle killed off Holmes because he was tired of writing about him, but fans demanded that he bring Holmes back, and so he did.

Today, it's rare that any series comes to a final, definitive end. Partly this is economics -- if you write for a living, obviously you're going to write more of what sells. Partly it is love of one's creations, and a desire to keep telling stories about them as long as fans want to keep reading them. But there are definitely series that have gone on too long. Sometimes it just starts to feel like the author is phoning it in, producing the latest installment on schedule to keep up the mortgage payments, sometimes the series takes a sudden left turn and does a WTF?!-inducing literary bellyflop, and sometimes it just succumbs to a steady descent in quality as the things that once made it bearable are slowly eclipsed by the author's obsessions, fetishes, or conversion to fundamentalist Christianity.

In the tradition of pulp serials, popular sci-fi and fantasy series used to just keep going and going and would make no pretense about being installments in an unending series.


Dumarest of Terra #20 Gor #20



Nowadays, rather than admitting they are writing an umpteen-book series, authors usually write multiple trilogies or heptalogies in the same world, but call each one a "new" saga, featuring a (somewhat) new set of characters.

This doesn't seem to be the case in the mystery genre, where like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, authors just keep going and going and going writing the same characters in the same setting having the same sorts of adventures. This is one of the reasons I don't stick with many mystery series. Most of them you can pretty much read the books in random order and not notice. To the degree that you will notice, it's because of the other reason mystery series lose my interest: the dynamic, interesting crime-solver of the first couple of books becomes saddled with an ever-growing cast of support characters who must all be mentioned in subsequent novels, and pretty soon the books are more about how so-and-so just had a baby and the main character's sister-in-law is starting a horse ranch and other than these domestic details, there isn't much character growth or significant change in the world.

That brings me to the topic of today's Saturday Book Discussion: series you wish had been given a dignified ending but the author just kept writing more of them. What series did you start out liking, even follow for many volumes, but come to despise, or at least no longer love? Did it jump the shark in a moment of terribad author!fail, or did it just keep limping along like an increasingly pathetic old horse that should have been taken out back and shot long ago?

Note that the topic here is not series that you hated right from the start, so if you think Laurell K. Hamilton's entire oeuvre is crap, it's just a Series You Hate, not a Series That Went On Too Long.

I shall, as usual, begin.

Gor, by John Norman



Okay, put away the knives! I was never a John Norman fan, honest. But for those of you who are familiar with the premise of the Gor novels but have never actually read any, I'll point out that when I first read them (at age fourteen) I was deep into Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber, and thought John Norman was more of the same.

Yeah, not so much. But the first three or four Gor novels were pretty much standard-issue planetary romances, with Norman's.... peculiar views on sexuality not taking center stage. Oh yeah, and there were slavegirls. Cool! (said I, gormless fourteen-year-old boy.)

Flip open to a random page in any of the later books, and you're probably in the middle of a long-winded soliloquy about how Earth is weak and degenerate because they deny men and women their "true" natures and let women wear clothes.

Even as a young dumb fourteen-year-old, I backed away from that series pretty quickly.

Xanth, by Piers Anthony



Yeah, I really had no taste when I was young. But I'd say it's the case with most of Piers Anthony's series that he started with some clever and imaginative ideas, enough to make one or two decent books, and then he'd just write the series into the ground, with his rape-happy pedophiliac kicks inevitably oozing across the pages. That squickiness was actually less apparent in the Xanth books than most of his other series (discounting the most appallingly-named squick-inducing book title ever) because he pretty much admitted that at a certain point his primary audience was twelve-year-old girls and that's who he wrote for. But the books increasingly became little more than a string of reader-submitted puns followed by author's notes in which Piers Anthony would have difficulty squeezing his ego into a mere twenty pages while explaining why he is the greatest writer ever and someday the world will recognize him for the Serious Author that he is.

Wild Cards, edited by George R. R. Martin



One of the longest series I ever kept up with -- I read all twelve of the original series, but when they started a "new" series, I just couldn't be bothered.

This is one that I think just succumbed to a long, slow decline. How much new was there to say about the Wild Cards world, really? It's kind of the same reason I have stopped reading comic books; when you know a series is going to go on forever, the writers can only pull so many epic storylines and Crowning Moments of Awesome out of their hat before it all starts to blend together. Also, while George R. R. Martin is not entirely to blame, since he was just one of many writers in this shared-world series, it's still a GRRM product, which means lots of rape and beloved characters unexpectedly turning into blood spatters.

Tony Hillerman's Navajo mysteries



Dance Hall of the Dead

Before he passed away, Tony Hillerman wrote eighteen books about Navajo tribal police officers Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. This is one of my favorite series ever, especially for something outside the SF&F genre. I was first introduced to it when the first book, The Blessing Way, was assigned in a cultural anthropology class. I have seen all of the (mediocre) movies that were made from Hillerman's novels.

I have actually only read up to book #16, The Sinister Pig. I... did not like it.

There were rumors that Hillerman was going to end the series, having grown tired of it, along about book ten or eleven. But I suppose, like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, he just couldn't let go. So he kept writing, and towards the end, it was sadly apparent that he was running on fumes.

Reviews of the last two books do not make me look forward to reading them. I'm going to, eventually, because I was such a fan of Hillerman for so long that the completist in me must read to the end of the series, but this was one that should have been allowed to die before the author did.


It seems most series sputter to a halt (or go off the rails in a horrible trainwreck) sooner or later. I've heard many Pratchett fans say that the Diskworld books have never gotten old, though that's another series that is actually a series of series. I've only read a few of them, and liked what I read, so I will go back to it. But I think, all things considered, I rather prefer a series that actually comes to a conclusive end after a preplanned X-number of books. Even if I do think (along with half the planet) that J.K. Rowling probably has a few more good Potter books in her.

So, share. What series have you enjoyed but fallen out of love with? Conversely, any series that have gone on for a long time without disenchanting you or losing your interest?


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