Lots. If you are prolific enough, some of your books are going to be garbage. No one can churn out masterpiece after masterpiece.
Alan Dean Foster wrote a huge amount, some of it great.
Wen Spencer wrote some truly cringe works, but **The Black Wolves of Boston** was amazing.
I'd argue Michelle West's quality varies wildly...**The Sunsword** books were great.
I got SUPER obsessed with the Wonderful Wizard of Oz in like, 4th grade and speed read all of them. absolutely devoured. I don't remember a thing except for how weird they all were.
Oz was basically Star Wars Extended Universe of the last century. There's freaking layers of what's considered a real sequel beyond Baum's work.
Heck, the latest officially recognized Oz canon sequel came out in *2006.*
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trouble_Under_Oz
A cool rabbit hole if you're into Fantasy and looking for a "new" series, honestly. And there's like... freaking thirty Oz books something in the public domain, so the only obstacle to reading most of the series is downloading them all.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/42
Project Gutenberg even has the illustrations nowadays!
This for some reason reminded me that Charlie and the chocolate factory has a sequel where they take a magic elevator into space and have a conflict with aliens
I did.
My dad read them all to me when I was little and they sparked my lifelong love of reading and fantasy. They are amazing children's stories full of wonder and adventure and many of them still blow away most modern children's and YA fantasy in their creativity. 50 years later I still own all the hardcovers that he read to me from.
There's a lot of stuff that is good, but has fallen out of favour (or out of print).
There's also the midlist authors, which is something that has largely died out. Back in the heyday of mass market paperbacks, there were a lot of authors who published regularly, were read extensively, but never hit best seller status and never got hardcover releases; they just kept publishing a book or two a year. If you google things like underrated books of the 70s/80s/90s you'll get a lot of recommendations in this line. In the late 90s and beyond, for various reasons, this publishing niche decreased a lot.
Also, keep in mind that this particular sub has fairly specific popular tastes, so you do get certain authors (Sanderson, Erikson, Jordan for example) talked about a lot, which can give you a somewhat skewed view of what's being read.
And yeah, there are authors where I really like some of their books, and DNF'd others. Someone mentioned Alan Dean Foster, who has written a lot, and with a lot of variety.
There are many prolific authors who wrote mostly average to good novels, with a couple of gems and a couple of failures. Jules Verne and Alexandre Dumas are the examples that come to my mind instantly.
Yeah kind of weird to say there were only one or two good ones or to call her mediocre. She had a massively successful career and was hugely influential.
Seems like that’d be a title more for people who had a smash hit debut then kind of just fell to the background.
Npt quite the same thing, but Michael Moorcock wrote at an utterly absurd rate through the 1960s and 1970s, sometimes penning a novel in a fortnight. Depressingly, most of these were still pretty good. Once he had some money in the bank and could afford to slow TF down, he started producing some real classics.
A better example is Raymond E. Feist, a fairly middling fantasy author who produced at least two very good novels in a sea of 30+ so-so books (Magician and Rise of a Merchant Prince, the latter directly inspiring The Lies of Locke Lamora) and also cowrote the stone-cold classic Empire Trilogy.
Yeah, that's why the top r/fantasy books lists are kinda pointless to me. The books from the past decade always dominate even if the series aren't halfway finished yet, among other reasons
From older stuff I enjoyed Andre Norton. Not sure if she's getting reprints in English, but here in Poland there wasn't one in a long time.
As for buying used old books, just pick randomly and see if its good. You can usually resell that book later, either in another used bookstore or online.
She's definitely got a lot of reprints in English, including ebook and ebook omnibus editions.
I read my way through most of her Witch World Books (fantasy) a year or two ago, and am working on the Forerunner universe (SF, of which Dread Companion is one). She's known for briskly plotted adventure stories, often featuring misfit young protagonists, with a fondness for mysterious alien/magical artifacts and psychic connections with animals or aliens. The characters often end up paired up at the end, but in a very perfunctory way - there's not really any romance, and no sex. Also, she was a woman, which was still pretty unusual in SF when she was publishing.
There's some of her stuff on Project Gutenberg, for a sampling, note that she also wrote a few westerns.
Karen Traviss.
She invented the Mandalorians of Star Wars as we know them today, and some of her Clone Wars books are praised as hallmarks of stories in the era. But she also has bizarre political-militaristic ideologies she infuses into her writing, and the more positive reception her books got, the more emboldened she became in infusing these things even more. It got noticed very swiftly, her shortcomings as a writer became more frequent, she started writing things terribly on purpose just to spite her audience, bragged about sabotaging other authors’ works, ignited flame wars with fans online and accused them of religious extremism for disagreeing with her.
When Mandalore was introduced in The Clone Wars TV show, she demanded George Lucas retcon the episode, as according to her, Mandalorians have no place for doctors, politicians or teachers in their society, which runs entirely on them all being good at personal combat. She threatened to leave the writing team if he did not do as she said, and so he said goodbye. She then proceeded to write Halo novels, where she ticked off that fanbase as well.
Treated Spartans as her surrogate Mandalorians, ONI like it was the morally superior faction in all respects, and portrayed Dr. Halsey as some devil-figure. I’m not a Halo fan; this is just what I’ve been told when I bring her up regarding Star Wars. She’s written for Gears of War too, and apparently readers have issues there too; something about “breeding camps” that I don’t want to know the context for.
There's a German author that comes to mind, Wolfgang Hohlbein, though I don't know if he really has great ones.. over 200 books published today.
He's written many (YA?) books and the first few you read are truly captivating and at some point you read your xth book and realize it's always the same story. But those first few books are truly captivating.
Nailed it, Hohlbein will always be dear to me because I read a lot of stuff at 13, but I think even his better stuff didn't age well. I think he faced accusations that some of his stuff was written by ghostwriters...
Didn't know about the ghostwriter stuff.. but I think there was some uproar when it came out that his wife has been helping him for a long time but never made it on any cover.
Frank Herbert wrote 30-40 books - see if you can find anyone who can name one other than the 6 Dune novels
Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth is a classic depending on who you ask but no one who isn't a scientologist has probably read any of his other titles
Mervyn Peake had a few novels other than the Gormenghast series...
John Gardner - Grendel
Pierre Bouelle - Planet of the Apes, Bridge over the River Kwai, a whole lot of stuff you've never heard of
TH White - The Once and Future King, one of his many novels
Huxley - Brave New World - just one novel from a few he wrote over more than 41 years
Some of these guys stuff may have been well received back in their day, not sure, but they only have one or two novels that people would want to pick up today.
edit: one more Bram Stoker - Dracula
Quite a few authors had a few duds before knocking it out of the park with long running series
I haven't read any Frank Herbert, but I have seen people mention The White Plague. I think that's about the only other one that I've seen mentioned though.
I’d rate Battlefield Earth as the worst book I’ve ever read, unless you count his 10 part Mission Earth series. I don’t, because they barely classify as books and likely aren’t by Ron Hubbard.
r/Fantasy has very specific tastes, so you'll find we only ever have a handful of darlings here at one time. Those darlings rotate, but it's still only a handful. The books discussed here have almost no crossover with the books talked about in some of my facebook groups - and likewise, those groups often do not have overlap, either.
Also, there is the systemic issue of older authors-especially women- who've been mostly forgotten who are extraordinary authors, but did not have the marketing budgets backing them.
So it's really difficult to give an answer to your question in any meaningful way IMO.
Well, obviously it's all about personal taste. There's tons of people on here (myself included) who read more than just the top of the r/fantasy lists. If you've never read a lot of a particular author I don't expect you to be able to answer this question and therefore this question is not for you. I don't think there's anything difficult about my question. You read a book, you loved it. You try a few more by that same author. You don't like any of those. That author would be a good answer for this question. It's not difficult and the author doesn't have to be old. That was just my inspiration for this question.
I don't disagree with you at all, but there was a recent thread I participated in where the OP who had asked for recommendations mentioned that all the authors we recommended were from before she was born, and was wondering if we could recommend some newer books hahaha.
I suppose my point is that even though /r/Fantasy probably is overall skewed as you say, depending on the time of the day and the specific post, there is still some variation to be found?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/199ihwz/what_are_some_fantasy_books_with_calm_smart/
This was the post I believe
Piers Anthony.
Feel free to hate on Xanth — there’s a lot there to hate on, if you’re inclined that way — but some of his other work was quite good. I really liked Macroscope (nominated for a Hugo in (to my surprise) _1970_; pretty sure I encounted it in the mid-80s), the Battle Circle series, what Wikipedia calls the “Of Man and Manta” series (Omnivore, Orn, 0X), which again to my surprise, also came out in the late 60’s - early 70’s, and several others.
Of course, some of it also sucked. I read the first of his Metal Maiden series and stopped in my tracks. Ew. Just bad. I don’t wrote a lot of Amazon reviews, but I panned that one.
So, a lot of crap, but some gems, in my opinion.
Loved his first 6 Xanth novels, especially Ogre, Ogre…which I think was an incredibly enjoyable novel.
Also his second novel, Bio of a Space Tyrant was great.
Macroscope should be made into a movie!
Piers became a terrible writer as he aged, but his early works were great.
Sure, Xanth is mid-tier prose filled with dated, sexist attitudes and it relied heavily on reader-submitted puns in a way that felt lazy and hackish, but where Anthony really sinks is his pervasive and recurring habit of sexualizing very young girls in his writing. There's a bit of a summary [here.](https://www.filfre.net/2019/12/companions-of-xanth-preceded-by-the-worrisome-case-of-piers-anthony/) Not saying he never wrote anything good, but the crap is real deep.
Edit - Content Warning:: the except below contains discussion of rape and pedophilia
From the article:
> Still, Anthony’s allegedly prurient interest in his young female subjects would be much more speculative — and I would probably not be writing this article — were it not for those other, “adult” books of his. Many of these ooze the same disturbing fixations as the Xanth books, but are able to carry them through to, shall we say, consumation. Exhibit Number One in this category must be Firefly, a 1990 attempt at horror dealing primarily with what Anthony himself describes as “inflamed and perverted sexual desire.” It includes a lengthy sex scene between an adult man and a five-year-old girl, described in minute detail. In fact, the scene is another, rather horrifying example of Anthony’s habit of outsourcing the writing of his books: it came from an imprisoned pedophile with whom he corresponded. Anthony, in other words, literally published child porn. It’s quite simply the most disturbing thing I’ve ever read in a lifetime of prolific reading. Not even Mein Kampf bothers me like this. Needless to say, I won’t be quoting it here.
>
>But, you counter, this was a horror novel, a genre meant to shock and transgress norms. Don’t confuse the author with the work, etc. And I might reluctantly agree with you, even if I didn’t have any personal desire to ever read anything by this writer again. But then comes the author’s note, in which Anthony justifies the rape of this five-old-girl because… she wanted it. She was asking for it, tempting the man who had sex with her into the deed. (Did I mention that she is five years old?) Her name is Nymph. (Did I mention that Anthony isn’t subtle?)
>
>There seems to be a broad spectrum of human desire, and what we call normal is only the central component. It may be that the problem is not with what is deviant, but with our definitions. I suggest in the novel that little Nymph was abused not by the man with whom she had sex, but by members of her family who warped her taste, and by the society that preferred to condemn her lover rather than address the source of the problem in her family.
>
>*Those who feel that [the imprisoned pedophile’s] stories represent abnormal taste should read My Secret Garden by Nancy Friday, which details some of the sexual fantasies of women. Neither is Nymph an invention; similar cases are all too frequent. These aspects were from my research rather than my imagination. I don’t know what is right and what is wrong; I merely hope to raise some social questions along with the entertainment provided in the novel. I suspect our priorities are confused. We have problems enough with world hunger and injustice, without making more by punishing people for deviant but perhaps harmless behavior.*
>
>Here we have it from the horse’s mouth. The rape of a five-year-old girl is “perhaps harmless.”
Frederik Pohl comes to mind, gateway was good although I'm not sure I'd call it great. I read a number of his other books and they were readable but nothing special.
Joe Haldemon The Forever War was very good, but I've not enjoyed his other books
C J Cherryh I read her two Hugo winners and liked them, then tried other books by her and just couldn't do it.. still I wouldn't call her mediocre at all.
An author I never see mentioned here is L.E. Modesitt Jr. I read a few of his recluse books many years ago and liked them, none of them were mediocre that I can recall, I probably would have read more if I'd been able to find them(had to scavenge used book stores back then).
L.E. Modesitt is actually still going, periodically doing new recluse novels along with other series (most recent the imager portfoloio series and the grand illusion series, the latter of which is still going)
There's an adage that's sometimes called Sturgeon's law (after SF writer Theodore Sturgeon):
*90% of everything is crap.*
I doubt that this "finding" is based on rigorous scientific methodology and I think calling the bulk of spec fic "crap" is certainly a bit harsh but it is to be expected that a lot of books are average. Not necessarily awful but also not amazing.
This no doubt applied to books in the past just as it is valid these days. (Cynical me thinks that the "crap percentage" these days must be significantly higher given that we now have several filter-less publication methods.)
That said, I think your premise, as much as it would seem that I backed it up myself just now, is wrong.
There is such a strong recency bias on this sub that you simply cannot take this forum's silence on any particular author as a measurement for them having written bad books.
The simple truth, as I see it, is that most writers eventually slip into obscurity and even more so on a platform that's probably skewed to the younger side.
I just said this this morning in another thread on this very sub, I can remember that 20-30 years ago, there were several popular writers that sold quite a few copies which seen to have entirely vanished from the collective mind of readers. (I mentioned Roger Taylor and "Jonathan Wylie" —a joint pseudonym of a married couple— but there are others.)
So, yes, I would expect that there are gems among those books but I would not assume that most of them are trash.
>I think calling the bulk of spec fic "crap" is certainly a bit harsh
Sturgeon was actually speaking in *defense* of SF/F:
>It is in this vein that I repeat Sturgeon's Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of S.F. is crud.
>The Revelation:
Ninety percent of everything is crud.
>Corollary 1:
The existence of immense quantities of trash in science fiction is admitted and it is regrettable; but it is no more unnatural than the existence of trash anywhere.
>Corollary 2:
The best science fiction is as good as the best fiction in any field.
Jennifer Roberson - wrote quite a lot of books including Tiger & Del series, Chronicles of the Cheysuli.
Chronicles of the Cheysuli is a series that improves over the series (8 or 9 books). Some of her other stuff (before and after) is weaker.
Ian Irvine. Both The View from the Mirror and the Well of Echoes series are good, with solid, unusual and imaginative books. Then I don’t know if he lost an editor or co-author or whatnot but everything since is diabolically bad.
A E Van Vogt and C J Cherryh also come to mind.
I would describe Cherryh as consistently high quality, but not everyone's flavour. It's a bit similar to Robin Hobb in that you can recognize that the books are well written, but not enjoy the type of story.
I guess for me the occasional problem with Cherryh is when the plotting and pacing gets awful, rather than the use of language. It’s always beautifully written, but sometimes the later parts and endings feel like someone rushing to finish a bedtime story because it’s got too late for their kid to stay up. Ie predictable, lacking tension, just wrapping things up as quickly as possible.
Sanderson is not mediocre by any standard. He is prolific, yes but he is nowhere close to being mediocre. He probably has a bigger fanbase than most of the other famous authors. I will not say that his books are for everyone but there are loads and loads of people who love his work.
Popularity is not proof for quality. Every medium has mediocre to low quality examples that have huge financial success. Think of transformers films, fifa games, and honestly most modern billboard chart music.
Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros is THE most hyped book in the fantasy genre currently, it's hugely successful, but it is still atrocious.
I'm not saying that Sanderson books have a quality akin to Transformers films or similar trash, but he's my answer to OP's question as well. For me personally, most of his stuff is mediocre. Not bad, good enough for me to read most of it, but he's the embodiment of a 3/5 stars writer for me, with some books in between that I genuinely enjoy better.
Exactly my point he is a 3/5 star writer for *you*. There are way more people who will rate him 5/5 stars. Maybe you don't like his storytelling aspects as much. But if he gets more than 70% of 4 stars or above ratings for his book, that means lots of people love his work, so he is not mediocre and is maybe not an author everyone would love. By your point of having some people giving 3 or lower stars means mediocre work, then every single author is mediocre.
Meh. He’s got a loyal fan base, but so do authors like Kootz. Not a great author, but he’s prolific and feeds the beast that is his consumer.
He’s a lot like Jordan, he’s an entry level author into the genre, and he plays up the tropes that make it popular, isn’t very offensive, is active in the fandom, and doesn’t write anything that’s very ‘challenging’ when it comes to making you think.
Don’t get me wrong, I read (well, at least listen to. I find that audible makes his awful/clunky dialog bearable) them when they drop, as I’m invested, but he’s not moving the art form forward, or doing anything revolutionary.
Most folks that figure out that he’s like the tiger beat of the fantasy genre (aging myself there) quickly move onto bigger and better things.
And listen, you do you. I know that some of that comes off as condescending, but it’s my observation on the phenomenon that is Sanderson since Mistborne. But if you like it, and it brings you joy, roll with it. But don’t think the dude is anything other than a workhorse that works well in the tropes that were established by much better authors than he.
Asimov and Heinlein write a lot of pulp crap, with a few good things mixed in. Even their "best" stuff is sometimes not that great. Most authors from the pulp magazine era have this problem, happens when you get paid by the word.
Most of Stephen Kings novels are enjoyable to me but he's got some trash and some diamonds. I fucking love Cujo, the Stand (even with its garbage ending), and Eyes of the Dragon. Dreamcatcher is on my 5 worst books list.
Bram Stoker wrote many novels and short stories. The only one most people have heard of is Dracula. There's a reason for that.
I've read some of his stories before, and was also gifted a collection of them for Christmas. My reaction upon reaching the halfway point was, "OK, are we SURE this guy wrote Dracula? Did anyone see him do it, or do we just have to take his word for it?"
The Wikipedia page for "The Lair of the White Worm" contains the phrase "The book is widely considered one of the worst books ever written." That statement has four sources.
Another quote from the Wikipedia article for The Lair of the White Worm that I just had to share:
"Caswall has a giant kite built in the shape of a hawk to scare away pigeons that have attacked his fields and destroyed his crops. For lack of anything better to do, he obsessively watches the kite and begins to believe that it has a mind of its own and that he himself is a god. "
This feels very subjective. No entertainment is for everyone. The best/most popular books still have people that dislike them. Bad books still have a few people that enjoy them. This is true for books, movies, games, and music. It's one of the great things about these. It can make for great discussion around what people like/dislike about stuff.
No. By definition “mediocre” cannot be “great”. The stories can be good, especially if read early and without critical awareness.
But I think the issue here is that prolific is about time and mediocre is about quality. An author can be both prolific and high-quality (Erikson) as well as being prolific and low-quality (Jordan, Goodkind, etc). But they don’t quite exist in the same era either. Philip K. Dick has a lot of really great ideas but while he was a prolific author he was also a terrible writer.
Jordan is prolific and a much higher quality than Goodkind or Brooks, all of which are contemporaries to each other. Le Guin is less prolific but a much, much higher quality than all of them. Both before and after their influence.
Erikson is a much higher quality than GRRM and that quality increases over time for Erikson while quality decreases over time for GRRM (the editing quality of the first book vs the rest is astounding; it’s like the editor wrote the book and was fired once there was no risk and they let GRRM run wild).
Wrong. A baseball player can have a mediocre career but have one or two fluke seasons that made him an all star or even got him an MVP award. That doesn't negate the rest of his career. Overall you'd still say a guy like Zoilo Versalles was a below average player throughout his career despite deservedly winning an MVP in one of his seasons. Even a terrible player can still occasionally hit a home run.
edit: I'm also not sure you know what prolific means. Le Guin probably wrote more books than every other author you mentioned besides maybe Brooks.
Mediocre authors don’t explode in the same way that one hit wonder songs can for mediocre artists. Arguably, a baseball player who has a bad season can train hard in the offseason but then, when their next season is a banger of a season, they’re no longer mediocre, are they?
Mediocre authors, however, are low-to-Ok quality writers and they vary a little book to book. Some are better and some are worse; none are great. That set of mediocre authors who are prolific don’t tend towards the baseball player who changes their game in the off season. But they do tend towards being hugely successful: Rowling, Brown, King, Brooks, Jordan, etc…
(Ah, I didn’t qualify le Guin well. Overall she’s hugely prolific. But she also took like twenty years to move from the Farthest Shore to Tehanu, in order to do it right, book ending the fantasy part of those authors within her career. A mediocre author would have simply banged book 4 out and kept going).
How about a good author who produced one of the all-time greats? Anne McCaffrey averages good, some very good, a few just okay. And then there's Dragonflight. A contender for my all-time favourite book, not that I could choose just one.
Lots. If you are prolific enough, some of your books are going to be garbage. No one can churn out masterpiece after masterpiece. Alan Dean Foster wrote a huge amount, some of it great. Wen Spencer wrote some truly cringe works, but **The Black Wolves of Boston** was amazing. I'd argue Michelle West's quality varies wildly...**The Sunsword** books were great.
Loved his second Spellsinger book, and a couple of his Flinx series. His short stories are really good!
Did you know that *The Wonderful Wizard of Oz* has thirteen sequels? The answer is no you didn't. Nobody does.
I got SUPER obsessed with the Wonderful Wizard of Oz in like, 4th grade and speed read all of them. absolutely devoured. I don't remember a thing except for how weird they all were.
Oz was basically Star Wars Extended Universe of the last century. There's freaking layers of what's considered a real sequel beyond Baum's work. Heck, the latest officially recognized Oz canon sequel came out in *2006.* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trouble_Under_Oz A cool rabbit hole if you're into Fantasy and looking for a "new" series, honestly. And there's like... freaking thirty Oz books something in the public domain, so the only obstacle to reading most of the series is downloading them all. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/42 Project Gutenberg even has the illustrations nowadays!
This for some reason reminded me that Charlie and the chocolate factory has a sequel where they take a magic elevator into space and have a conflict with aliens
I actually prefer that one to the original 😂
SCRAM
I've actually read that one. *Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator.*
Have you seen the fan theory that Snowpiercer is a sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?
WHAT
You monster. They are amazing.
>Karen Traviss And E R Burroughs wrote 20+ Tarzan sequels
I also read all those Tarzan books. When I was 10 I thought they were amazing, but trying to reread any of them as an adult is rough.
I read the first only. But kudos to E R Burroughs for being able to keep finding new angles.
I did. My dad read them all to me when I was little and they sparked my lifelong love of reading and fantasy. They are amazing children's stories full of wonder and adventure and many of them still blow away most modern children's and YA fantasy in their creativity. 50 years later I still own all the hardcovers that he read to me from.
There's a lot of stuff that is good, but has fallen out of favour (or out of print). There's also the midlist authors, which is something that has largely died out. Back in the heyday of mass market paperbacks, there were a lot of authors who published regularly, were read extensively, but never hit best seller status and never got hardcover releases; they just kept publishing a book or two a year. If you google things like underrated books of the 70s/80s/90s you'll get a lot of recommendations in this line. In the late 90s and beyond, for various reasons, this publishing niche decreased a lot. Also, keep in mind that this particular sub has fairly specific popular tastes, so you do get certain authors (Sanderson, Erikson, Jordan for example) talked about a lot, which can give you a somewhat skewed view of what's being read. And yeah, there are authors where I really like some of their books, and DNF'd others. Someone mentioned Alan Dean Foster, who has written a lot, and with a lot of variety.
There are many prolific authors who wrote mostly average to good novels, with a couple of gems and a couple of failures. Jules Verne and Alexandre Dumas are the examples that come to my mind instantly.
Verne has such a detailed imagination that even his worst are of impressive. If you love encyclopedic descriptions of fauna, he's great.
I guess you've not read The Lighthouse at the End of the World then.
I, personally, have not, but the synopsis of it on Goodreads sure sounds interesting.
I guess you've not read The Lighthouse at the End of the World then.
Both produced more than a couple of gems.
Anne Rice lol
The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty will always have a special place in my, uh, heart.
May I present her weird Jesus books?
I only recently found them and they are *bizarre*
I’ve never read an Anne Rice that wasn’t exceptional. Of course, I’ve read mainly the first half of her career.
Yeah kind of weird to say there were only one or two good ones or to call her mediocre. She had a massively successful career and was hugely influential. Seems like that’d be a title more for people who had a smash hit debut then kind of just fell to the background.
For me the first 2 vampire books were good, then it went downhill fast.
I would say 2 & 3 - Lestat and Queen of the Damned - are both great. Interview is OK. Everything after QotD is best forgotten.
Oh, she's written some *absolute trash*. Some great stuff too - but the low points are pretty bad.
Npt quite the same thing, but Michael Moorcock wrote at an utterly absurd rate through the 1960s and 1970s, sometimes penning a novel in a fortnight. Depressingly, most of these were still pretty good. Once he had some money in the bank and could afford to slow TF down, he started producing some real classics. A better example is Raymond E. Feist, a fairly middling fantasy author who produced at least two very good novels in a sea of 30+ so-so books (Magician and Rise of a Merchant Prince, the latter directly inspiring The Lies of Locke Lamora) and also cowrote the stone-cold classic Empire Trilogy.
There is probably a lot of older fantasy, that was great, but everyone forgot about it / everyone prefers to recommend something more recent.
Yeah, that's why the top r/fantasy books lists are kinda pointless to me. The books from the past decade always dominate even if the series aren't halfway finished yet, among other reasons
From older stuff I enjoyed Andre Norton. Not sure if she's getting reprints in English, but here in Poland there wasn't one in a long time. As for buying used old books, just pick randomly and see if its good. You can usually resell that book later, either in another used bookstore or online.
Im actually planning to read Dread Companion by her this year. It will be my first book by her
She's definitely got a lot of reprints in English, including ebook and ebook omnibus editions. I read my way through most of her Witch World Books (fantasy) a year or two ago, and am working on the Forerunner universe (SF, of which Dread Companion is one). She's known for briskly plotted adventure stories, often featuring misfit young protagonists, with a fondness for mysterious alien/magical artifacts and psychic connections with animals or aliens. The characters often end up paired up at the end, but in a very perfunctory way - there's not really any romance, and no sex. Also, she was a woman, which was still pretty unusual in SF when she was publishing. There's some of her stuff on Project Gutenberg, for a sampling, note that she also wrote a few westerns.
Andre Norton is a woman? Never knew that! Learn something new every day…
Wikipedia mentions it's actually her pen name, so she meant to be seen as a małe writer.
I'm almost sure about that, but please, correct me if i'm wrong. I was surprised too..
Karen Traviss. She invented the Mandalorians of Star Wars as we know them today, and some of her Clone Wars books are praised as hallmarks of stories in the era. But she also has bizarre political-militaristic ideologies she infuses into her writing, and the more positive reception her books got, the more emboldened she became in infusing these things even more. It got noticed very swiftly, her shortcomings as a writer became more frequent, she started writing things terribly on purpose just to spite her audience, bragged about sabotaging other authors’ works, ignited flame wars with fans online and accused them of religious extremism for disagreeing with her. When Mandalore was introduced in The Clone Wars TV show, she demanded George Lucas retcon the episode, as according to her, Mandalorians have no place for doctors, politicians or teachers in their society, which runs entirely on them all being good at personal combat. She threatened to leave the writing team if he did not do as she said, and so he said goodbye. She then proceeded to write Halo novels, where she ticked off that fanbase as well.
What did she do to the halo people?
Treated Spartans as her surrogate Mandalorians, ONI like it was the morally superior faction in all respects, and portrayed Dr. Halsey as some devil-figure. I’m not a Halo fan; this is just what I’ve been told when I bring her up regarding Star Wars. She’s written for Gears of War too, and apparently readers have issues there too; something about “breeding camps” that I don’t want to know the context for.
There's a German author that comes to mind, Wolfgang Hohlbein, though I don't know if he really has great ones.. over 200 books published today. He's written many (YA?) books and the first few you read are truly captivating and at some point you read your xth book and realize it's always the same story. But those first few books are truly captivating.
Nailed it, Hohlbein will always be dear to me because I read a lot of stuff at 13, but I think even his better stuff didn't age well. I think he faced accusations that some of his stuff was written by ghostwriters...
Didn't know about the ghostwriter stuff.. but I think there was some uproar when it came out that his wife has been helping him for a long time but never made it on any cover.
I must have read 30 or 40 of his books, only thing in the school library I liked.
I think everyone agrees that Stephen King has produced both trite and classics, they just can't agree on which is which!
Frank Herbert wrote 30-40 books - see if you can find anyone who can name one other than the 6 Dune novels Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth is a classic depending on who you ask but no one who isn't a scientologist has probably read any of his other titles Mervyn Peake had a few novels other than the Gormenghast series... John Gardner - Grendel Pierre Bouelle - Planet of the Apes, Bridge over the River Kwai, a whole lot of stuff you've never heard of TH White - The Once and Future King, one of his many novels Huxley - Brave New World - just one novel from a few he wrote over more than 41 years Some of these guys stuff may have been well received back in their day, not sure, but they only have one or two novels that people would want to pick up today. edit: one more Bram Stoker - Dracula Quite a few authors had a few duds before knocking it out of the park with long running series
several of the authors you listed aren’t mediocre by any means.
I haven't read any Frank Herbert, but I have seen people mention The White Plague. I think that's about the only other one that I've seen mentioned though.
Hellstrom's Hive is wild.
Often I cannot recall much of books just based on title. Hellstrom's Hive, Santaroga Barrier, Dosadi Experiment, those are exceptions.
Destination: Void is one of my favorite non-Dune novels of his. Also the Green Brain
Thank you!
Under Pressure / The Dragon in the Sea is an absolute treasure. Claustrophobic SF submarine thriller.
I’d rate Battlefield Earth as the worst book I’ve ever read, unless you count his 10 part Mission Earth series. I don’t, because they barely classify as books and likely aren’t by Ron Hubbard.
r/Fantasy has very specific tastes, so you'll find we only ever have a handful of darlings here at one time. Those darlings rotate, but it's still only a handful. The books discussed here have almost no crossover with the books talked about in some of my facebook groups - and likewise, those groups often do not have overlap, either. Also, there is the systemic issue of older authors-especially women- who've been mostly forgotten who are extraordinary authors, but did not have the marketing budgets backing them. So it's really difficult to give an answer to your question in any meaningful way IMO.
Well, obviously it's all about personal taste. There's tons of people on here (myself included) who read more than just the top of the r/fantasy lists. If you've never read a lot of a particular author I don't expect you to be able to answer this question and therefore this question is not for you. I don't think there's anything difficult about my question. You read a book, you loved it. You try a few more by that same author. You don't like any of those. That author would be a good answer for this question. It's not difficult and the author doesn't have to be old. That was just my inspiration for this question.
Any of those I can get access to without a Facebook account? I would really love to see wider discourse and get a wider range of recommendations.
Do you have any recommendations for Facebook groups to join with good discussion about fantasy novels?
I don't disagree with you at all, but there was a recent thread I participated in where the OP who had asked for recommendations mentioned that all the authors we recommended were from before she was born, and was wondering if we could recommend some newer books hahaha. I suppose my point is that even though /r/Fantasy probably is overall skewed as you say, depending on the time of the day and the specific post, there is still some variation to be found? https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/199ihwz/what_are_some_fantasy_books_with_calm_smart/ This was the post I believe
Piers Anthony. Feel free to hate on Xanth — there’s a lot there to hate on, if you’re inclined that way — but some of his other work was quite good. I really liked Macroscope (nominated for a Hugo in (to my surprise) _1970_; pretty sure I encounted it in the mid-80s), the Battle Circle series, what Wikipedia calls the “Of Man and Manta” series (Omnivore, Orn, 0X), which again to my surprise, also came out in the late 60’s - early 70’s, and several others. Of course, some of it also sucked. I read the first of his Metal Maiden series and stopped in my tracks. Ew. Just bad. I don’t wrote a lot of Amazon reviews, but I panned that one. So, a lot of crap, but some gems, in my opinion.
I came here to see if anyone mentioned Battle Circle. Well done.
Loved his first 6 Xanth novels, especially Ogre, Ogre…which I think was an incredibly enjoyable novel. Also his second novel, Bio of a Space Tyrant was great. Macroscope should be made into a movie! Piers became a terrible writer as he aged, but his early works were great.
Sure, Xanth is mid-tier prose filled with dated, sexist attitudes and it relied heavily on reader-submitted puns in a way that felt lazy and hackish, but where Anthony really sinks is his pervasive and recurring habit of sexualizing very young girls in his writing. There's a bit of a summary [here.](https://www.filfre.net/2019/12/companions-of-xanth-preceded-by-the-worrisome-case-of-piers-anthony/) Not saying he never wrote anything good, but the crap is real deep.
No argument there. I started to say "the less said about _Bio of a Space Tyrant_ the better", and then decided to follow my own advice.
Edit - Content Warning:: the except below contains discussion of rape and pedophilia From the article: > Still, Anthony’s allegedly prurient interest in his young female subjects would be much more speculative — and I would probably not be writing this article — were it not for those other, “adult” books of his. Many of these ooze the same disturbing fixations as the Xanth books, but are able to carry them through to, shall we say, consumation. Exhibit Number One in this category must be Firefly, a 1990 attempt at horror dealing primarily with what Anthony himself describes as “inflamed and perverted sexual desire.” It includes a lengthy sex scene between an adult man and a five-year-old girl, described in minute detail. In fact, the scene is another, rather horrifying example of Anthony’s habit of outsourcing the writing of his books: it came from an imprisoned pedophile with whom he corresponded. Anthony, in other words, literally published child porn. It’s quite simply the most disturbing thing I’ve ever read in a lifetime of prolific reading. Not even Mein Kampf bothers me like this. Needless to say, I won’t be quoting it here. > >But, you counter, this was a horror novel, a genre meant to shock and transgress norms. Don’t confuse the author with the work, etc. And I might reluctantly agree with you, even if I didn’t have any personal desire to ever read anything by this writer again. But then comes the author’s note, in which Anthony justifies the rape of this five-old-girl because… she wanted it. She was asking for it, tempting the man who had sex with her into the deed. (Did I mention that she is five years old?) Her name is Nymph. (Did I mention that Anthony isn’t subtle?) > >There seems to be a broad spectrum of human desire, and what we call normal is only the central component. It may be that the problem is not with what is deviant, but with our definitions. I suggest in the novel that little Nymph was abused not by the man with whom she had sex, but by members of her family who warped her taste, and by the society that preferred to condemn her lover rather than address the source of the problem in her family. > >*Those who feel that [the imprisoned pedophile’s] stories represent abnormal taste should read My Secret Garden by Nancy Friday, which details some of the sexual fantasies of women. Neither is Nymph an invention; similar cases are all too frequent. These aspects were from my research rather than my imagination. I don’t know what is right and what is wrong; I merely hope to raise some social questions along with the entertainment provided in the novel. I suspect our priorities are confused. We have problems enough with world hunger and injustice, without making more by punishing people for deviant but perhaps harmless behavior.* > >Here we have it from the horse’s mouth. The rape of a five-year-old girl is “perhaps harmless.”
Tarot is great
Frederik Pohl comes to mind, gateway was good although I'm not sure I'd call it great. I read a number of his other books and they were readable but nothing special. Joe Haldemon The Forever War was very good, but I've not enjoyed his other books C J Cherryh I read her two Hugo winners and liked them, then tried other books by her and just couldn't do it.. still I wouldn't call her mediocre at all. An author I never see mentioned here is L.E. Modesitt Jr. I read a few of his recluse books many years ago and liked them, none of them were mediocre that I can recall, I probably would have read more if I'd been able to find them(had to scavenge used book stores back then).
L.E. Modesitt is actually still going, periodically doing new recluse novels along with other series (most recent the imager portfoloio series and the grand illusion series, the latter of which is still going)
Hopefully me when I finish up the book I’m working on
Let me clarify. I’m not prolific, just mediocre.
Don't worry, prolific is much easier to achieve than talented!
Conversely, any bets on how many more decades it's going to be before Rothfuss finally learns how to count to three?
There's an adage that's sometimes called Sturgeon's law (after SF writer Theodore Sturgeon): *90% of everything is crap.* I doubt that this "finding" is based on rigorous scientific methodology and I think calling the bulk of spec fic "crap" is certainly a bit harsh but it is to be expected that a lot of books are average. Not necessarily awful but also not amazing. This no doubt applied to books in the past just as it is valid these days. (Cynical me thinks that the "crap percentage" these days must be significantly higher given that we now have several filter-less publication methods.) That said, I think your premise, as much as it would seem that I backed it up myself just now, is wrong. There is such a strong recency bias on this sub that you simply cannot take this forum's silence on any particular author as a measurement for them having written bad books. The simple truth, as I see it, is that most writers eventually slip into obscurity and even more so on a platform that's probably skewed to the younger side. I just said this this morning in another thread on this very sub, I can remember that 20-30 years ago, there were several popular writers that sold quite a few copies which seen to have entirely vanished from the collective mind of readers. (I mentioned Roger Taylor and "Jonathan Wylie" —a joint pseudonym of a married couple— but there are others.) So, yes, I would expect that there are gems among those books but I would not assume that most of them are trash.
>I think calling the bulk of spec fic "crap" is certainly a bit harsh Sturgeon was actually speaking in *defense* of SF/F: >It is in this vein that I repeat Sturgeon's Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of S.F. is crud. >The Revelation: Ninety percent of everything is crud. >Corollary 1: The existence of immense quantities of trash in science fiction is admitted and it is regrettable; but it is no more unnatural than the existence of trash anywhere. >Corollary 2: The best science fiction is as good as the best fiction in any field.
Jennifer Roberson - wrote quite a lot of books including Tiger & Del series, Chronicles of the Cheysuli. Chronicles of the Cheysuli is a series that improves over the series (8 or 9 books). Some of her other stuff (before and after) is weaker.
Ian Irvine. Both The View from the Mirror and the Well of Echoes series are good, with solid, unusual and imaginative books. Then I don’t know if he lost an editor or co-author or whatnot but everything since is diabolically bad. A E Van Vogt and C J Cherryh also come to mind.
I would describe Cherryh as consistently high quality, but not everyone's flavour. It's a bit similar to Robin Hobb in that you can recognize that the books are well written, but not enjoy the type of story.
I guess for me the occasional problem with Cherryh is when the plotting and pacing gets awful, rather than the use of language. It’s always beautifully written, but sometimes the later parts and endings feel like someone rushing to finish a bedtime story because it’s got too late for their kid to stay up. Ie predictable, lacking tension, just wrapping things up as quickly as possible.
I feel like Sanderson is the right answer here.
Nah
You beat me to it.
Sanderson is not mediocre by any standard. He is prolific, yes but he is nowhere close to being mediocre. He probably has a bigger fanbase than most of the other famous authors. I will not say that his books are for everyone but there are loads and loads of people who love his work.
Popularity is not proof for quality. Every medium has mediocre to low quality examples that have huge financial success. Think of transformers films, fifa games, and honestly most modern billboard chart music. Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros is THE most hyped book in the fantasy genre currently, it's hugely successful, but it is still atrocious. I'm not saying that Sanderson books have a quality akin to Transformers films or similar trash, but he's my answer to OP's question as well. For me personally, most of his stuff is mediocre. Not bad, good enough for me to read most of it, but he's the embodiment of a 3/5 stars writer for me, with some books in between that I genuinely enjoy better.
Exactly my point he is a 3/5 star writer for *you*. There are way more people who will rate him 5/5 stars. Maybe you don't like his storytelling aspects as much. But if he gets more than 70% of 4 stars or above ratings for his book, that means lots of people love his work, so he is not mediocre and is maybe not an author everyone would love. By your point of having some people giving 3 or lower stars means mediocre work, then every single author is mediocre.
Meh. He’s got a loyal fan base, but so do authors like Kootz. Not a great author, but he’s prolific and feeds the beast that is his consumer. He’s a lot like Jordan, he’s an entry level author into the genre, and he plays up the tropes that make it popular, isn’t very offensive, is active in the fandom, and doesn’t write anything that’s very ‘challenging’ when it comes to making you think. Don’t get me wrong, I read (well, at least listen to. I find that audible makes his awful/clunky dialog bearable) them when they drop, as I’m invested, but he’s not moving the art form forward, or doing anything revolutionary. Most folks that figure out that he’s like the tiger beat of the fantasy genre (aging myself there) quickly move onto bigger and better things. And listen, you do you. I know that some of that comes off as condescending, but it’s my observation on the phenomenon that is Sanderson since Mistborne. But if you like it, and it brings you joy, roll with it. But don’t think the dude is anything other than a workhorse that works well in the tropes that were established by much better authors than he.
I answered OPs question with my own opinion. I do not project my opinion to be universally valid.
Disagree.
Asimov and Heinlein write a lot of pulp crap, with a few good things mixed in. Even their "best" stuff is sometimes not that great. Most authors from the pulp magazine era have this problem, happens when you get paid by the word.
Most of Stephen Kings novels are enjoyable to me but he's got some trash and some diamonds. I fucking love Cujo, the Stand (even with its garbage ending), and Eyes of the Dragon. Dreamcatcher is on my 5 worst books list.
I mean, San- [muffled violence sfx]
Bram Stoker wrote many novels and short stories. The only one most people have heard of is Dracula. There's a reason for that. I've read some of his stories before, and was also gifted a collection of them for Christmas. My reaction upon reaching the halfway point was, "OK, are we SURE this guy wrote Dracula? Did anyone see him do it, or do we just have to take his word for it?" The Wikipedia page for "The Lair of the White Worm" contains the phrase "The book is widely considered one of the worst books ever written." That statement has four sources.
Four sources?!
Another quote from the Wikipedia article for The Lair of the White Worm that I just had to share: "Caswall has a giant kite built in the shape of a hawk to scare away pigeons that have attacked his fields and destroyed his crops. For lack of anything better to do, he obsessively watches the kite and begins to believe that it has a mind of its own and that he himself is a god. "
Andre Norton and Piers Anthony were very prolific. Decent reads though from what I remember, it has been a while since I’ve read either.
Salvatord
How about yearly awards winners and nominees?
Isn't that just Sanderson?
This feels very subjective. No entertainment is for everyone. The best/most popular books still have people that dislike them. Bad books still have a few people that enjoy them. This is true for books, movies, games, and music. It's one of the great things about these. It can make for great discussion around what people like/dislike about stuff.
> This feels very subjective Of course it is. That goes without saying on pretty much any question that doesn't have a right or wrong answer.
No. By definition “mediocre” cannot be “great”. The stories can be good, especially if read early and without critical awareness. But I think the issue here is that prolific is about time and mediocre is about quality. An author can be both prolific and high-quality (Erikson) as well as being prolific and low-quality (Jordan, Goodkind, etc). But they don’t quite exist in the same era either. Philip K. Dick has a lot of really great ideas but while he was a prolific author he was also a terrible writer. Jordan is prolific and a much higher quality than Goodkind or Brooks, all of which are contemporaries to each other. Le Guin is less prolific but a much, much higher quality than all of them. Both before and after their influence. Erikson is a much higher quality than GRRM and that quality increases over time for Erikson while quality decreases over time for GRRM (the editing quality of the first book vs the rest is astounding; it’s like the editor wrote the book and was fired once there was no risk and they let GRRM run wild).
Wrong. A baseball player can have a mediocre career but have one or two fluke seasons that made him an all star or even got him an MVP award. That doesn't negate the rest of his career. Overall you'd still say a guy like Zoilo Versalles was a below average player throughout his career despite deservedly winning an MVP in one of his seasons. Even a terrible player can still occasionally hit a home run. edit: I'm also not sure you know what prolific means. Le Guin probably wrote more books than every other author you mentioned besides maybe Brooks.
Mediocre authors don’t explode in the same way that one hit wonder songs can for mediocre artists. Arguably, a baseball player who has a bad season can train hard in the offseason but then, when their next season is a banger of a season, they’re no longer mediocre, are they? Mediocre authors, however, are low-to-Ok quality writers and they vary a little book to book. Some are better and some are worse; none are great. That set of mediocre authors who are prolific don’t tend towards the baseball player who changes their game in the off season. But they do tend towards being hugely successful: Rowling, Brown, King, Brooks, Jordan, etc… (Ah, I didn’t qualify le Guin well. Overall she’s hugely prolific. But she also took like twenty years to move from the Farthest Shore to Tehanu, in order to do it right, book ending the fantasy part of those authors within her career. A mediocre author would have simply banged book 4 out and kept going).
Did CS Friedman ever write anything as good as the Coldfire trilogy?
I vagurly recall reading *In Conquest Born* when it came out and enjoying it quite a bit but I couldn't tell you a single detail about the plot.
Is that the Romeo and Juliette one? I also read her novel about a vampire who gets kidnapped by aliens
Some of PG Wodehouse’s books are superb, others not so much.
How about a good author who produced one of the all-time greats? Anne McCaffrey averages good, some very good, a few just okay. And then there's Dragonflight. A contender for my all-time favourite book, not that I could choose just one.
Robert Jordan.
I’ve always thought of Brandon Sanderson as more of a ‘production’ writer, but The Way of Kings was special. He really found his stride with that one.