Dragaera

Literary Disappointments (was: The LKH thing)

Sun Feb 16 20:03:35 PST 2003

On Sat, 15 Feb 2003, Andrew Lias wrote:

@> So... this suggests a new topic.  What books/series have you been especially 
@> disappointed by and why?

Mmm.

Well, Weis and Hickman manage to severely mess up every series they return
to; vide the last volumes of the Dragonlance and Darksword series. Similarly, 
they have a tendency to forget what they were doing between books in a
series and randomly start killing people and/or adjusting everyones'
personalities midstream.

Piers Anthony has already been mentioned. I shall mention him again: Piers
Anthony, who has maybe two or three books that he can write and just keeps
producing them again and again.

The second Thomas Covenant series; there was definitely good stuff in
there, but if I see the words "argent" or "extravagant" one more time, I
swear I am going to rip Donaldson's kidneys out.

The Wraeththu books; someone told me Mr. Constantine was a decent
writer. I'm not certain precisely what variety of crack that person was
on, but it must be one that makes you blind to the use of exclamation
points and question marks in the same sentence, the phrase "different to",
multiple egregious omissions of commas, and similar things. Oh, yeah, and
the complete lack of interesting stuff happening didn't really help either.

And there's Jordan's Wheel of Time, which has also come up. This is what
happens when you take a four-book series and stretch it out to three times
that length. With sniffling and much adjusting of necklines.

I have to stop. This is making my head hurt.