I re-start my regular columns today...

[seawasp]

 
... with Why Isn't This As AWESOME As The Last One?, the problem facing most series!

Comments

[jessmahler]

Nailed it.

HH becoming an admiral took a lot of the shiny outof the series for me bc I'm not big on political stories, I signed on for the milfic and exploring new and different cultures. Weber's decision to split the series was, IMO, genius for solving this problem, though it created others. The Saganami series has all the stuff I loved in the original HH books, following new characters in a new area of the galaxy. But it still has clear and understandable tie-ins with what's going on in the main series.

Of course, this ups the complexity and makes it harder for new readers to jump in, so it's a trade off. But I'm sure I'm not the only reader whose still buying the main series BECAUSE it ties in with Saganami and not the other way around.

[seawasp]

While I stopped reading the series not because I resented the shift -- I liked following Honor. I stopped BECAUSE of all the tie-ins that were being done by other authors that were suddenly having an effect on the main line. I was reading Honor Harrington by David Weber, not "The Wide World of Manticore" by A Large Assemblage of Authors.

[dsrtao]

Interestingly, I had the opposite reaction: I realized that most (though not all) of the other authors were better at writing those stories than Weber is.

I think you'd like Harry Connolly's The Great Way epic fantasy trilogy: three hefty books, written as a unified whole specifically to address the "why isn't this so awesome" problem by being aware that this isn't going to be an unlimited series: the pacing is one! two! three-and-done!.

[seawasp]

I've actually got that one, I was one of his supporters in doing it. Just have to get around to READING it!

[jessmahler]

To each their own?

I like having other author's input shape a really long series that deals with national or international plot lines. It adds a level of realism to the worlds that I like. No one author can ever really simulate the complexity of the real world and the way "Bit actor #52" can stumble into something and become a pivotal part of events, but letting a couple of authors interject their own characters and twists into the storyline can help keep your series from becoming an unintentional paean to the "Great Man" theory of history.

It's not such a thing for a short series or trilogy, but by the time you're getting into 10+ books, it makes a big difference, IMO.

[kengr]

Definite points there.

btw. You've got a *lot* of missing space (run together words) in that post. One or more per paragraph.