It wasn't the ending.. but it was AN ending..

[Rishathra]

It's not like Frank Herbert and the chapterhouse abomination.

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?

[Strazos]

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

[bhodi]

It's not like Frank Herbert and the chapterhouse abomination.

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?

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.)

[Righ]

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.

[Morat20]

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.

[bhodi]

You're so vain.

[Morat20]

[ack, nevermind]

[bhodi]

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.

[angry.bob]

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.

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.

[MahrinSkel]

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

[Wolf]

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.

[murdoc]

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. 

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.

[Wolf]

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.

[Riggswolfe]

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.

Piers Anthony, Foul Scribe of Hades and 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.

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.

[Murgos]

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

[Salamok]

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

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.

[Riggswolfe]

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

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.

[Reg]

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.

[Morat20]

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

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.

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.

[HaemishM]

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.

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.

[Salamok]

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.

[MahrinSkel]

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

[Johny Cee]

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.

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.

[Phildo]

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.

[Rasix]

pedo-Phil approves.

[Reg]

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.

[MahrinSkel]

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.

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.

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

[angry.bob]

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.

[lamaros]

It's not like Frank Herbert and the chapterhouse abomination.

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?

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.)

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)

[SurfD]

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 .........

[angry.bob]

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

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.

[WindupAtheist]

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

What?

[Riggswolfe]

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.

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.

[angry.bob]

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.

Reread it. It's there.

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

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.

[Comstar]

But at least the Recluce books move *on*. 

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.