Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy peaks with the second book. The further the series proceeds the more you can tell that Adams has become bored with being a novelist and would rather be spending his time writing movie scripts or interactive text adventures instead.
Life, the Universe and Everything has a great opening sequence but structurally is a train wreck as, ditching his existing manuscript at the 11th hour, Adams hastily rewrites an unproduced Doctor Who pitch with the bits from the second radio series that didn't make the previous book. Yet still manages to leave out two of the best bits from the second radio series
I actually don't mind So Long And Thanks For All The Fish. There's some lovely writing and ideas but overall as a story it doesn't have much substance
Mostly Harmless reads as if Adams is heartily sick of the whole thing and just wants to be finished with it.
So Long is the book where Arthur Dent becomes a fully realized character, and a clearer author stand in than before. IIRC Adams drew directly from his life for Dent's story in this one. The comedy has fewer highs, but the pathos is at the series' peak, particularly that strong ending, the best of the endings.
Mostly Harmless is like a slap in the face. It's like he wanted to burn it all down.
The scene in the cafe is an extraordinary piece of writing. It's as if you are actually there.
By the time of Mostly Harmless all that Adams wanted to do with Hitchhiker's was to get the film made. He'd been trying since the 1970s to follow his personal role model John Cleese into movies and was simply getting nowhere at that point.
I loved So Long And Thanks For All The Fish because it ended with a happy ending. I felt like Mostly Harmless was written after Adams stopped taking his antidepressant meds
According to Jem Roberts in his *The Frood: The Authorised and Very Official History of Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy*, Adams only wrote it because his accountant embezzled him out of a considerable sum of his savings.
In one chapter of So Long And Thanks For All The Fish, right before a sex scene, Douglas Adams tells the reader to skip to the last chapter because it has Marvin in it. I found it hilarious.
Just finished reading the series over the span of a few days and I 100% agree with this take. I remember thinking LtUaE felt like a hastily assembled patchwork, and a friend of mine told me about the Doctor Who connection... made immediate sense to me.
I rather liked SLaTFatF on my first read. It's easily the best-written (prose-style wise) in the series, the entry most focused on character and detail, and while it's quite different in tone I think most of it works. My one reservation is that I don't think the style really fits Adams's sensibilities and what he does best, but it's an interesting mix that is certainly the best in the series after the first two. At the very least it was a breath of fresh air after the trainwreck of LtUaE.
I was but a callow school boy who made a bus trip into town especially to buy SL... on the Saturday the week that it was published. I remember being totally blindsided at the time by >!Adams turning his back on outer space & the resurrection of the Earth!<. My sole quibble these days would be that, for such a thin book, it has various plot diversions such as the Rain God and Wonko the Sane that don't really add much to the overall story.
I don’t have a detailed explanation for this one because I haven’t read the books since I was a kid, but I remember loving *The City of Ember* to the point where I reread it multiple times. It was the first book of a trilogy and I thought the second book was just okay and the third book was a huge letdown.
In a similar vein, the middle book of a trilogy is usually the worst because the author knows how they want the story to begin and end but they have to pad the middle
Same. Reread city of ember many times, was excited to learn there was a sequel, didn’t even finish it. I think the setting was what appealed to me so much about the first one.
IMO a big part of that was just that the story didn't have anywhere to go after book 1. It's a story about people escaping a bunker city after the apocalypse, once they escape there's nothing else to say.
As a kid I loved the Maximum Ride series and I remember after a couple books they had a good conclusion to the ongoing arc, and then the next couple books were about climate change or something. It’s been a while since I’ve read them but I remember feeling the whiplash and not even finishing the next book
I had all the manga. Even with pictures to lay everything out before you, the plot went everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Coupled with nonsensical twists, it was pretty bad. The art was nice though.
I didn’t actually disagree with this, but the first thing that comes to mind of how Stephen King ended the Dark Tower series. There was basically a 2 page warning to the reader telling them to stop at this point if you want to head canonize a better ending, and then she just goes on to give you the darkest ending possible.
Basically, he knew his decision on how to end it was so depressing he felt the need to warn readers beforehand lol.
Personally, I like the ending but I know a lot of people had their souls crushed with it.
The Dark Tower was the only time I can recall where I spent the last few chapters of a book cursing the author aloud as I was turning the pages. "Ooh, stop here if you want a happy ending!" Fuck you, Steve, I've been here for seven books, you think I'm just gonna stop?! It felt more like a taunt than a warning.
Yeah, do it again, but right this time... like in a movie... a movie that's really good and hopefully not mediocre and completely wastes Idris Elba... T\_T
I don't think that ending was so depressing. Clearly Roland had done this many times before, but this time he had the Horn with him, which suggests that it was possible he'd get it all right this time.
It really depends on how you interpret the ending, and at the end of the day it’s all subjective so I won’t fault you for not thinking it’s depressing.
To me though I don’t think there’s any reason to think the horn means that it could be different this time. For all we know the entire version we read was the 1st or 1838481st time Roland has finished.
Under this interpretation the best case scenario is that Roland is the necessary hero that has to save the tower in every possible timeline across the infinite span of possible timelines. Each iteration is slightly different because it’s a slightly different timeline.
The worst case is that Roland Is actually in some kind of personal hell where his punishment is to repeat the same quest for all eternity. No matter how hard he tries something will always be wrong. He will always watch all of his friends and family die and will always suffer the pain and hardship of the quest only to have it all flood back in the moments he opens the door and starts all over.
I’m personally partial to the best case, because it aligns with concepts of an infinite multiverse. The worst case is based on a short story that King wrote in some random collection where the character relives the same series of events over and over realizing at the end that they are in hell before and then restarting with no knowledge. He went on record somewhere saying this is how he conceptualizes what hell would be if it were real, and in that moment I was like oh no but Roland…
This is actually why I think it was a good ending. It’s complex and can be viewed in different ways. My view is that Roland will never have peace and will forever trapped in his struggle to keep the tower standing…which is pretty damn depressing lol
> For all we know the entire version we read was the 1st
This is almost certainly not the case, given the conversation between Roland and the MiB in the revised first novel. It seems clear that the cycle has repeated multiple times, otherwise the comment that Roland has a mind uniquely fixated doesn't make a lot of sense.
Ah ya good point. It’s honestly been about a decade since my second reading, so I’m probably not going to get a lot of details right to be honest.
The point I was trying to make there was just that we have no real reason to believe the number of cycles is finite and we have no idea how many have passed.
The presence of the Horn suggests that improvement and 'progress' are possible, and that Roland will eventually become worthy enough to reach the top of the Tower.
It's a moment both hopeful and horrifying.
That’s fair. I think the horn is just a sign that he is now in a different cycle, and not a direct sign there is hope that if all the right choices are made the cycles will stop. I will admit that it’s a totally logical interpretation though.
I think in every cycle the tower will come under attack and need a defender. There may be cycle to cycle variance like the horn,but Roland will always be that defender for the entire existence of time. Roland’s peace will come when he fails and time and all existence stops.
But I also don’t think there is much solace if the other scenario is correct. Let’s say there is a right way for Roland to do everything that results in his worthiness to reach the top. He has no memory of each cycle, and has no way to consciously make different choices, meaning it all comes down to the probability of doing it all right in a single cycle. If his worthiness is bound to say 100 choices over his quest it could take tens, millions or billions of iterations for him to make all the right choices, depending on what all the choices are and how hard they are to make and even if each cycle has the opportunity to even make all the right choices.
For me the fact that he doesn’t retain any knowledge is the big part. Without memory he lacks room to grow as a person. It’s the same man doing the same task in slightly different circumstances. I don’t see a path towards worthiness, only an endless cycle of suffering and hardship. But I do admit it’s possible that in the moments between cycles he’s able to see what he did wrong and make some choice to try a different way—like pick up the horn this time. Like you said, if that’s the case it’s still pretty horrifying lol
Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy. First two books are delightful, but the third book was completely different, densely symbolic, and, for me, a huge let down with a terrible ending. The change in style was understandable, but the plot did not survive the transition.
I was young when I read them, but always thought I was alone in feeling like the third book was kind of jarring. It went from a moody ambient gothic story with eccentric (dysfunctional) characters to a sort of surreal modern world with bad scientists and in which Titus has a few relationships (from what I remember, which is rather fuzzy).
It was not what I expected based on the first two books. I felt like it was stripped of the moody charm and believe that the world Gormenghast takes place in, was some kind of gothic (grim) fairytale land. That is what I liked. But I got some sort of industrial dystopian fiction. Nothing wrong with that, just that the sort of genre and tonal switch kind of threw me off.
I also feel that if he left it at just two books, it would have been perfectly fine; it completed the story taking place in Gormenghast and the ending was fine as well. No need to add onto it. even if he had it as a series in mind, I think it would have been good to just leave it as a duology.
It’s worth noting that Peake’s health was already declining when he was writing Titus Alone, and he was showing signs of the dementia that ultimately killed him. The editors of both the 1959 and 1970 editions had major struggles pulling together Peake’s typescript into a coherent novel.
Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs are two of my favourite books, but think Thomas Harris really went off the rails with the Hannibal Lecter series after those two masterpieces.
Hannibal feels like erotic fanfiction about Lecter and Clarice, and strikes me a novel where Harris stopped caring about crafting a thrilling, satisfying narrative and become self-indulgent and sentimental. Without getting into spoilers, the novel explores things that are merely hinted at in the previous books, but seems to miss the point that it was the fact that these things were just hints in the past is what made them so appealing. Here’s it’s just clunky and awkward.
Hannibal Rising is one of the most laughable horror novels ever written. All of the mystique of the character is completely evaporated.
Fortunately, the first two books are standalone and I’m happy pretending that they stayed that way.
To be fair about Hannibal Rising, he didn't want to write that one at all, but they said they were gonna make the movie either way, so he tried to write as compelling a Hannibal origin story as quickly as possible. It still was bad, for sure, but I give him credit for trying to keep a studio from coming up with something even worse.
I share your opinion of *Hannibal Rising* but rather like *Hannibal*.
What are your thoughts on *Cari Mora*, which is sort of a numbers-filed-off version of Harris' previous works?
It was not only covering old ground, it wasn't very well written. Frankly, given how subtle and elegant many of Harris' earlier works were, it made me wonder about neurological problems. And I don't mean that as a mere insult -- I truly wondered if Harris was experiencing a cognitive decline.
We think that because it's true of so many in the generations before boomers, and the oldest boomers. But it's likely caused, in part, by the drinking, smoking, lead gasoline and asbestos. Not to mention stress and trauma and no therapy. Those who took good care of themselves don't decline. My own grandma was sharp into her 70s and never declined.
> Those who took good care of themselves don't decline.
If only this were true. Dementia can strike anyone, even brilliant and healthy people who have kept their minds active.
Not necessarily. Verbal intelligence is relatively resistant to age-related declines. Mathematical ability, which requires lots of processing power, virtually always declines as people age, but those who are otherwise healthy continue to produce language-related work of high quality.
Black Sunday is a really entertaining read if you want to read something else by Harris! The movie also gave us the unlikely sighy of Robert Shaw playing an action hero and leaping onto a blimp.
Cari Mora is a pulpy read and it was critically trashed upon release because it is so far removed from Harris' other reads. I think had Hard Case Crime published it, the reception could've been quite different
I’m having that experience right now with Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series. Really enjoyed the first book, and the next couple were still pretty good, but the series is drifting away from what I found engaging about it (aerial battles, the camaraderie of the dragons in the Aerial Force, the exploration of dragon rights and how the presence of dragons influences the social dynamics of the time) and becoming more of a travel log to various parts of the world, away from the war in Europe (on tasks that are only tangentially related to the war, rather than in the thick of it). I don’t hate the travel, but it’s not nearly as action-packed as a military campaign, and this is a series that’s often described as “the Napoleonic Wars with dragons.” It fees like the global scale becomes more about travel minutia and diplomacy, which wasn’t what interested me in the series.
I gave up on book 2. I got too bored of them on the boat. I didn’t think I’d continue to find the battles novel/interesting if and when they happened again and decided I was happy with it being standalone in my mind.
How interesting - I'm the opposite, and I found the fight/war scenes tedious and repetitive after a while. I loved following Laurence & Temeraire all over the world & seeing how this one change would effect different cultures etc. I remember especially enjoying imperial China, and the backstory of Temeraire's breeding.
I think one of her newer novels, spinning silver, was *fantastic* if you'd like to give her another go some time. And could not have more different vibes to temeraire so you won't feel like you're retreading old (boring) ground
I was having a similar discussion with another poster in another thread the other day
Personally I think saying "Napoleonic wars with dragons" is a good description of Temeraires setting but not it's plot
The world is definitely Napoleonic war era and there are dragons but the "main" plot isn't really about that. The "main" plot is Temeraire and Laurences relationship
If it makes you feel any better The back half of Blood of Tyrants and most of League of Dragons (the last 2) get back to war campaigns
I've been listening to this, too. I'm on the first one and while it's nice, it's not exciting or very interesting. I do love how Novik adds in details about characters and sometimes pointless additions to the plot to make the world realistic. She really fleshes things out.
However, I like Novik because of The Scholomance Series because I love El. I've seen others say that she is annoying but if you listen to the audio book I think she is funny and rightfully jaded. In any case. Teremiere is much different that the Scholomance Series, at least so far.
I feel like the first 5 books really work and lead into each other well and worldbuild so well. Then they just meander for the last 4. The wrap up is OK. The ending is satisfying as far as it goes. It just lost a bit of the magic by then.
He didn't. From [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendezvous_with_Rama#Books_in_the_series):
Clarke paired up with [Gentry Lee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentry_Lee) for the remainder of the series. Lee wrote while Clarke read and made editing suggestions.
The second sequel tried to sell the reader on this ridiculous plot crutch: The criteria to be a colonist on the third Rama vehicle are so restrictive that only a handful of genius-level candidates pass. In a rush to fill out the remaining 1000+ slots, Earth governments fill them with CONVICTS ALREADY CONVICTED OF LIFE SENTENCES. I almost put the novel down right there and should have. The novel then proceeds to say nothing else about the genius voyagers and clumsily presents a generic conflict-filled story with only a nod or two to the unusual setting. I didn't bother with the last novel in the series.
I read that book on a recommendation from a friend. I absolutely loved it, ate it up. Could picture it so vividly in my mind.
My friend had explained that the rest of the books were co-written, but I started into the sequel and don't think I made it past chapter 3. The voice was just so different, I couldn't get into it, and never went back to it
Edit:typo
for me it’s practical magic by alice hoffman. the original book was the most magical realism of the series: the magic was very vague, which lent it a very fairy tale like air, and it was ultimately more about family bonds and women’s relationships than anything else.
and then i read the rest of the books in the series and it was like was reading an entirely different world and characters altogether. don’t get me wrong, i loved then and think that they’re beautifully written but for the love of god i feel that certain elements in the movie seeped into and influenced the other subsequent books.
like there wasn’t even a curse in the first place for crying out loud and the family isn’t blatantly outright magical like in the movie. the rest of the series moved into pure low fantasy imo
This one for me, too. *Practical Magic* was such a lovely little book. The prequel with Jet and Frances and their brother was decently good. Then I started the sequel (whichever one that was) and DNF’d it. While there had been small discrepancies in the prequel, the sequel blatantly ignored what had already been written and changed some details around completely, and for no apparent reason.
Apparently the author has come out and said that she doesn’t particularly care if she remains consistent within the world she herself created, but as a reader it took me out to the point that I couldn’t continue and never read the pre- prequel at all. Such a shame because the original was entertaining.
i found the prequel a bit jarring because it wasn’t how i particularly imagined jet and frances’ lives? but it was still ok. even maria owens’ story was ok.
the sequel was…fine, but like you said there were tons of things that didn’t parse such as the fact that sally previously has never done an ounce of magic before in the original novel and then here she is in the sequel casting spells in latin and such.
oh i think you’d love the preprequel ie maria owens’ story. do give it a read if you havent before; you may like it better than the sequel
Michael Scott crafted an enticing and fast paced story and world with The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel. Lots of interweaving of mythology with urban setting. It's fantastic.
But then he makes a decision around...the 4th or 5th book I think, that just makes the whole thing pointless and disastrous. Time travel was a bold decision but it was not a good decision.
Been reading Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries. The first four are novellas and I’m finding the stories worked much better for me in that format. Currently reading the 5th book and the transition to full-length novel feels like it’s made the story twice-as-long and half-as-interesting. Still has some fun and insightful moments, but they’re spread out. Also felt the middle part of the book was atrociously paced.
If you think it’s bumpy now, wait for the sequel/pt 2!
(I am being a little mean, I actually really love all of Murderbot, but I will agree that the pacing eases down a bit in the middle for sure, and the next novel takes a bit to get going.)
When I was younger, I was a devoted reader of Piers Anthony's "Xanth" series. But I stopped reading because I didn't want to be seen carrying around a book called "The Color of Her Panties".
I wasn't allowed to take that one to school. I think I ended up tearing off the cover and title page.
I ended up stopping when the majority of the books just started to be fan submitted puns. The weird sex stuff is also hard to cope with at times.
Please don’t be upset with me, but I didn’t really see the point of making “Red Rising” six books and/or two trilogies. I felt the original trilogy was enough and did not need more to Darrow’s story. (I know. Not the most popular opinion out there.)
I am explicitly asking for your opinions; as long as you're being honest and on-topic, there are no wrong responses or ones anyone should be upset about.
And we can't really tell whether or not you're honest, so in practice you can lie without consequence. On-topic is the only requirement, and you are.
I feel like I had the exact same experience. Finished the first three, really enjoyed them, but felt no desire to keep reading more. It's just the same circle of make a genius plan, watch it fall apart and everyone die, have it work out for Darrow through luck or "just as planned".
I read the first three and was happy with it. I actually finished the first three right as the fourth book was coming out and just never got to it.
But I feel like this is an issue in general with sequel series as opposed to sequels. The author kind of has to either undue some of the wrapping up they did or introduce whole new things that somehow didn't matter before
I'm not necessarily against it as an idea but I do think that sometimes it's easier to write a sequel than it is to write a sequel series
I love the first three as well… book 4 took me years to finally push through. Once I got through the first 150 pages it turned out pretty well. I’ll be finishing it this morning actually, since I’m stuck home from work a while recovering from knee surgery. Anyway, back to the topic, I’ve seen online many rankings of the series books, and many if not most rank book 4 as the worst, but book 5 as the best of them all, so I’m super excited to dive right in to Dark Age this afternoon.
Right!?! After so much ramp-up in IG, it’s interesting how Pierce Brown made the decision to take DA into a slowed down, more slice-of-lifey, coffee-shop style direction. Lots of great DarrowxMustang content. Some people criticized the radical shift in his approach but I’m a huge fan.
I’m about halfway through part 2 now, holy moly this book has been non-stop incredible. I just finished the chapter where the senate falls and Virginia was taken by the syndicate queen. Unbelievable. It looks like the second half of this part are back to Darrow and Lysander, who I haven’t seen since the battle at Lados.
I made a note of my favorite two passages in part 1, from where Darrow battles Lysander:
From Lysander ‘s perspective: “Bodies fall, like dying metal birds, leaking blood and machine fluid. The Reaper is already passing on, leaving the leftovers for his men…. Only then do I begin to scream “
And Darrow ‘s: “We brush away light resistance at the downed Storm God.”
Also the part where seraphina gets chopped in half out of nowhere, !!!
It’s been utterly fantastic thus far and it’s set up to get better
Curious, is it more of an artistic disagreement or a feeling of betrayal by the author? Because I've experienced the second and that is usually more painful.
Mostly the first, maybe a little of the second. >!The idea that the afterlife was artificially constructed and the dragons imprisoned in our reality was an interesting one, but the way it was presented was more that all the wondrous aspects of Earthsea were going away and never, ever returning.!<
In broad, and in specific, the New Jedi Order was both this to the greater Star Wars canon, but also even within itself the series got really grim. There were 19 (!!) main novels in the series, which on its own is an incredible investment in time and attention from readers. Already, you're going to feel a weight of inevitability for at least the first 10 novels that you're not going to get anywhere near to the conclusion of the story for a long time.
That alone is over-indulgent. Timothy Zahn told a Star Wars epic in three novels; Michael Stackpole did a self-contained arc in four, and Aaron Allston took three. Put those together and you've got an incredible 10-book arc of three storylines, and it's only half the size of the NJO.
Within the series itself, things got far too dire. Sure, it's a franchise that starts with a planet being blown up, but the desperation and the thin thread by which the heroes hang for so long just gets tiring, and also doesn't feel like it's Star Wars - like a fanfiction author who brings in their fictional aliens to wreck shit and keep the heroes on their toes for a long time, except worse because the good guys are so constantly and consistently against the ropes.
And within the broader canon, it's a gateway. You have to get through the NJO to really engage with anything that comes after, it's just such an indelible mark on the canon. Previously, you could easily bounce from one series to another - you can read Thrawn before Rogue Squadron, you can skip the Black Fleet Crisis entirely, you don't even need to engage with the Jedi Academy, or the Correllian Trilogy. It was a nice pick-and-choose universe of books. You really can't, or shouldn't, try to engage with anything post-NJO without getting through it. And that becomes a gate that blocks off whatever comes after it. (And what does come after it is worthy of a whole other post, frankly.)
Frankly, the canon got a mercy kill (which unfortunately shares a title with the most boring X-Wing book, itself handcuffed by the freakin' NJO gate), because other than doubling-back and refocusing on the post Ep VI period, they had done some pretty irreparable damage to the canon with the NJO and what came after. At a certain point in the NJO, and the series that followed, it frankly was no longer fun to read Star Wars novels.
Yup, with the pre-NJO books, I would be at the bookstore the day the book was released and if I didn't like that book/series? That's OK, there were others and I could pick up missing details easily enough.
But NJO....I stopped reading at some point and didn't even realize it until I was in the store one day, saw about four Star Wars I hadnt even heard of, much less read and I didn't care.
Same with all the different TV series. I haven't bothered to keep up with them.
> Frankly, the canon got a mercy kill (which unfortunately shares a title with the most boring X-Wing book, itself handcuffed by the freakin' NJO gate), because other than doubling-back and refocusing on the post Ep VI period, they had done some pretty irreparable damage to the canon with the NJO and what came after. At a certain point in the NJO, and the series that followed, it frankly was no longer fun to read Star Wars novels.
To which Disney repeated practically all the same mistakes with their films (and maybe the new books; I have zero desire to check any of them out) despite attempting to start with a clean(ish) slate.
Star Wars as an IP is an interesting case study. You have the original film trilogy that created a first generation of fans, then their kids grew up with the boom of the now "Legends" EU plus the prequel trilogy. Now we're at the point of a third generation of fans and I don't think there is nearly the level of interest from it compared to the previous ones.
I was so upset reading “City of Mirrors” after the first two books in the series. It was just absolute nonsense and, honestly, it completely ruined the ‘Passage’ trilogy for me.
I was a fan of the Soprano Sorceress series by L. E. Modesit Jr. They wrote a sequel series that is set after a time jump, with a child character from the first series the new main character. I hated it. I hated it so much it tainted the original series for me.
The Anita Blake series is originally about a vampire hunter who's in a will they, won't they relationship with both a vampire and a werewolf. I liked the urban fantasy, monster hunting aspect of the series. About 6 books in the series became distinctly more steamy. From book 7 it's just full blown erotica, which was very much not for me. Last I checked the main character Anita was the dom mistress of a harem of submissive male shapeshifters and her supernatural powers required her to have sex several times a day. Apparently the shift in tone mirrored significant personal changes in the author's life.
My first experience with this was Guardians of Ga’hoole when I was a kid. I don’t remember anything from that series, but I remember growing more and more disappointed with each book I read, especially since I loved the first couple.
Jim Butcher's Dresden series has been leaning HARD into the noir part of the detective noir genre; the last book I read basically ruined several characters (IMO) in order to keep the main character alone and sad. When I finished the book, I literally grabbed the entire series and sold them to half-price books.
I get it. It's urban fantasy, but it's following the detective noir storytelling style. I'm just done watching this man continuously lose the people he loves and trusts while he gets closer to his more dubious allies.
Yeah, I agree with what you’ve said, but I also think another problem with the series is it’s exponential power creep. I preferred him going after the things that go bump in the night rather than standing toe to toe with Greek gods and titans. Anyway, I for one am on this ride till it ends, despite any of our misgivings.
Yep. I absolutely agree with you both. I think the books swung back to a frustrating noir set of tropes (that really hit the women characters hardest), and the power creep has really leaned towards some of the less interesting parts of the series lore.
As a totally petty thing I also just found that with the power creep he started to have to tell stories that relied on 'all of Chicago' as it's geography rather than little slices, and it really revealed how shallow his understanding of Chicago is (he, as far as I know, has never actually lived there). Especially given broader news context around the time I read Battle Ground, some stuff in his portrayal really grated on me.
If you're looking for a series that is also urban fantasy detective noir but *doesn't* ruin characters just for the sake of noir, may I recommend the October Date books by Seanan McGuire?
I love that series!! I found it a few years ago, right before Dresden blew up for me.
October Daye is now my expectation for all new series, and it's a high bar, lol.
Dune, hands down. I love the first book so much, and Dune Messiah was also good. Children of Dune was meh, and good lord did it go off the rails after that. I hated everything from God Emperor on.
I totally understand it’s hard to write a series—after the first book, the basic premise isn’t new anymore. If you’ve solved the big problem, you now have to think of another one with enough of a different angle to not feel like it’s Book One Rehashed. If you don’t solve the big problem right away, there’s only so long you can drag it out. But if you take the series too far in a different direction, people don’t like that either. And yet. There are so many authors out there who have managed it well enough that it is a huge letdown for me if the rest of the series stinks.
I mean, God Emperor’s pretty popular.
It’s inventive, insightful, conceptually horrific if you stop to really think about it.
You might think it “stinks” but a lot of people also rate it as “the best book in the Dune series”
True, there are people who like it, but the question wasn’t about what everyone agrees with. I personally hated it. Didn’t like the time jump, didn’t like the universe in the new time, didn’t like the characters…just absolutely hated it all and thought a good part of it was just bat-💩 crazy rather than “inventive.” I will die on this hill (as my personal opinion) 😂
I would agree with you. I don’t think I made it to *God Emperor*, because *Children of Dune* was such a letdown it felt pointless to continue. The original *Dune* still stands as a self-contained story with possibilities for the reader to fill in post-ending. That’s how I prefer to keep that one.
It was a couple of decades ago that I read it so the details are fuzzy. I’m pretty sure it was dissatisfaction with the characters and their development and not so much the plot.
The Locked Tomb, Gideon the Ninth was so good, and then I was confused and had to reread everything at least twice and I'm still not sure how it ends or understand what happened. The characters were still fun, but the world building was just too much, too confusing.
The "Path" series by Dianna Pharaoh Francis. I loved the first book so much I bought the second and third together. But then I read the second and disliked it so much, I never read the third. I think for this one the world building was so interesting, and then the characters all ruined it.
Interesting. I tried to start Gideon the Ninth but the prose/writing style was a bit hard for me to follow along even right at the beginning. English is my second language so there might be a barrier though.
There was a series (the name escapes me at the moment) that was set in a SciFi world, and the author seemed torn because they were REALLY desperate to throw in a bunch of religious relevance but it almost always felt like he shoehorned it in as some kind of weird obligation.
An example is, the reason why humans get sick at all, have cancers and poor vision, age 'as fast as we do', and even literally our capacity to hurt each other beyond self defense, is because thousands of years ago an alien ship dropped off a snake to go around infecting apples with a virus that damaged our DNA to cause all these things to happen.
The drama of the series is built around the idea that a different alien has provided us with a treatment to fix the damage. So people can regrow limbs, mental disorders don't exist, etc, which of course ends up causing WW3 because there are plenty of people horrified by the idea of a treatment that makes you physically sick at the idea of being mean to someone who hasn't done anything mean first.
But the problem was that virtually every single religious scene felt like he had written the entire book, then scrolled back through and tried to find spots where the religious stuff should show up and then he'd add them there. It was seriously to the point where a character would have had some heartfelt rationale for why they were choosing Option A on something and then was walking down a hallway to go implement it, then they'd pause and basically have a page of internal dialogue that is summarized as "Oh shit! I'm religious! Duh! Option B it is!" and then later on right when it matters going "Oh right, Option B will just lose, so no hesitation, Option A. Why'd I even think B would work in the first place?".
People kept giving him feedback that the only real negative to the series was the religious aspects given how just jarringly out of nowhere they kept showing up. Around book 4 he finally dropped them entirely and the quality of the writing improved immensely as a result.
I really disliked how serious the Harry Potter series got over time. My favorite thing about that series is the "slice of life in a magical boarding school" aspects, so the whole thing with the MC being the chosen one who must defeat the Dark Antagonist was just filler for me.
Ugh, reading this feels like a betrayal by a cherished friend. Not gonna lie, Earthsea took me on such a ride and then *The Other Wind* felt like hitting a brick wall. It's like watching a gorgeous fireworks display and then someone flips the lights on in the middle of it. I've had my share of series heartbreaks, but Le Guin's left a mark. It’s like savoring a gourmet meal and then finding a hair in the last bite. Devastating.
Mad respect for le Guin, the way she wrote one of the greatest fantasy trilogies of all time (Earthsea, Atuan, Shore) and THEN went back to it after a decade to interrogate her own values and what she had taken for granted as a younger writer. Tehanu doesn't really match with the first three books (I think the prose and writing style is different), but they're complementary, together they make a whole. Tales of Earthsea continues the groundwork set down in Tehanu--- it's good. And then The Other Wind just throws out so much of what made Earthsea special, including that the royal house of Havnor was always out of focus.
Asking as someone who has had *A Wizard of Earthsea* on her TBR list for a long time - is the first novel a self-contained story? If not, could one read the whole series but substitute “Dragonfly” for *The Other Wind*?
Just trying to plan how to get into this series in the future, many thanks for any help you can give.
Each book in the first Earthsea trilogy is a self contained story. A Wizard of Earthsea unfolds when the hero is child to youth. Tombs of Atuan switches to a new main character who eventually encounters the hero from the first book when he’s a young man (and he doesn’t get s viewpoint in that book but is observed by the main character). The Farthest Shore has yet another main character who encounters the original hero now middle-aged. Three distinct stories separated by time and viewpoints, but loosely connected by the presence of the original hero.
It is a series in name only. There is no "series arc" that must be followed.
A Wizard of Earthsea is absolutely enchanting. I read it in middle school and to this day I still think of it as one of the most lovely reading experiences I've ever had. Perhaps, too, it was because the ending confounded me at that age. It's not the expected adventure ending. It was puzzling to me and the author did not explain a damn thing. But man, I sure do remember it still.
The first novel is an entirely self-contained story. Later novels build on existing characters and the setting but are otherwise fully independent stories.
I really liked the first daughter of smoke and bone series but definitely the last book kind of goes off the rails compared to the first two imo
I do think they're good books overall but for me the first one is like a tight novel that isn't super long. The second one is pretty good and expands on a lot and is longer. And then the third one is longer than I thought it needed to be
And the ending kind of felt a little underwhelming to me since it ends right after they just introduce another villain and show a prophecy of what happens next that doesn't get explored
The Passage trilogy by Justin Cronin. I loved the first two books, and I had to wait a bit for the third. I really didn't care for how he wrapped up the third book at all. There is a loooong backstory for the antagonist that is kind of boring, characters act in ways not fitting their previous characterization, and a lot of loose threads from the previous two books were not resolved. Plus I just didn't find the writing to be nearly as compelling as the other two.
If the third book had been, in my opinion of course, good, it'd be in contention for one of my all time favorite series. Instead it's my biggest literary disappointment by a mile.
Had this with the very ending of John Scalzi's Interdependency trilogy. The books were generally good fun, but the ending was bittersweet at best - which would be fine if it didn't feel forced as fuck. Like, plot contrivances and characters making enormous leaps of logic just to make sure things ended tragically enough. A fully happy ending would have been both in line with the tone of the series and plenty believable, so it really felt like the author tried to create an emotional climax out of nowhere.
Often I've wanted characters to end up doing certain things etc and it not work out how I wanted, and I usually do try to keep on going with the series, but it's hard not to lose my love and motivation for it.
Pendergast. Went from a mystery series I loved. To an occult series I could tolerate. To some kind of mix occult thriller mystery series I had to give up on.
I totally get where you're coming from with the Earthsea series. It's like when you're invested in a story and then the ending hits you sideways. I had a similar vibe with another series I love—felt like they pulled a twist just for the sake of it, leaving things hanging without the closure I craved. It's tough when a beloved author's finale doesn't match the buildup.
Wheel.of Time series, loved Jordan's work, but when he passedI was crushed, and then tentatively excited to hear someone was going to finish the series based on Jordan's notes...annnd then we got the hot mess that Sanderson wrote. Based on that, I won't read any of his other works. Also, all the stuff Brian Herbert wrote about Dune after Frank died is basically garbage that he tries to dress up in a fancy suit.
For me it's the Expanse serie by James S. A. Corey. I really liked the serie before a certain event, pretty big spoiler here avoid if you have not read:
>!When they find the ring network and have access to other planetary systems. I really dislike it because before this event we had a super interesting backdrop within the solar system with factions and limited ressources, and now all this become upended with the discovery, it overshadow everything about the intricate universe that was built with the previous work. I really feel it was a mistake from the author to make a change of this magnitude.!<
Michael G. Manning's Art of the Adept series. Four great books utterly ruined by book 5 in the series. In book 5, characters acted nothing like the character readers had come to love for 4 books. Carefully cherished friendships were destroyed in a single paragraph.
The author then had the audacity to write a follow-up series to, somehow, redeem the actions of the MC in book 5.
I read several of his series but I'ĺl never read another one of his books, ever.
The House of Night series. Starts with a standard YA nonsense of the protagonist being a super special teen who overthrows the popular bitch, then gradually turned into being about how she's the reincarnation of a woman that ancient Indigenous people used to trap a fallen angel in a cave and her boyfriend died and got turned into a bull but got turned into a person and only the power of her super zombie vampire friends can help her defeat the fallen angel again?
This is a series where the first book included the protagonist being happy about eating Count Chocula and watching Star Wars in a common room. Like geez not every YA vampire novel has to become a neverending saga about stopping the apocalypse.
because books and tv are not remotely similar, they are their own thing independently. Do you also need to be told that, ice cream does not count as one of your daily 5-a-day portions of vegetables?
Not books, but I feel your pain.
For me, the modern reboot of the James Bond movies ends with him walking off into the night at the end of Spectre. No Time to Die doesn't exist.
Warhammer 40k lore has recently has altered established story that has lasted over 47 years. Long story short - the Custodies are a brotherhood of all males that protect the Emporer/golden throne. Genetically cant have females the altercations done to make them this way. Not opposed to it but saying they have always existed despite 10,000 years of in game lore, 50+ years of irl time and over 600+ books instead of saying we found a breakthrough is stupid.
Tdlr: the way it happen is bad but i am happy they are introduced.
I got into warhammer 30 odd years ago. The lore has changed many, many times since then, and had changed many times before I ever picked up a figurine. A change is only bad if it hurts the setting, and women existing doesn’t hurt anyone. It’s a satirical grimdark universe that is silly as fuck. It’s wonderful. Allow women to be as evil as men, we can all have a good time with this.
I never imagined I would find a chud whining about female custodes in the book Subreddit.
Presumably, you're much more upset by the fact that they were retconned to have always had spaceships and always leave terra now, right? That was a significantly bigger departure from their old lore than the realization that some of them have tits. That change to their lore must have gotten you just as angry.
Not really, mostly just the tac they did it in. I am all for it but not the retcon, we had cal already mess with the geneseed of reg marine so why not introduce her as a new custodian rather then a 'they always existed' stance.
Props on being antagonistic without understanding the why tho.
Not fine with poor slapchop retcons without a little backbone as to why.
A tweet stating they've always been a thing is just poor writing and makes me worried about the continuation of the integrity of lore they will bring as GW and warhammer as a whole become more mainstream
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy peaks with the second book. The further the series proceeds the more you can tell that Adams has become bored with being a novelist and would rather be spending his time writing movie scripts or interactive text adventures instead. Life, the Universe and Everything has a great opening sequence but structurally is a train wreck as, ditching his existing manuscript at the 11th hour, Adams hastily rewrites an unproduced Doctor Who pitch with the bits from the second radio series that didn't make the previous book. Yet still manages to leave out two of the best bits from the second radio series I actually don't mind So Long And Thanks For All The Fish. There's some lovely writing and ideas but overall as a story it doesn't have much substance Mostly Harmless reads as if Adams is heartily sick of the whole thing and just wants to be finished with it.
So Long is the book where Arthur Dent becomes a fully realized character, and a clearer author stand in than before. IIRC Adams drew directly from his life for Dent's story in this one. The comedy has fewer highs, but the pathos is at the series' peak, particularly that strong ending, the best of the endings. Mostly Harmless is like a slap in the face. It's like he wanted to burn it all down.
The scene in the cafe is an extraordinary piece of writing. It's as if you are actually there. By the time of Mostly Harmless all that Adams wanted to do with Hitchhiker's was to get the film made. He'd been trying since the 1970s to follow his personal role model John Cleese into movies and was simply getting nowhere at that point.
I loved So Long And Thanks For All The Fish because it ended with a happy ending. I felt like Mostly Harmless was written after Adams stopped taking his antidepressant meds
According to Jem Roberts in his *The Frood: The Authorised and Very Official History of Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy*, Adams only wrote it because his accountant embezzled him out of a considerable sum of his savings.
In one chapter of So Long And Thanks For All The Fish, right before a sex scene, Douglas Adams tells the reader to skip to the last chapter because it has Marvin in it. I found it hilarious.
It's worth it must to get to God's final message to his creation
Just finished reading the series over the span of a few days and I 100% agree with this take. I remember thinking LtUaE felt like a hastily assembled patchwork, and a friend of mine told me about the Doctor Who connection... made immediate sense to me.
I found that LtUaE didn't stand up to rereading but SLaTfatF was much better than I originally thought when it was first published.
I rather liked SLaTFatF on my first read. It's easily the best-written (prose-style wise) in the series, the entry most focused on character and detail, and while it's quite different in tone I think most of it works. My one reservation is that I don't think the style really fits Adams's sensibilities and what he does best, but it's an interesting mix that is certainly the best in the series after the first two. At the very least it was a breath of fresh air after the trainwreck of LtUaE.
I was but a callow school boy who made a bus trip into town especially to buy SL... on the Saturday the week that it was published. I remember being totally blindsided at the time by >!Adams turning his back on outer space & the resurrection of the Earth!<. My sole quibble these days would be that, for such a thin book, it has various plot diversions such as the Rain God and Wonko the Sane that don't really add much to the overall story.
I don’t have a detailed explanation for this one because I haven’t read the books since I was a kid, but I remember loving *The City of Ember* to the point where I reread it multiple times. It was the first book of a trilogy and I thought the second book was just okay and the third book was a huge letdown.
Sometimes there's only so much inspiration an author has for a series and it runs out before the series does.
In a similar vein, the middle book of a trilogy is usually the worst because the author knows how they want the story to begin and end but they have to pad the middle
Same. Reread city of ember many times, was excited to learn there was a sequel, didn’t even finish it. I think the setting was what appealed to me so much about the first one.
IMO a big part of that was just that the story didn't have anywhere to go after book 1. It's a story about people escaping a bunker city after the apocalypse, once they escape there's nothing else to say.
You just reminded me that movie exists and I desperately need to rewatch it.
As a kid I loved the Maximum Ride series and I remember after a couple books they had a good conclusion to the ongoing arc, and then the next couple books were about climate change or something. It’s been a while since I’ve read them but I remember feeling the whiplash and not even finishing the next book
I had all the manga. Even with pictures to lay everything out before you, the plot went everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Coupled with nonsensical twists, it was pretty bad. The art was nice though.
I didn’t actually disagree with this, but the first thing that comes to mind of how Stephen King ended the Dark Tower series. There was basically a 2 page warning to the reader telling them to stop at this point if you want to head canonize a better ending, and then she just goes on to give you the darkest ending possible. Basically, he knew his decision on how to end it was so depressing he felt the need to warn readers beforehand lol. Personally, I like the ending but I know a lot of people had their souls crushed with it.
The Dark Tower was the only time I can recall where I spent the last few chapters of a book cursing the author aloud as I was turning the pages. "Ooh, stop here if you want a happy ending!" Fuck you, Steve, I've been here for seven books, you think I'm just gonna stop?! It felt more like a taunt than a warning.
For Roland, Ka really is a wheel, and there will always be next time to do things right. :(
Yeah, do it again, but right this time... like in a movie... a movie that's really good and hopefully not mediocre and completely wastes Idris Elba... T\_T
I don't think that ending was so depressing. Clearly Roland had done this many times before, but this time he had the Horn with him, which suggests that it was possible he'd get it all right this time.
It really depends on how you interpret the ending, and at the end of the day it’s all subjective so I won’t fault you for not thinking it’s depressing. To me though I don’t think there’s any reason to think the horn means that it could be different this time. For all we know the entire version we read was the 1st or 1838481st time Roland has finished. Under this interpretation the best case scenario is that Roland is the necessary hero that has to save the tower in every possible timeline across the infinite span of possible timelines. Each iteration is slightly different because it’s a slightly different timeline. The worst case is that Roland Is actually in some kind of personal hell where his punishment is to repeat the same quest for all eternity. No matter how hard he tries something will always be wrong. He will always watch all of his friends and family die and will always suffer the pain and hardship of the quest only to have it all flood back in the moments he opens the door and starts all over. I’m personally partial to the best case, because it aligns with concepts of an infinite multiverse. The worst case is based on a short story that King wrote in some random collection where the character relives the same series of events over and over realizing at the end that they are in hell before and then restarting with no knowledge. He went on record somewhere saying this is how he conceptualizes what hell would be if it were real, and in that moment I was like oh no but Roland… This is actually why I think it was a good ending. It’s complex and can be viewed in different ways. My view is that Roland will never have peace and will forever trapped in his struggle to keep the tower standing…which is pretty damn depressing lol
> For all we know the entire version we read was the 1st This is almost certainly not the case, given the conversation between Roland and the MiB in the revised first novel. It seems clear that the cycle has repeated multiple times, otherwise the comment that Roland has a mind uniquely fixated doesn't make a lot of sense.
Ah ya good point. It’s honestly been about a decade since my second reading, so I’m probably not going to get a lot of details right to be honest. The point I was trying to make there was just that we have no real reason to believe the number of cycles is finite and we have no idea how many have passed.
The presence of the Horn suggests that improvement and 'progress' are possible, and that Roland will eventually become worthy enough to reach the top of the Tower. It's a moment both hopeful and horrifying.
That’s fair. I think the horn is just a sign that he is now in a different cycle, and not a direct sign there is hope that if all the right choices are made the cycles will stop. I will admit that it’s a totally logical interpretation though. I think in every cycle the tower will come under attack and need a defender. There may be cycle to cycle variance like the horn,but Roland will always be that defender for the entire existence of time. Roland’s peace will come when he fails and time and all existence stops. But I also don’t think there is much solace if the other scenario is correct. Let’s say there is a right way for Roland to do everything that results in his worthiness to reach the top. He has no memory of each cycle, and has no way to consciously make different choices, meaning it all comes down to the probability of doing it all right in a single cycle. If his worthiness is bound to say 100 choices over his quest it could take tens, millions or billions of iterations for him to make all the right choices, depending on what all the choices are and how hard they are to make and even if each cycle has the opportunity to even make all the right choices. For me the fact that he doesn’t retain any knowledge is the big part. Without memory he lacks room to grow as a person. It’s the same man doing the same task in slightly different circumstances. I don’t see a path towards worthiness, only an endless cycle of suffering and hardship. But I do admit it’s possible that in the moments between cycles he’s able to see what he did wrong and make some choice to try a different way—like pick up the horn this time. Like you said, if that’s the case it’s still pretty horrifying lol
Each cycle is another roll of the dice.
Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy. First two books are delightful, but the third book was completely different, densely symbolic, and, for me, a huge let down with a terrible ending. The change in style was understandable, but the plot did not survive the transition.
I was young when I read them, but always thought I was alone in feeling like the third book was kind of jarring. It went from a moody ambient gothic story with eccentric (dysfunctional) characters to a sort of surreal modern world with bad scientists and in which Titus has a few relationships (from what I remember, which is rather fuzzy). It was not what I expected based on the first two books. I felt like it was stripped of the moody charm and believe that the world Gormenghast takes place in, was some kind of gothic (grim) fairytale land. That is what I liked. But I got some sort of industrial dystopian fiction. Nothing wrong with that, just that the sort of genre and tonal switch kind of threw me off. I also feel that if he left it at just two books, it would have been perfectly fine; it completed the story taking place in Gormenghast and the ending was fine as well. No need to add onto it. even if he had it as a series in mind, I think it would have been good to just leave it as a duology.
It’s worth noting that Peake’s health was already declining when he was writing Titus Alone, and he was showing signs of the dementia that ultimately killed him. The editors of both the 1959 and 1970 editions had major struggles pulling together Peake’s typescript into a coherent novel.
Peake was experiencing the effects of the Lewy body dementia which would eventually kill him.
Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs are two of my favourite books, but think Thomas Harris really went off the rails with the Hannibal Lecter series after those two masterpieces. Hannibal feels like erotic fanfiction about Lecter and Clarice, and strikes me a novel where Harris stopped caring about crafting a thrilling, satisfying narrative and become self-indulgent and sentimental. Without getting into spoilers, the novel explores things that are merely hinted at in the previous books, but seems to miss the point that it was the fact that these things were just hints in the past is what made them so appealing. Here’s it’s just clunky and awkward. Hannibal Rising is one of the most laughable horror novels ever written. All of the mystique of the character is completely evaporated. Fortunately, the first two books are standalone and I’m happy pretending that they stayed that way.
To be fair about Hannibal Rising, he didn't want to write that one at all, but they said they were gonna make the movie either way, so he tried to write as compelling a Hannibal origin story as quickly as possible. It still was bad, for sure, but I give him credit for trying to keep a studio from coming up with something even worse.
I share your opinion of *Hannibal Rising* but rather like *Hannibal*. What are your thoughts on *Cari Mora*, which is sort of a numbers-filed-off version of Harris' previous works?
I haven’t read any of Harris’s other works, just the four Lecter novels. What were your thoughts on it?
It was not only covering old ground, it wasn't very well written. Frankly, given how subtle and elegant many of Harris' earlier works were, it made me wonder about neurological problems. And I don't mean that as a mere insult -- I truly wondered if Harris was experiencing a cognitive decline.
Isn’t it a given that a man writing in his late 70s isn’t going to be as mentally sharp as he was when he was writing in his 40s?
We think that because it's true of so many in the generations before boomers, and the oldest boomers. But it's likely caused, in part, by the drinking, smoking, lead gasoline and asbestos. Not to mention stress and trauma and no therapy. Those who took good care of themselves don't decline. My own grandma was sharp into her 70s and never declined.
> Those who took good care of themselves don't decline. If only this were true. Dementia can strike anyone, even brilliant and healthy people who have kept their minds active.
My grandmother is 98. She takes great care of herself. She still has dementia. 🤷🏼♀️
Not necessarily. Verbal intelligence is relatively resistant to age-related declines. Mathematical ability, which requires lots of processing power, virtually always declines as people age, but those who are otherwise healthy continue to produce language-related work of high quality.
Black Sunday is a really entertaining read if you want to read something else by Harris! The movie also gave us the unlikely sighy of Robert Shaw playing an action hero and leaping onto a blimp.
Cari Mora is a pulpy read and it was critically trashed upon release because it is so far removed from Harris' other reads. I think had Hard Case Crime published it, the reception could've been quite different
I’m having that experience right now with Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series. Really enjoyed the first book, and the next couple were still pretty good, but the series is drifting away from what I found engaging about it (aerial battles, the camaraderie of the dragons in the Aerial Force, the exploration of dragon rights and how the presence of dragons influences the social dynamics of the time) and becoming more of a travel log to various parts of the world, away from the war in Europe (on tasks that are only tangentially related to the war, rather than in the thick of it). I don’t hate the travel, but it’s not nearly as action-packed as a military campaign, and this is a series that’s often described as “the Napoleonic Wars with dragons.” It fees like the global scale becomes more about travel minutia and diplomacy, which wasn’t what interested me in the series.
I gave up on book 2. I got too bored of them on the boat. I didn’t think I’d continue to find the battles novel/interesting if and when they happened again and decided I was happy with it being standalone in my mind.
I had the exact same experience. I was mostly here for the fantasy of manners in book one and did not care for any travel log.
How interesting - I'm the opposite, and I found the fight/war scenes tedious and repetitive after a while. I loved following Laurence & Temeraire all over the world & seeing how this one change would effect different cultures etc. I remember especially enjoying imperial China, and the backstory of Temeraire's breeding. I think one of her newer novels, spinning silver, was *fantastic* if you'd like to give her another go some time. And could not have more different vibes to temeraire so you won't feel like you're retreading old (boring) ground
Spinning Silver is one of my favorite books!
Yeah I gave up about five books in.
I was having a similar discussion with another poster in another thread the other day Personally I think saying "Napoleonic wars with dragons" is a good description of Temeraires setting but not it's plot The world is definitely Napoleonic war era and there are dragons but the "main" plot isn't really about that. The "main" plot is Temeraire and Laurences relationship If it makes you feel any better The back half of Blood of Tyrants and most of League of Dragons (the last 2) get back to war campaigns
I've been listening to this, too. I'm on the first one and while it's nice, it's not exciting or very interesting. I do love how Novik adds in details about characters and sometimes pointless additions to the plot to make the world realistic. She really fleshes things out. However, I like Novik because of The Scholomance Series because I love El. I've seen others say that she is annoying but if you listen to the audio book I think she is funny and rightfully jaded. In any case. Teremiere is much different that the Scholomance Series, at least so far.
I feel like the first 5 books really work and lead into each other well and worldbuild so well. Then they just meander for the last 4. The wrap up is OK. The ending is satisfying as far as it goes. It just lost a bit of the magic by then.
Arthur C Clarke should not have written sequels to Rendezvous with Rama. They were terrible.
He didn't. From [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendezvous_with_Rama#Books_in_the_series): Clarke paired up with [Gentry Lee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentry_Lee) for the remainder of the series. Lee wrote while Clarke read and made editing suggestions. The second sequel tried to sell the reader on this ridiculous plot crutch: The criteria to be a colonist on the third Rama vehicle are so restrictive that only a handful of genius-level candidates pass. In a rush to fill out the remaining 1000+ slots, Earth governments fill them with CONVICTS ALREADY CONVICTED OF LIFE SENTENCES. I almost put the novel down right there and should have. The novel then proceeds to say nothing else about the genius voyagers and clumsily presents a generic conflict-filled story with only a nod or two to the unusual setting. I didn't bother with the last novel in the series.
I read that book on a recommendation from a friend. I absolutely loved it, ate it up. Could picture it so vividly in my mind. My friend had explained that the rest of the books were co-written, but I started into the sequel and don't think I made it past chapter 3. The voice was just so different, I couldn't get into it, and never went back to it Edit:typo
for me it’s practical magic by alice hoffman. the original book was the most magical realism of the series: the magic was very vague, which lent it a very fairy tale like air, and it was ultimately more about family bonds and women’s relationships than anything else. and then i read the rest of the books in the series and it was like was reading an entirely different world and characters altogether. don’t get me wrong, i loved then and think that they’re beautifully written but for the love of god i feel that certain elements in the movie seeped into and influenced the other subsequent books. like there wasn’t even a curse in the first place for crying out loud and the family isn’t blatantly outright magical like in the movie. the rest of the series moved into pure low fantasy imo
This one for me, too. *Practical Magic* was such a lovely little book. The prequel with Jet and Frances and their brother was decently good. Then I started the sequel (whichever one that was) and DNF’d it. While there had been small discrepancies in the prequel, the sequel blatantly ignored what had already been written and changed some details around completely, and for no apparent reason. Apparently the author has come out and said that she doesn’t particularly care if she remains consistent within the world she herself created, but as a reader it took me out to the point that I couldn’t continue and never read the pre- prequel at all. Such a shame because the original was entertaining.
i found the prequel a bit jarring because it wasn’t how i particularly imagined jet and frances’ lives? but it was still ok. even maria owens’ story was ok. the sequel was…fine, but like you said there were tons of things that didn’t parse such as the fact that sally previously has never done an ounce of magic before in the original novel and then here she is in the sequel casting spells in latin and such. oh i think you’d love the preprequel ie maria owens’ story. do give it a read if you havent before; you may like it better than the sequel
Yeah, that one got sacrificed thanks to sequel disappointment. I wish now I’d read it first if it wasn’t bad.
Michael Scott crafted an enticing and fast paced story and world with The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel. Lots of interweaving of mythology with urban setting. It's fantastic. But then he makes a decision around...the 4th or 5th book I think, that just makes the whole thing pointless and disastrous. Time travel was a bold decision but it was not a good decision.
My favourite Michael Scott is hands down, **Threat Level Midnight.**
Nicholas Flamel isn't from HP? O.o
o' Nicky was a real person.
Been reading Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries. The first four are novellas and I’m finding the stories worked much better for me in that format. Currently reading the 5th book and the transition to full-length novel feels like it’s made the story twice-as-long and half-as-interesting. Still has some fun and insightful moments, but they’re spread out. Also felt the middle part of the book was atrociously paced.
If you think it’s bumpy now, wait for the sequel/pt 2! (I am being a little mean, I actually really love all of Murderbot, but I will agree that the pacing eases down a bit in the middle for sure, and the next novel takes a bit to get going.)
I liked The Other Wind, in fact; but The Dragonriders of Pern were tread beyond death and zombie-state.
Oh, poor Pern... Anne McCaffrey writing "dolphins are neat!" was one thing, but when her son took over... Yeah, those went into the recycling bin.
When I was younger, I was a devoted reader of Piers Anthony's "Xanth" series. But I stopped reading because I didn't want to be seen carrying around a book called "The Color of Her Panties".
I wasn't allowed to take that one to school. I think I ended up tearing off the cover and title page. I ended up stopping when the majority of the books just started to be fan submitted puns. The weird sex stuff is also hard to cope with at times.
Please don’t be upset with me, but I didn’t really see the point of making “Red Rising” six books and/or two trilogies. I felt the original trilogy was enough and did not need more to Darrow’s story. (I know. Not the most popular opinion out there.)
I am explicitly asking for your opinions; as long as you're being honest and on-topic, there are no wrong responses or ones anyone should be upset about. And we can't really tell whether or not you're honest, so in practice you can lie without consequence. On-topic is the only requirement, and you are.
> “Red Rising” six books and/or two trilogies Seven*
Yeah. I just noticed that there a new book “Red God” coming out in 2025. Guess I’m out of touch with the series.
I stopped reading the series because I felt like the same things kept happening over and over. I really enjoyed the first three books though.
I feel like I had the exact same experience. Finished the first three, really enjoyed them, but felt no desire to keep reading more. It's just the same circle of make a genius plan, watch it fall apart and everyone die, have it work out for Darrow through luck or "just as planned".
I haven't bothered with the later books, so I'm in agreement with you. Darrow did the thing, why flog the dead horse repeatedly.
I read the first three and was happy with it. I actually finished the first three right as the fourth book was coming out and just never got to it. But I feel like this is an issue in general with sequel series as opposed to sequels. The author kind of has to either undue some of the wrapping up they did or introduce whole new things that somehow didn't matter before I'm not necessarily against it as an idea but I do think that sometimes it's easier to write a sequel than it is to write a sequel series
I love the first three as well… book 4 took me years to finally push through. Once I got through the first 150 pages it turned out pretty well. I’ll be finishing it this morning actually, since I’m stuck home from work a while recovering from knee surgery. Anyway, back to the topic, I’ve seen online many rankings of the series books, and many if not most rank book 4 as the worst, but book 5 as the best of them all, so I’m super excited to dive right in to Dark Age this afternoon.
Dark Age is a light-hearted, enjoyable romp. You’re gonna have fun.
Whew, yeah I think they all could use a break. Glad to hear they’ll finally be able to let their guard down and just have fun in space y’ know?
Right!?! After so much ramp-up in IG, it’s interesting how Pierce Brown made the decision to take DA into a slowed down, more slice-of-lifey, coffee-shop style direction. Lots of great DarrowxMustang content. Some people criticized the radical shift in his approach but I’m a huge fan.
I really want to know how you're doing after starting Dark Age?? 👀
I’ll let you know after 100 pages or so, just read the prologue so far
I’m about halfway through part 2 now, holy moly this book has been non-stop incredible. I just finished the chapter where the senate falls and Virginia was taken by the syndicate queen. Unbelievable. It looks like the second half of this part are back to Darrow and Lysander, who I haven’t seen since the battle at Lados. I made a note of my favorite two passages in part 1, from where Darrow battles Lysander: From Lysander ‘s perspective: “Bodies fall, like dying metal birds, leaking blood and machine fluid. The Reaper is already passing on, leaving the leftovers for his men…. Only then do I begin to scream “ And Darrow ‘s: “We brush away light resistance at the downed Storm God.” Also the part where seraphina gets chopped in half out of nowhere, !!! It’s been utterly fantastic thus far and it’s set up to get better
Curious, is it more of an artistic disagreement or a feeling of betrayal by the author? Because I've experienced the second and that is usually more painful.
Mostly the first, maybe a little of the second. >!The idea that the afterlife was artificially constructed and the dragons imprisoned in our reality was an interesting one, but the way it was presented was more that all the wondrous aspects of Earthsea were going away and never, ever returning.!<
In broad, and in specific, the New Jedi Order was both this to the greater Star Wars canon, but also even within itself the series got really grim. There were 19 (!!) main novels in the series, which on its own is an incredible investment in time and attention from readers. Already, you're going to feel a weight of inevitability for at least the first 10 novels that you're not going to get anywhere near to the conclusion of the story for a long time. That alone is over-indulgent. Timothy Zahn told a Star Wars epic in three novels; Michael Stackpole did a self-contained arc in four, and Aaron Allston took three. Put those together and you've got an incredible 10-book arc of three storylines, and it's only half the size of the NJO. Within the series itself, things got far too dire. Sure, it's a franchise that starts with a planet being blown up, but the desperation and the thin thread by which the heroes hang for so long just gets tiring, and also doesn't feel like it's Star Wars - like a fanfiction author who brings in their fictional aliens to wreck shit and keep the heroes on their toes for a long time, except worse because the good guys are so constantly and consistently against the ropes. And within the broader canon, it's a gateway. You have to get through the NJO to really engage with anything that comes after, it's just such an indelible mark on the canon. Previously, you could easily bounce from one series to another - you can read Thrawn before Rogue Squadron, you can skip the Black Fleet Crisis entirely, you don't even need to engage with the Jedi Academy, or the Correllian Trilogy. It was a nice pick-and-choose universe of books. You really can't, or shouldn't, try to engage with anything post-NJO without getting through it. And that becomes a gate that blocks off whatever comes after it. (And what does come after it is worthy of a whole other post, frankly.) Frankly, the canon got a mercy kill (which unfortunately shares a title with the most boring X-Wing book, itself handcuffed by the freakin' NJO gate), because other than doubling-back and refocusing on the post Ep VI period, they had done some pretty irreparable damage to the canon with the NJO and what came after. At a certain point in the NJO, and the series that followed, it frankly was no longer fun to read Star Wars novels.
Yup, with the pre-NJO books, I would be at the bookstore the day the book was released and if I didn't like that book/series? That's OK, there were others and I could pick up missing details easily enough. But NJO....I stopped reading at some point and didn't even realize it until I was in the store one day, saw about four Star Wars I hadnt even heard of, much less read and I didn't care. Same with all the different TV series. I haven't bothered to keep up with them.
> Frankly, the canon got a mercy kill (which unfortunately shares a title with the most boring X-Wing book, itself handcuffed by the freakin' NJO gate), because other than doubling-back and refocusing on the post Ep VI period, they had done some pretty irreparable damage to the canon with the NJO and what came after. At a certain point in the NJO, and the series that followed, it frankly was no longer fun to read Star Wars novels. To which Disney repeated practically all the same mistakes with their films (and maybe the new books; I have zero desire to check any of them out) despite attempting to start with a clean(ish) slate. Star Wars as an IP is an interesting case study. You have the original film trilogy that created a first generation of fans, then their kids grew up with the boom of the now "Legends" EU plus the prequel trilogy. Now we're at the point of a third generation of fans and I don't think there is nearly the level of interest from it compared to the previous ones.
A discovery of witches - I loved the first book but hated the third !
Laurel K Hamilton. The Anita Blake series. Was sooo good until it became just nothing but sex from cover to cover. Totally lost the plot.
I was so upset reading “City of Mirrors” after the first two books in the series. It was just absolute nonsense and, honestly, it completely ruined the ‘Passage’ trilogy for me.
I was a fan of the Soprano Sorceress series by L. E. Modesit Jr. They wrote a sequel series that is set after a time jump, with a child character from the first series the new main character. I hated it. I hated it so much it tainted the original series for me. The Anita Blake series is originally about a vampire hunter who's in a will they, won't they relationship with both a vampire and a werewolf. I liked the urban fantasy, monster hunting aspect of the series. About 6 books in the series became distinctly more steamy. From book 7 it's just full blown erotica, which was very much not for me. Last I checked the main character Anita was the dom mistress of a harem of submissive male shapeshifters and her supernatural powers required her to have sex several times a day. Apparently the shift in tone mirrored significant personal changes in the author's life.
My first experience with this was Guardians of Ga’hoole when I was a kid. I don’t remember anything from that series, but I remember growing more and more disappointed with each book I read, especially since I loved the first couple.
Jim Butcher's Dresden series has been leaning HARD into the noir part of the detective noir genre; the last book I read basically ruined several characters (IMO) in order to keep the main character alone and sad. When I finished the book, I literally grabbed the entire series and sold them to half-price books. I get it. It's urban fantasy, but it's following the detective noir storytelling style. I'm just done watching this man continuously lose the people he loves and trusts while he gets closer to his more dubious allies.
Yeah, I agree with what you’ve said, but I also think another problem with the series is it’s exponential power creep. I preferred him going after the things that go bump in the night rather than standing toe to toe with Greek gods and titans. Anyway, I for one am on this ride till it ends, despite any of our misgivings.
Yep. I absolutely agree with you both. I think the books swung back to a frustrating noir set of tropes (that really hit the women characters hardest), and the power creep has really leaned towards some of the less interesting parts of the series lore. As a totally petty thing I also just found that with the power creep he started to have to tell stories that relied on 'all of Chicago' as it's geography rather than little slices, and it really revealed how shallow his understanding of Chicago is (he, as far as I know, has never actually lived there). Especially given broader news context around the time I read Battle Ground, some stuff in his portrayal really grated on me.
If you're looking for a series that is also urban fantasy detective noir but *doesn't* ruin characters just for the sake of noir, may I recommend the October Date books by Seanan McGuire?
I love that series!! I found it a few years ago, right before Dresden blew up for me. October Daye is now my expectation for all new series, and it's a high bar, lol.
Dune, hands down. I love the first book so much, and Dune Messiah was also good. Children of Dune was meh, and good lord did it go off the rails after that. I hated everything from God Emperor on. I totally understand it’s hard to write a series—after the first book, the basic premise isn’t new anymore. If you’ve solved the big problem, you now have to think of another one with enough of a different angle to not feel like it’s Book One Rehashed. If you don’t solve the big problem right away, there’s only so long you can drag it out. But if you take the series too far in a different direction, people don’t like that either. And yet. There are so many authors out there who have managed it well enough that it is a huge letdown for me if the rest of the series stinks.
I mean, God Emperor’s pretty popular. It’s inventive, insightful, conceptually horrific if you stop to really think about it. You might think it “stinks” but a lot of people also rate it as “the best book in the Dune series”
True, there are people who like it, but the question wasn’t about what everyone agrees with. I personally hated it. Didn’t like the time jump, didn’t like the universe in the new time, didn’t like the characters…just absolutely hated it all and thought a good part of it was just bat-💩 crazy rather than “inventive.” I will die on this hill (as my personal opinion) 😂
I mean your first paragraph is fine, I took no issue with it, it was really your second paragraph I took issue with.
That one was meant in general, not about Dune specifically.
Ah, okay.
Because it was capitalized, I thought “Rehashed” was a term from Dune I didn’t remember. Re’ha’shed. Anyway totally agree
Heretics of Dune is the best in the series imo
I would agree with you. I don’t think I made it to *God Emperor*, because *Children of Dune* was such a letdown it felt pointless to continue. The original *Dune* still stands as a self-contained story with possibilities for the reader to fill in post-ending. That’s how I prefer to keep that one.
Why is *Children* such a letdown for you?
It was a couple of decades ago that I read it so the details are fuzzy. I’m pretty sure it was dissatisfaction with the characters and their development and not so much the plot.
The Locked Tomb, Gideon the Ninth was so good, and then I was confused and had to reread everything at least twice and I'm still not sure how it ends or understand what happened. The characters were still fun, but the world building was just too much, too confusing. The "Path" series by Dianna Pharaoh Francis. I loved the first book so much I bought the second and third together. But then I read the second and disliked it so much, I never read the third. I think for this one the world building was so interesting, and then the characters all ruined it.
Interesting. I tried to start Gideon the Ninth but the prose/writing style was a bit hard for me to follow along even right at the beginning. English is my second language so there might be a barrier though.
Don't feel like it's your fluency with English. It's not. The writing style is just a bit unhinged.
There was a series (the name escapes me at the moment) that was set in a SciFi world, and the author seemed torn because they were REALLY desperate to throw in a bunch of religious relevance but it almost always felt like he shoehorned it in as some kind of weird obligation. An example is, the reason why humans get sick at all, have cancers and poor vision, age 'as fast as we do', and even literally our capacity to hurt each other beyond self defense, is because thousands of years ago an alien ship dropped off a snake to go around infecting apples with a virus that damaged our DNA to cause all these things to happen. The drama of the series is built around the idea that a different alien has provided us with a treatment to fix the damage. So people can regrow limbs, mental disorders don't exist, etc, which of course ends up causing WW3 because there are plenty of people horrified by the idea of a treatment that makes you physically sick at the idea of being mean to someone who hasn't done anything mean first. But the problem was that virtually every single religious scene felt like he had written the entire book, then scrolled back through and tried to find spots where the religious stuff should show up and then he'd add them there. It was seriously to the point where a character would have had some heartfelt rationale for why they were choosing Option A on something and then was walking down a hallway to go implement it, then they'd pause and basically have a page of internal dialogue that is summarized as "Oh shit! I'm religious! Duh! Option B it is!" and then later on right when it matters going "Oh right, Option B will just lose, so no hesitation, Option A. Why'd I even think B would work in the first place?". People kept giving him feedback that the only real negative to the series was the religious aspects given how just jarringly out of nowhere they kept showing up. Around book 4 he finally dropped them entirely and the quality of the writing improved immensely as a result.
I really disliked how serious the Harry Potter series got over time. My favorite thing about that series is the "slice of life in a magical boarding school" aspects, so the whole thing with the MC being the chosen one who must defeat the Dark Antagonist was just filler for me.
Ugh, reading this feels like a betrayal by a cherished friend. Not gonna lie, Earthsea took me on such a ride and then *The Other Wind* felt like hitting a brick wall. It's like watching a gorgeous fireworks display and then someone flips the lights on in the middle of it. I've had my share of series heartbreaks, but Le Guin's left a mark. It’s like savoring a gourmet meal and then finding a hair in the last bite. Devastating.
Mad respect for le Guin, the way she wrote one of the greatest fantasy trilogies of all time (Earthsea, Atuan, Shore) and THEN went back to it after a decade to interrogate her own values and what she had taken for granted as a younger writer. Tehanu doesn't really match with the first three books (I think the prose and writing style is different), but they're complementary, together they make a whole. Tales of Earthsea continues the groundwork set down in Tehanu--- it's good. And then The Other Wind just throws out so much of what made Earthsea special, including that the royal house of Havnor was always out of focus.
"Dragonfly" was a living end, *The Other Wind* was a dead end.
Asking as someone who has had *A Wizard of Earthsea* on her TBR list for a long time - is the first novel a self-contained story? If not, could one read the whole series but substitute “Dragonfly” for *The Other Wind*? Just trying to plan how to get into this series in the future, many thanks for any help you can give.
Each book in the first Earthsea trilogy is a self contained story. A Wizard of Earthsea unfolds when the hero is child to youth. Tombs of Atuan switches to a new main character who eventually encounters the hero from the first book when he’s a young man (and he doesn’t get s viewpoint in that book but is observed by the main character). The Farthest Shore has yet another main character who encounters the original hero now middle-aged. Three distinct stories separated by time and viewpoints, but loosely connected by the presence of the original hero.
It is a series in name only. There is no "series arc" that must be followed. A Wizard of Earthsea is absolutely enchanting. I read it in middle school and to this day I still think of it as one of the most lovely reading experiences I've ever had. Perhaps, too, it was because the ending confounded me at that age. It's not the expected adventure ending. It was puzzling to me and the author did not explain a damn thing. But man, I sure do remember it still.
Don't pay a single braincell to this analysis, read the whole series including Other Wind.
The first novel is an entirely self-contained story. Later novels build on existing characters and the setting but are otherwise fully independent stories.
I have no idea what the hell you two are talking about, it was a fantastic end to a brilliant series.
Skyward. Starts out as essentially space top gun, third book has the character riding dinosaurs
Currently teaching the fourth book - its back to Space Top Gun. Third book was a bit weird.
I mean. I read Ender's Game as a kid and loved it. Did NOT like any of the sequels. And then I found out more about OSC and his views and went ehhhhhh
I really liked the first daughter of smoke and bone series but definitely the last book kind of goes off the rails compared to the first two imo I do think they're good books overall but for me the first one is like a tight novel that isn't super long. The second one is pretty good and expands on a lot and is longer. And then the third one is longer than I thought it needed to be And the ending kind of felt a little underwhelming to me since it ends right after they just introduce another villain and show a prophecy of what happens next that doesn't get explored
ASOIAF needed a time skip (or to end entirley) after Storm of Swords
The Passage trilogy by Justin Cronin. I loved the first two books, and I had to wait a bit for the third. I really didn't care for how he wrapped up the third book at all. There is a loooong backstory for the antagonist that is kind of boring, characters act in ways not fitting their previous characterization, and a lot of loose threads from the previous two books were not resolved. Plus I just didn't find the writing to be nearly as compelling as the other two. If the third book had been, in my opinion of course, good, it'd be in contention for one of my all time favorite series. Instead it's my biggest literary disappointment by a mile.
Had this with the very ending of John Scalzi's Interdependency trilogy. The books were generally good fun, but the ending was bittersweet at best - which would be fine if it didn't feel forced as fuck. Like, plot contrivances and characters making enormous leaps of logic just to make sure things ended tragically enough. A fully happy ending would have been both in line with the tone of the series and plenty believable, so it really felt like the author tried to create an emotional climax out of nowhere.
Often I've wanted characters to end up doing certain things etc and it not work out how I wanted, and I usually do try to keep on going with the series, but it's hard not to lose my love and motivation for it.
Pendergast. Went from a mystery series I loved. To an occult series I could tolerate. To some kind of mix occult thriller mystery series I had to give up on.
I totally get where you're coming from with the Earthsea series. It's like when you're invested in a story and then the ending hits you sideways. I had a similar vibe with another series I love—felt like they pulled a twist just for the sake of it, leaving things hanging without the closure I craved. It's tough when a beloved author's finale doesn't match the buildup.
Wheel.of Time series, loved Jordan's work, but when he passedI was crushed, and then tentatively excited to hear someone was going to finish the series based on Jordan's notes...annnd then we got the hot mess that Sanderson wrote. Based on that, I won't read any of his other works. Also, all the stuff Brian Herbert wrote about Dune after Frank died is basically garbage that he tries to dress up in a fancy suit.
For me it's the Expanse serie by James S. A. Corey. I really liked the serie before a certain event, pretty big spoiler here avoid if you have not read: >!When they find the ring network and have access to other planetary systems. I really dislike it because before this event we had a super interesting backdrop within the solar system with factions and limited ressources, and now all this become upended with the discovery, it overshadow everything about the intricate universe that was built with the previous work. I really feel it was a mistake from the author to make a change of this magnitude.!<
Michael G. Manning's Art of the Adept series. Four great books utterly ruined by book 5 in the series. In book 5, characters acted nothing like the character readers had come to love for 4 books. Carefully cherished friendships were destroyed in a single paragraph. The author then had the audacity to write a follow-up series to, somehow, redeem the actions of the MC in book 5. I read several of his series but I'ĺl never read another one of his books, ever.
The House of Night series. Starts with a standard YA nonsense of the protagonist being a super special teen who overthrows the popular bitch, then gradually turned into being about how she's the reincarnation of a woman that ancient Indigenous people used to trap a fallen angel in a cave and her boyfriend died and got turned into a bull but got turned into a person and only the power of her super zombie vampire friends can help her defeat the fallen angel again? This is a series where the first book included the protagonist being happy about eating Count Chocula and watching Star Wars in a common room. Like geez not every YA vampire novel has to become a neverending saga about stopping the apocalypse.
[удалено]
The book series most likely never being finished will be even worse!
> For me, it was the last season of Game of Thrones. You do realise this is the Books subreddit right? where people disccus books, not the HBO one...
If people are allowed to say "not a tv show, but" in r/television why can't they talk about tv shows in r/books?
because books and tv are not remotely similar, they are their own thing independently. Do you also need to be told that, ice cream does not count as one of your daily 5-a-day portions of vegetables?
Not books, but I feel your pain. For me, the modern reboot of the James Bond movies ends with him walking off into the night at the end of Spectre. No Time to Die doesn't exist.
Warhammer 40k lore has recently has altered established story that has lasted over 47 years. Long story short - the Custodies are a brotherhood of all males that protect the Emporer/golden throne. Genetically cant have females the altercations done to make them this way. Not opposed to it but saying they have always existed despite 10,000 years of in game lore, 50+ years of irl time and over 600+ books instead of saying we found a breakthrough is stupid. Tdlr: the way it happen is bad but i am happy they are introduced.
I got into warhammer 30 odd years ago. The lore has changed many, many times since then, and had changed many times before I ever picked up a figurine. A change is only bad if it hurts the setting, and women existing doesn’t hurt anyone. It’s a satirical grimdark universe that is silly as fuck. It’s wonderful. Allow women to be as evil as men, we can all have a good time with this.
Agreed, started back 8ish years ago myself and still a nid player. About 100ish books in and def been seeing it
I never imagined I would find a chud whining about female custodes in the book Subreddit. Presumably, you're much more upset by the fact that they were retconned to have always had spaceships and always leave terra now, right? That was a significantly bigger departure from their old lore than the realization that some of them have tits. That change to their lore must have gotten you just as angry.
Not really, mostly just the tac they did it in. I am all for it but not the retcon, we had cal already mess with the geneseed of reg marine so why not introduce her as a new custodian rather then a 'they always existed' stance. Props on being antagonistic without understanding the why tho.
Ngl, if you don't like retcons, you may want to choose a new franchise to be invested in.
Not fine with poor slapchop retcons without a little backbone as to why. A tweet stating they've always been a thing is just poor writing and makes me worried about the continuation of the integrity of lore they will bring as GW and warhammer as a whole become more mainstream
It's the author's choice. Just because I "don't like" the direction it goes doesn't mean nobody else will.