f13.net

Robert Jordan died, Sept 16.

All of the usual fan sites are getting hammered right now.    The series will now go unfinished.. which some might argue was going to be the case anyway.

Perhaps some other author will pick it up and finish it for us.  I imagine many fans want closure (ANY sort of closure).

Hell, it cant be THAT hard to come up with a decent finish for the thing.

Fucker should have eaten more salads. He owed it to me. Fucker.

Sad to see him go, but this is why you finish your life's work while you're still alive.

Man, I know a lot of people who are going to be pisssssssssssssssssssssssed come tomorrow.

Rumour has it that he picked out who he wanted to write the last book for him, before he died, and that the vast majority of the required material is available. Time will tell, i suppose.

I'm sooooooo glad I gave up on that series a long time ago.

Not to speak ill of the dead, but I can't imagine whoever he hand picked to finish the series being a worse writer than he was.

In an unprecedented turn of events, Robert Jordan picked a 12-year old illiterate child from Bratislava to finish his series. His last words were, "You'll never forget me now, suckers."

Not to troll, but who?

That unbelievable bastard.  He just jumped past George Lucas on my list.

Kevin

J.

Anderson

Dude.  The Young Jedi Knights books were good fun.
Now if you want bad, pretty much 2/3rds of the women writing fantasy and horror, because its more like bad fanfic porn than actual stories. 
I swear every month the Sci Fi Bookclub gets infested with more obvious fantasy and horror porn, usually with a side order of pretty guys doin each other in between the spunky heroine with a cool concept for a story.. UNTIL A MYSTERIOUS MAN SHOWS UP AND SEX HAPPENS SOONER THAN LATER.

Argh.

And I guess I am glad I quit Wheel of Time in the middle of book 8 or so.  Ok the middle of the prologue which by that point was about 100 pages. 
My sympathies to his family though.
And a giant FUCK YOU to the assholes in the Navy who said the series was really good back in the mid 90s.  I should have known people willing to spend 100 bucks for a Magic card and who thought PKing in AD&D was fun weren't people to trust for book advice..

Kevin J Anderson is the worst writer in the world.

Good luck with that.

Sorry Ironwood, but that prize goes to the author of the book below:

(http://www.wizards.com/global/images/products_dlnovel_083340000_lgpic.jpg)

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I don't know about the writer picking part, but I do know about the required material from my fandom days back in the 90s.   Jordan, while slow as fuck as a writer, mentioned numerous times that he kept extensive notes and journals about the WoT series.  Things like how the whole magic system worked, who was really a darkfriend and their motivations, blah blah blah.  No idea how detailed they were, but the ras-fwj folks from those days seemed to feel they were pretty damn detailed and they were as hardcore as a fan could get. He also (supposedly) had the ending written/ sketched-out before he even started the series, it was just a problem GETTING THERE.

I can't feel too bad for him (or the still hardcore fans) on that bit.  It was obvious he was burned-out around book 6, and here we are at almost 12 books now.  The time between kept getting longer and longer and the cast list did the same as events were forced instead of just 'going with the flow' as it were.

On the topic of bad writers, Kevin J may be bad, but he was far better than Barbara Hambly, Kathy Tyers or Vonda McIntyre when I subjected myself to them.

Only Piers Anthony can pick up where Jordan left off. He's already proven with Xanth that he has the ability to write an unending series where each book is perceptibly worse than the book before it.

He does also have a good chunk of the last book already written or dictated via voice recorder during these last few months.   So the last book will eventually be finished by a ghost writer and published.

Yeah; he knew this might happen and planned for it, the book is pretty well documented. It's not like Frank Herbert and the chapterhouse abomination.

It's a shame he didn't make it; though I didn't really like him personally (I've chatted at book signings), I do admire his work. It's a shame the series slowed down in the middle, I think he took exposition a little too far, and I hear the latest two books picked up the pace some.

That's sad. I was in a dollar store over the weekend and saw Book 10 in hardcover. So I bought it. For a fucking dollar, why not? I've read through the first 4 and enjoyed them, and have through book 6 or 7 in hardcover, which I plan on reading eventually. But I could tell even in book 4 that shit was starting to get stale, especially with the female characters.

If George RR Martin ends up being the guy who finishes it, my head may exploded.

Part of me says "Well, whomever he picked to finish it will have all the notes and since he's trying to finish someone's legacy, will work swiftly to bring the story to a close." And then part of me says "Whoa....the Wheel of Time gravy-train comes to a fucking END when he's done -- he'll drag it out more".

I never read the last book. I have it sitting around somewhere, but frankly I just don't have the heart. I know it'll be like 500 pages of nothing happening, 200 pages of pissed off women, and 100 pages of plot movement.

Thing is, we've already SEEN the ending. It was the very first fucking pages of the very first book. He's practially hammered us over the head with it in all the books I've read. WHEEL of time, as in circle as in shit happens again and again and again. Rand breaks the world all over again, becomes the big bad guy Shadow and the cycle starts anew.

This is very disappointing. 

I started rereading WoT a little while back.  When I moved to my new house, I lost every book but 8 & 9.  I remember previously stalling out on 9 and it's 70+ page prologue.  I'm up to 6 right now, and I can safely say this is where the books start going downhill.  Up to this point it's been very enjoyable and I've understood the books a lot better this time around (I think I may have read them a bit too hastily the first time).  He just gets bogged down with the gals in the book and every chapter focusing on a female character is usually 100% shit.  The character motivations are starting to get to me also.  For large expanses, no one's actions make any sort of sense. 

Blah (if you start focusing on the negatives in WoT, you'll never lack finding more), despite this, I was determined to get caught up.  I'm not sure anymore.  I may finish 6 (nearly done), but after that I'll likely hold off on repurchasing 7 until I hear the series is done. I'm just not really up to slogging through 9 and 10, which I hear are extremely vile, if there's not going to even be a badly written payoff. 

It's too bad he died.

I just finished re-reading the entire series over the last two years or so.  The last book published was actually not horrible if still not as good as the first 4.  Sure, we all know that everything is a cycle in these stories and Rand was doomed from the outset.  Heck, Rand knows he's doomed from the outset and alludes to breaking the world again at least once.

I have no more vitriol for Jordan, he started off strong and got in over his head.  I imagine that if he had been stronger physically his books may have had more force of direction and the middle-end books probably are as much a reflection of his own mental state as anything else.

Hopefully, the wheel doesn't try and spit him out again in Tibet, the Chinese would probably try and pull another bait and switch and the story will end with a glorious peoples uprising led by the serving women as they sniff, snort and hair pull their way to world dominance.

I'm pretty sure I read in an interview with him that his wife is going to finish it, she has also been his editor for all the other books.

Actually, the last book was quite good, as far as his writing goes. My impression upon reading it was that he had actually hired a proper editor (not his wife) at some point before publishing it. Plus, you know, stuff really DOES happen.

Is the 12th (unfinished) supposed to be the last?

I have the first 8, but like was stated earlier in the thread, around #6 or so, the series really started to turn stale, and it just seemed like Jordan was dragging it out just for the sake of extending an epic saga… …never did finish the 8th one, it's like half way read still…

Supposedly it was going to be extremely long, but Jordan had planned on finishing up with the next book.  Mostly because he knew he wouldn't have time for another one.

Just read the 90 page book summaries and save yourself a ton of time. I enjoyed them better than reading the middle books themselves

Nope. Six ages (or five, or some shit).

They make a circle -- so whatever the NEXT age is, isn't like that last one. And sooner or later, it has to go back with the Satan-guy back in his cage (with no hole, mind you) for at least an Age or two so people forget about him.

They made that point early on -- if there's a patch in his cage, if he's got flunkies around, people will remember he's there no matter what. Only when he's 100% sealed up with no influence will people forget, leading to a bunch of idiots drilling a hole into his cage and letting him loose.

So whatever the hell Rand does -- which could include another breaking, leading to total loss of civilization and savagery -- won't cycle back like that. Rand's the Fisher King guy -- a forgotten reference in a game that was old and forgotten on the previous cycle.

(Which leads me right back to "When the hell did Terry Brooks decide to link his "Running with the Demon" books with his "Shannara" books?")

I think everyone but his most rabid fans made peace with the series a long time ago. I would like to see it end, but I have already gone through being annoyed that it never will and into acceptance.

Rand needs a face-off with Drizzt.

I'd rather not see it end... Re-release book the first book and change all the characters names! I mean it's the wheel of friggin time, it's keeps rolling...

I will see that and raise you this-

(http://ec1.images-amazon.com/images/I/51RTzJdz47L._AA240_.jpg)


Sorry to hear about Jordan. The first 6 books were so good (6 slipped, but Dumai's Wells made up for it. Definitely my favorite scene in the whole series, methinks), and the rest so frustrating, but I was invested in the story and wanted an ending. However, I think a decent writer with Jordan's notes, etc. could make it happen, and NOT leave me reading 400 pages about dresses and women who sniff and cross their arms under their breast every 5 goddamned seconds.

OH SNAP.

Forgot about Salvatore.

I weep.

Are you referring to Chapterhouse itself?  Because aside from the cliffhanger ending, I still thought it was pretty good.  Or do you mean the multiple abominations spewed out by Kevin J. Anderson afterwards?

Oh come on, at least the Canticle was decent....mostly.

I'm referring to chapterhouse itself, which I thought he had only half-written before he died. According to wikipedia he actually completed writing it before he died. While our opinions may vary, I feel it was by far the weakest out of all of the dune books and so boring I couldn't even get through it (which is saying quite a lot.)

When I die, the final chapters of my thirty volume fantasy epic will spread through the Internet borne by aggressive computer malware. With any luck, I'll be published before that happens.

I'd help write it, as long as I could amuse myself by first encrpyting it with 448-bit Blowfish, and then causing the virus to randomly spew segments of the ciphertext as it mutates and runs amuck, so that to get the entire ciphertext you have to deliberately infect countless computers, and then spend years trying to crack it, and then put the key up for sale on Ebay.

You're so vain.

[ack, nevermind]

I know, it wasn't a very good joke. I really wanted to work in the Carly Simon auction and allusion to that stupid song somehow.

Piers Anthony, Foul Scribe of Hades and probable insane pedophile, has no interest whatsoever in writing about anything that does not involve twelve year-olds giving people pany shots. I've never read any of the WoT books, but if you want the "Time" part of the title to mean the "time" of puberty when vaguely erotic references to little girl's underwear are interesting instead of batfuck creepy, Piers is your man.

I forget which book it was when I gave up (probably 7, from the arc others are describing).  It was when he re-introduced Mazrim Taim and then *yet another* Aes Sedai conspiracy to destroy Rand and company that I realized that he was completely incapable of tying off a plot thread and leaving it tied, that he was going to aimlessly snarl them until either he got bored of it and severed them all by declaring the final battle, or he died.  I mean, if even making a character *thoroughly* dead isn't enough to end their arc, you're playing tennis without the net.  I see he went for door number 2.

--Dave

I actually started reading the series when the 9th one had just came out. I bought it by mistake and than had to buy the 1 through 8 so I won't feel bad. I got hooked, and while I agree that the waiting is fucking awful (2 for something  like 7 years. Come on.) and the writing can be pretty shitty at times I still like it. And let's face it, I prefer his style to OMG MARTIN TEH AWESOME - fight, fuck, fight, fuck, kill off a character that you followed the last 400 pages, fight, fuck. 

The depth is what keeps me coming back to WoT, I must have read the whole lot like 3 or 4 times. Stuff that happened 5 books ago finally untying before your eyes can be quite cool. I hope someone finishes it, stuff really started to pick up in the last one. If someone has stopped at the 10th (which was a fucking waste of 700 pages, god) definitely pick up number 11.

So, you only read 'Game of Thrones' eh? And, if that's all you got out of it, then you didn't really even read that.

I got to book 6, 'Lord of Chaos', read about half of that, then donated all my WoT books to the local library.

I believe I've read 3. And that applies to at least 2 of them. Of course it's an oversimplification and exaggeration but so is all the mention of shuffling of skirts and frowning women.

You know, I've read alot of early Piers stuff (mid 90s or so) and I don't remember any of this stuff people talk about now. I keep wondering if something happened around the time I stopped reading his stuff.

90's isn't early Piers Anthony.  60's is early.

dead on, I was thinking this from book 5 on but I still managed to read them all.  I believe the last book I read was so fragmented that each chapter seemed to be dedicated to a different PoV.  I hate when books split the main characters up because I am inevitably hooked on one storyline and bored by the other.  I can see why many of you dislike his writing but I personally thought the man was a genius and if LoTRO had been Wheel of Time Online I would probably be playing it even with the crappy game engine.  

Don't get me wrong I think LoTR is by far the better series and have read through that tale many more times than anything Jordan has written.  I just think that the world Jordan created would make for a far more interesting game.

It's when I stopped reading. I read from the very first Xanth novel through the next 10 or so, then most of the incarnations of immortaility. And the blue adept stuff. I read the first book of the fractal node series but that's when I stopped. So....still kinda curious how I missed all the pedophile stuff. Maybe I read the wrong books. Or since, most of them I read, I read in the 80s when I was in my mid-teens I just didn't think about it or something.

That's about when I stopped reading him too. He just annoyed the hell out of me by taking really interesting ideas like Incarnations of Immortality, starting off strong and then wrecking them. I have no idea where the pedophilia accusations are coming from.

It started getting REALLY FLAMINGLY OBVIOUS right about the time you stopped reading, I think. The fractal mode stuff had some, but pretty minor. The Xanth book's were often from children's PoV, so he could hide it. But then he came out with shit like Firefly or whatever it was called, and things went downhill from there.

It's not uncommon -- Heinlein was all about group marriage, polyamory, and such by the end of his career. Jack Chalker was obsessed with forced transgender themes (strange how they all ended up loving being a woman or a man in the end). Anthony, of course, got into the fringes of pedophilia. Stephen King is just a twsited fuck in general, and Dean Koontz likes to pretend he's a really awesome, but mild-mannered, ex-Navy Seal with extra doses of fucking awesome.

I have never been able to make it entirely through a Piers Anthony novel, so you are stronger than me. Firefly was just one of the saddest pieces of shit I've ever read. I tried reading the first Incarnations book and couldn't make it 60 pages. His writing style is just so bad, it's like I'm being spattered by the geek spittle from that lispy, fat Comic Book Guy motherfucker every time I pick up the book.

Okay so a few suggestions of authors who can continue the trend of every Jordan book being worse than the last while never actually ending the story have been made.  How about we switch over to authors who might be able to save the series?

I'm voting for Modesitt, he would hate the job but the guy knows how to tell a story without it becoming a 12 volume run on sentence. 

Maybe it would be easier if we let him start rewriting at book 5 or so.

Piers Anthony's work up until the 90's played with symbolism in interesting, if sometimes ham-handed ways (I realize how pretentious that sounds).  But yeah, after "Being a Green Mother", he seemed to get hooked on finding ways to justify old men desiring and being desired by young girls in ways that were just fucking *creepy*.  Doing it once is exploration of the story potential, doing it twice is reprisal, doing it at least once in every damned book is either a cry for help or the literary equivalent of one pocket full of candy, the other with no lining, and a rusted out van with tinted windows and curtains.  And given the demographic of the Xanth series....

--Dave

I find Modesitt's books to be enjoyable reading, but....   He likes to milk the hell out of a novel concept while retelling the same story as well.  How many Recluce books are there now?  I petered out after the 7th or 8th.

You know, I remember reading Piers Anothony's first two Incarnations of Immortality books in high school and rather enjoying them for what they were.  The pervy stuff is news to me, too.

pedo-Phil approves.

I bet Raymond Feist could finish the Jordan books. His universe is at least as detailed as Jordan's and he's successfully written several multi-book series in it. He definitely has the discipline to do it up right.  It'll never happen of course.

To be fair, I picked up the latest Jordan when it came out in paperback a couple of months ago and it really wasn't bad at all. I wasn't once tempted to throw it across the room.

But at least the Recluce books move *on*.  And each sub-series is fairly self-contained, you can read one of them out of sequence without being lost.  The whole thing ground on too long for me as well, but it was in a "I'm not going to start the next trilogy" way, not a "I put that book down half-read 3 months ago, and don't want to start again" way.  And definitely not a "throw it in the fireplace and try to scrub the memory of it out of my head" way.

--Dave

I haven't ready anything by Piers Anthony in probably close to 20 years, so specific examples are going to be hard for me to cite. Most of the stuff in Xanth and the more mainstream stuff I'd read was limited to preteen girls having their panties oggled and the magic of girls panties. As time went on and/or I aged from 6th grade into high school, the panty crap became more forced and creepily rambling regarding the power of little girl panties. Some of his other series like Tyrant and I think Mode had old men flat out fucking little girls, but it was okay because the little girls started it. The very last think by him I read was some completely fucked short story about some old man living with/having guardianship of some elementary school girl. I vaguely remember some crap about her not wearing panties with her skirt for easier sex because in the future, mankind had advanced to the point where people were no longer penalized for engaging in what are perfectly natural victimless acts like teachers fucking preteen girls. I vaguely recall the little girl making toast and then calling the old man a "Silly" while she climbed up on his lap and seduced him by grinding her cooch onto his johnson. Seriously, as I remember it, it was so fucking vile and over the top that I vowed to never read anything by him again and tried to block it out.

AS was stated before, exploring the subject once is one thing, shoehorning it into everything you write to one degree or another points to some inner sketchiness. I'd even read an inteview with him where the subject of "Hey, what's with all the old men fucking little girls in your books" came up. He went into some batshit crazy ramble about how he wet his bed into his teens or some shit.

Fuck off. Chapter House was better than... Children, for Example. I'd almost go so far as to say that Chapter House is more interesting than most of them, with Dune and Dune Messiah clearly ahead (and even then, it's really only Dune itself that matter).

And I must admit, hack or no, I still have a soft spot for Salvatore (I only read one of his books, once, but it was fun at the time - I was 9 or so..) at least he's a fully fledge hack rather than an superbly abysmal 'writer'.

Feist could write for Jordan insofar as any shitty writer can write a shitty conclusion to a shitty series.. (Magician doesn't count because Feist wasn't a 'writer' when he did that)

angry bob really has me wanting to go back and re-read some of the piers anthony stuff i read back in grade / highschool.

I mean, i read probably the first 15 or so xanth books, owned the full Incarnations of immortality series, read the Magician series (the one where there was an overlapped Magic world / Sci-fi world where you could only pass from one to the other if your duplicate from the other side was dead) and seem to recall reading at least 2 or 3 one off stories, and I cant honestly recall ever running into the rampant depictions of underage sex Bob speaks of. 

Maybe i was just too young to recognise it (though somehow i doubt that) or maybe it was just so long ago i have forgotten.

I mean, heck, the most i remember about xanth was the entire series was just a haven for bizzare puns and the like.  Hell, the ONLY sex reference that sticks in my mind was his running gag with the "adult conspiracy", and how adults were covering up what REALLY happens during sex events by having the involved characters just get closer, and closer, and suddenly .........

Reading the Xanth stuff would be a waste of time as it's all just talking about panties as far as I know. Read the Space tyrant series for the outright fucking a little girl. But that doesn't count because she initiated it. Still, some of it was a little weird reading it as an adolescent - I bet it would hit you like a hammer as an adult.

Actually, read everything he's written and I think that the only book of his I read that didn't at least mention little girl's junk was the book about a space prostodontist. The degree varies from book to book, but it's shoehorned into almost every single one that I can think of. If you doubt it, I dare you to read as many of his books as you want and whenever he mentions preteen panties, adults having engaging in sexual activity with a minor, or expressing thoughts that would fit in with the Super Adventure Club, you have to mail me a hundred dollar bill.

"Those books are yucky and full of pedophilia!  I know because I've read every single one a million times each!"

What?

See, I read the space tyrant series (all except the first one I think) and remember two things: Enjoying the hell out of the politics, and alot of sex.But I still don't remember the kid sex.

As for the girl panties stuff in Xanth, I don't really remember that either.

Reread it. It's there.

It's in every single Xanth book that has a young female character. It gets more blatant and creepy as the series goes on. Hell, it's such a running theme the 15th book is titled "The Color of Her Panties" and has a bizarrely overwritten section where the young female characters try on panty after panty after panty.

They do? Every book I read in 4(?) different series all seemed to be "these Supermen are in charge because they give their lives if/when/or/mabye/never some invader will come to take over the poor slobs who wouldn't notice any difference on who's in charge".

But that's from reading books out of order perhaps.

I read the phaze/adept series (the alternate magic/tech world switching thing with the blue adept) recently and I don't recall any underage sex in it but there was a lot of nudity, unicorn sex, and robot sex.

I think that was the slashdot interview. I thought the question came out of left field, myself, though I do vaguely recall a section of the mode series referenced with the girl being 16-17 and not understanding what the big deal was with this arbitrary 'this is ok, this bad' magic 18. And ignoring it, of course.

I'm trying to remember if it was in the incarnations of imortality series.. I don't recall. Anyway, I think Xanth is trash and I never bothered.

Eh, Recluse is as much of a dead end time waste of nothing happening as the WoT stuff is.

Are we reading the same books?

Frankly, the Recluce books are cyclic for a reason -- the whole concept of Balance of Order and Chaos forces things to, well, balance. Each book starts with an imbalance of one side creating a focus on the other side, and how things get back into balance.

It varies a lot, though -- chronologically, the first pair deal with Cyador -- former high-tech colonists based on Chaos as they exhaust the last of their high-tech. The second pair  deal with the landing of the Angels (high-tech stuck in a low-tech world) and the establishment of the foundations of Order, and the destruction of Cyador. After that, you end up with competing Order/Chaos sets, until Lerrin comes along and gets rid of the bulk of Order and Chaos, freeing the place up for the development of technology.

As far as fantasy goes, I liked some for showing a high-tech culture trying to adapt to low-tech with strange 'magic'. Another set for showing the "hero" not to be a hero because of powerful wizardry, but application of knowledge and skill (engineering). I liked the Chaos-sided bookes because they got rid of the "Chaos = bad, Order = good" bit.

His Corean chronicles are pretty good, especially if you're found of cavalry battles. :)

She is 14. As for the Space Tyrant series I was literally in Jr High when I read it, maybe early high school so, it's been 2 decades. So, yeah, I probably just don't remember. In hindsight I do remember panty stuff in Xanth but since the whole series was silly I didn't think much of it.

Let's see, Bio of a Space Tyrant...I seem to recall volume 1 having pirates raping and killing the refugees, probable incest between Hope and his sister, and wasn't there a girl who was basically the property of some old pedophile, until she got too old for his tastes?

Yup, no twisted sex here :P

There was some native american book that he wrote that I have cleansed from my memory so I don't recall the title but there was a WHOLE lot of underaged sex in that one.  Bio of a space tyrant had underaged sex, underaged gang rape/torture and what not. I could not read past the halfway point into that book. It is the only book I have ever picked up that I refused to finish.

Don't read David Wingrove then kids. Unless you want to read some mildly interesting SF with a whole lot of incest and snuff sadism...

Wow, I forgot about Wingrove.  I admit that I really enjoyed the Chung Kuo series, but now that you mention it, there was a lot of incest and snuff sadism in it.  It never came off, to me at least, that those elements were included because he had a Piers Anthony level fetish about the stuff.

My only real problem is that he ended the series real shittily.  There was no real conclusion to the story.  It was just seven books of this ongoing story that got me really interested in the possible outcomes, and then it just ends.  That's it.  No payoff.

I've read the first two Chung Kuo books, and I don't recall any of that kind of stuff.

Merely proves that memory is more fallible for some people. It's there. Unmissably there.

Why is anyone surprised by any of this, when 90% of even the wildly successful science fiction writers don't even know anyone who has ever touched a woman? 

Ahhhh....that's why I don't know about it. I had from book 2 or 3 on and never got around to picking up the first book or two.

Most assuredly. I read the first two books, liked them but most of the stories have escaped me. I would think the incest was as strong as you suggest, I'd likely remember it.

I read Bio of a Space Tyrant in junior high and still remember the sex stuff, but at the time I found it cool, not shocking.  I guess it was the novelty of it.  As I got older, the sexual stuff in his books became less interesting and more creepy.  There was a period back then when I must have read 20 Piers Anthony books in a row, mostly Xanth-related.  Firefly was just fucked up...but I finished it.  It is extremely rare that I don't finish a book that I start, no matter how disappointing it becomes.

I just reread On A Pale Horse, my favorite of the Incarnations of Immortality, and after reading this thread it caught my eye when he made mention of how children were unfairly discriminated against by the law in not being able to summon succubi or incubi for some quick and easy sex ed.  Because letting your kid get humped by a demon is a really great idea, no way those wacky demons might get it in their minds to do some lasting harm to a kid!

Geeze, I haven't read that one in years but that little tidbit slid right by me. Ah well, I haven't been tempted to read anything by him in ages and don't see any reason to change.

The incest isn't nearly as pronounced as the sadistic stuff but it's definitely there. A shame because the books were otherwise pretty interesting.

To be fair I think the snuff sadism stuff got stronger the longer the series went on, but I'm pretty sure the incest was there from the start.

And yeah, as far as they went the books were interesting. I have nearly the whole series and read most of them at least twice in my youth. It started to go in circle in the end it seemed and my interest dropped quickly, but for a while there is was enjoyable. Plus it was my first introduction to 'Go', which is an awesome game.