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I really loved this series of books by Chris Wooding called 'Tales of the Ketty Jay'
The first book was a good read and the 2nd and 3rd books were just fantastic , the author really had found his stride with the characters and universe.

Then came the fourth and final book, what a let down! It's like he had forgotten what had made the last three books so good and was intent on providing unnecessary information or resolution to every plot point just for the sake of it.
I appreciate that endings are the hardest bit, but that was a real lesson in what not to do.

Conversely, I read the book Hyperion Cantos and absolutely loved it. In the front of the book was an essay basically waxing lyrical about how good the book is but also lamenting how the author kinda spoils the brilliance of the first book with the rest of the series. Therefore, I've decided to leave the series there, so in my mind the book will always retain its brilliance!

With the full Hyperion Cantos, there's 4 books, the first two (Hyperion and Return to Hyperion) are fantastic on their own. The other two sequels (Endymion and Rise of Endymion) are also good, but are best treated essentially as an alternate universe with a reworked view of the events of the first two books.

Simmons can write a great story, but also tends to go overboard on "I'm an author, look how fancy my English degree is! I'm *soooooooo* into melancholy 19th century poets!", and his newer stuff is substantially and increasingly less interesting (Ilium was pretty neat, Olympos became totally incoherent, while Flashback is sadly basically "minorities destroy America fanfic" with lots of awkward septuagenarian-oriented cable news tropes hamfisted in)

 Vaktathi wrote:
With the full Hyperion Cantos, there's 4 books, the first two (Hyperion and Return to Hyperion) are fantastic on their own. The other two sequels (Endymion and Rise of Endymion) are also good, but are best treated essentially as an alternate universe with a reworked view of the events of the first two books.

Simmons can write a great story, but also tends to go overboard on "I'm an author, look how fancy my English degree is! I'm *soooooooo* into melancholy 19th century poets!", and his newer stuff is substantially and increasingly less interesting (Ilium was pretty neat, Olympos became totally incoherent, while Flashback is sadly basically "minorities destroy America fanfic" with lots of awkward septuagenarian-oriented cable news tropes hamfisted in)

That sounds a lot like what happened to Orson Scott Card. I swear he got way too wrapped up in how 'deep' he thought he was that he only ended up showing how shallow he could be.

I think the only books he wrote that I ever enjoyed were Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead. Everything else is just... Not as good. Ender's Shadow is fun enough, but some of his books really strain to try and have more meaning than Card can coherently convey.

EDIT: Oh, and maybe we can throw Terry Goodkin in on that too. Some of the later Sword of Truth series books are infamous for devolving into objectivist political rants.

Now that you mention Card, while I'm sure I've read "in Enders Shadow" and "Xenocide" (they're on my shelf), I can't actually remember squat except the events in the original EG and Speaker

 Vaktathi wrote:
Now that you mention Card, while I'm sure I've read "in Enders Shadow" and "Xenocide" (they're on my shelf), I can't actually remember squat except the events in the original EG and Speaker

They're honestly pretty forgettable. Everything else he's written kind of is. The plot points I actually remember from Ender's Shadow are a) Bean is the main character, b) the villain is a sexist prick, and c) there's a scene where, in the middle of a war, someone commands their troops to go home and make babies because something something babies and making them are the most human thing ever? His other stuff goes weird places and imo becomes incredibly incoherent. Card is an author who I think let his initial success go way to his head and he convinced himself he was the next great writer.

The first Hyperion book is brilliant. The second is really good up until the last sixth or so. I vaguely remember that it reveals love is the fifth nuclear force. The Endymion duology sounds fine from reviews, but this fool won’t be a sucker again.
...unless you count the time I read Ilium and then threw Olympia against the wall. Damn you, Simmons! You did it to me again!



I read the short story of Ender’s Game before the novel, and found the novel tedious and unnecessary. I never made it more than 30 pages into Speaker or Xenocide.

To stop hammering poor Card,

I recently tried an audiobook. The Knife's Edge, which is the product of a self-published epic fantasy novel. I'd just finished Aching God by Mike Shel and was impressed with it as another self published fantasy novel. It wasn't world changing, but it was good so I went looking for others to see if there were more hidden gems and found Knife's Edge by Matt Wolf. I had great reviews with lots of people praising it for doing things its own way.

The reviews were so very wrong. Within the first 3 hours the story hit on every fantasy cliche. It's got a dumb prophecy compounded by someone deciding to keep it a secret for no apparent reason (and all of this is covered in 2 hours that move the plot forward about 5 seconds). The first two hours of the book are pointless cause the main character loses his memory of them and they don't come back for the next ten hours in any meaningful way. Hint to prospective writers, NEVER write the first book in your 'ten book epic' with the arrogant presumption that people will read the other nine and you don't have to worry about plotting a tight narrative. The biggest issue Wolf has in The Knife's Edge is that 15-16 hours of his 20 hour book is pointless empty filler with character introductions that don't seem to matter (yet), events that go unexplained (for now), and more dangling plot threads than GRRM has woven into 5 novels. This book desperately needed an editor to look the writer in the eye and tell him the book is like a pilot episode that tried to hook its audience but runs for an entire season.

To make it worse, it got real obvious real fast that the reviews were only saying the plot did things its own way because the people who liked it have clearly never seen an anime series. The story is plotted like one all the way through, with the character undergoing the epic cycle of training -> plot -> training -> plot for 20 hours. Most good anime these days has the sense to do the training off screen! People unfamiliar with the genre maybe might overlook how mundane that formula becomes at first, but like most anime/manga fans I think I got sick of it after DBZ, Naruto, and Bleach. Most series' today do their 'training' sequences off screen or minimize them heavily rather than drag them out. The series furthers these cliches with gratuitous battle shouting, meandering internal monologues about what a character can/can't do, characters saying aloud thing no actual person would ever say, and frantic action scenes that stop in the middle of things so someone can give a chapter long explanation that could have just been a few sentences.

And I feel bad saying that, cause Matt Wolf has the talent to be a good writer. His story just desperately needed refinement and maturation that comes from a hard nosed editing process. I know some people like to rant at editors and be all 'artistic integrity' but sometimes you really need one. As it is, it's plotted bizarrely, arrogant in its assumption of its own success, and only novel if you're unfamiliar with another genre.

It's got a dumb prophecy compounded by someone deciding to keep it a secret for no apparent reason (and all of this is covered in 2 hours that move the plot forward about 5 seconds). The first two hours of the book are pointless cause the main character loses his memory of them and they don't come back for the next ten hours in any meaningful way.

Ouch. Prophecy, 'dramatic' secret keeping and memory loss?

Its (almost) all of my least favorite things in film/books.

Add 'coming of age' story (it isn't inherently bad, just tiresome), and they've got the whole bundle.

Voss wrote:
Add 'coming of age' story (it isn't inherently bad, just tiresome), and they've got the whole bundle.

...

About that...

Gonna be controversial here and say Star Wars about 3/4's of the way through Return of the Jedi. Sitting through one average film, one good film and the the finale that got progressively worse just killed any interest for me and i've never had an interest in going back too it.

Sounds like the moment that turned you against the franchise was somewhere between C3PO telling the Ewoks “Toronto Gosh” and “Nooch Vader”?

I mean, not particularly. I had no real issue with the ewoks in general, the movie was just boring too me. And Harrison Ford's "i really don't want to be here" acting was kind of off putting too. And only one good movie out of a trilogy isn't enough to make me want to look at more of that particular universe.

Alien Covenant completely ruined the Alien franchise for me. Finding out their origins, and their reasons for being where they are even takes away from the older movies for me.

I gave up on Star Wars after the 7th movie even though the prequel trilogy was not to my taste. It wasn’t a bad movie, certainly better than Episode 1, but it didn’t make me want to watch any more Star Wars movies.

phillv85 wrote:
Alien Covenant completely ruined the Alien franchise for me. Finding out their origins, and their reasons for being where they are even takes away from the older movies for me.

I gave up on Star Wars after the 7th movie even though the prequel trilogy was not to my taste. It wasn’t a bad movie, certainly better than Episode 1, but it didn’t make me want to watch any more Star Wars movies.

Do you mean Promethus - that was a very very poor film, Convenant was improved on that but agreed it was nothing compared to the first two films.

 LordofHats wrote:

Voss wrote:
Add 'coming of age' story (it isn't inherently bad, just tiresome), and they've got the whole bundle.

...

About that...

Color me surprised. Its an easy intro to fiction in general, as it provides an proxy character for the audience to be explained at.
But in the hands of lazy writers, its just terrible. You can tick off the various boxes of destiny, rejection, acceptance, Special Chosen-ness, etc

 Just Tony wrote:

When I started learning music theory after I picked up guitar it changed the way I looked at probably half to two thirds of the music I listened to. I dropped all those CDs off at my older brother's house with no regrets. So I can understand the response.

If taking music theory classes makes one discard the majority of music one enjoys, there should be a warning label. At any rate, that kills whatever interest I might have harbored in doing so. I enjoy my music and don't want to see it ruined by over-analysis like my former enjoyment of poetry was.

Its hard to say, TLJ killed my enthusiasm for Disney Wars but I still watched Solo and Mandalorian, but I would say that Fall of skywalker is my walk away point for that franchise.

For marvel, it has not happened yet but I am increasingly apathetic about the series, not that its gotten bad or anything just lost interest.

Altered carbon series 2 was very poor, Falcon just could not pull off the role and the rest of the supporting caste just did not do it for me, wont likely watch a 3rd series.

JJ Trek Discovery I watched from start to finish because I am a trekky and a gluton for pain, however the end of the last season was my walk away point, I will not be returning to that series.

Kurtzman Trek Picard I got to episode 5 I think it was and just went "nope" and stopped watching, I sat through all the JJ Trek movies, Disco and Picard was the straw that broke the camels back.... terrible show made for people who hate star trek or have never seen it.

But with the bad you have to have the good.

Sense 8 is really really not my kind of thing normally and around episode 3 is when I went "yeah, I like this" and carried on watching.

The Expanse.... nuff said, excellent all round series.

The Good place, another show I would normally not touch with a barge pole but it has some actors I like and I dont regret it, very wholesome and fun series.

I still much love Alien and Aliens, but I can second Covenant killing my interest in the series. Honestly, I think I lost a little respect for Ridley Scott in the process cause the movie was way more Prometheus than Alien and I felt a little cheated by the stupid cartoon villain plot line he tried to make the centerpiece of a movie with Alien in the title. I think it's one of the few movies where executive meddling actually improved things cause the last sequence of the film was the best part and it clearly wasn't in the original script.

So Netflix is pushing the Midnight Gospel and the reviews are good. But honestly, it comes across as podcast by a stoner with random animations in the background.

 Vaktathi wrote:
With the full Hyperion Cantos, there's 4 books, the first two (Hyperion and Return to Hyperion) are fantastic on their own. The other two sequels (Endymion and Rise of Endymion) are also good, but are best treated essentially as an alternate universe with a reworked view of the events of the first two books.

Simmons can write a great story, but also tends to go overboard on "I'm an author, look how fancy my English degree is! I'm *soooooooo* into melancholy 19th century poets!", and his newer stuff is substantially and increasingly less interesting (Ilium was pretty neat, Olympos became totally incoherent, while Flashback is sadly basically "minorities destroy America fanfic" with lots of awkward septuagenarian-oriented cable news tropes hamfisted in)

Oh interesting, the essay basically said that by explaining the mystery of the Time Tombs and the Shrike the author makes it mundane, whereas in the first book he doesn't make that mistake.

I think all series have some inconsistency in them, so sometimes it's best just to read the gems rather than slavishly finishing the whole series just because it's there.

 Vulcan wrote:

 Just Tony wrote:

When I started learning music theory after I picked up guitar it changed the way I looked at probably half to two thirds of the music I listened to. I dropped all those CDs off at my older brother's house with no regrets. So I can understand the response.

If taking music theory classes makes one discard the majority of music one enjoys, there should be a warning label. At any rate, that kills whatever interest I might have harbored in doing so. I enjoy my music and don't want to see it ruined by over-analysis like my former enjoyment of poetry was.

It simply made me pay more attention to the structure of the music I was listening to. I mean, look at Living Color. That band gets rather high praise but when you listen to Vernon Reid from a technical viewpoint he's playing chromatic speed picking almost non stop on all lead work. Listen to Cult of Personality. When he DOES slow down to go "melodic" it's out of key and in poor tempo compared to the rhythm section. It's garbage. You can always tell the "chromatic or GTFO" players, their rhythm section picks one note and stays on it while the guitar player violates every semblance of structure. I like to call it the Mark Tremonti Effect.

I was surpisingly okay with considering the point where Thanos snaps his fingers and retires to his farm, to be the end point of the MCU.

I didn't mind Prometheus. Quite liked it in a few places. But Covenant took the world-shrinking aspect of Prometheus (the space jockeys being, like, Primaris humans or something) and doubled down on it. Took the Lovecraftian elements of Alien - an ancient, fathomless, unknown and uncaring creature, in an ancient, fathomless, unknown and uncaring universe, where humans are gnats or prey - and wiped them away by making the origin of the xenomorph a near-future robot with a petty grudge.

Though given the human cast, as interesting as plain porridge, you can kind of see his point.

 Kroem wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:
With the full Hyperion Cantos, there's 4 books, the first two (Hyperion and Return to Hyperion) are fantastic on their own. The other two sequels (Endymion and Rise of Endymion) are also good, but are best treated essentially as an alternate universe with a reworked view of the events of the first two books.

Simmons can write a great story, but also tends to go overboard on "I'm an author, look how fancy my English degree is! I'm *soooooooo* into melancholy 19th century poets!", and his newer stuff is substantially and increasingly less interesting (Ilium was pretty neat, Olympos became totally incoherent, while Flashback is sadly basically "minorities destroy America fanfic" with lots of awkward septuagenarian-oriented cable news tropes hamfisted in)

Oh interesting, the essay basically said that by explaining the mystery of the Time Tombs and the Shrike the author makes it mundane, whereas in the first book he doesn't make that mistake.

Eh, it's explanation is kinda dumb (though so was the ultimate force of universal love ), and is part of why I say to treat the second two as kinda their own thing, but the time tombs also don't play the same central role in the plot that they did in the first two either so within the context of the second two books doesn't feel quite as silly.

I think all series have some inconsistency in them, so sometimes it's best just to read the gems rather than slavishly finishing the whole series just because it's there.

There's definitely something to be said for that. Endymion and Rise of Endymion are good reads, but at the same time are completely skippable if you're not looking for more of Simmon's specifically and were satisfied with the first two books. There are interesting things presented in the book
but overall doesn't continue the same original story thread as the first two in the same way and a lot of concepts are re-imagined through the guise of "you only got part of the story" in the first couple books.

Fear The Walking Dead

After the first season. Horrible characters (probably testament to the actors to be fair), boring plot, failed mission statement.

Just didn’t give enough of a flip about the people or the stakes.

Have tried a couple of times to get back into it, and just can’t.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Fear The Walking Dead

After the first season. Horrible characters (probably testament to the actors to be fair), boring plot, failed mission statement.

Just didn’t give enough of a flip about the people or the stakes.

Have tried a couple of times to get back into it, and just can’t.

First season was trash. That showed turned a solid corner 3-4 episodes into season 2. And then I dropped it like a hot brick in the season they finished off all of the family except the sister.

Dies the Fire. It started off with such a great (and at the time, unqiue) premise but the writing was a constant abuse of the English language. I got three books in before it just became too mentally painful to read.

Runner up is Bastard!!!. It was a really good premise, but a twelve year old got ahold of the script and filled it from top to bottom with panty jokes

 ChargerIIC wrote:
Dies the Fire. It started off with such a great (and at the time, unqiue) premise but the writing was a constant abuse of the English language. I got three books in before it just became too mentally painful to read

I loved the first trilogy of that series. I enjoyed the kids journey to Nantucket in the next grouping. Gave up on it with the grandkids of the original group series as it got just to out there.

I actually haven't read the Dies the Fire series, but as its supposed to take place locally, I probably should get in on some of it

Big Bang Theory - Used to love that show but cracks started to appear around Season 5-6, after that you could see the Flanderisation in pretty much every character. Sheldon for example changed from "a bit awkward and has his own weird traits" to "I'm so weird I'm going to break up with my girlfriend of 5 years because my flatmate wants a new table" (which is an actual plotline). Then they decide to introduce a baby into the show, which is a general sign that the they're running out of ideas, and the show's changed from nerd humour to a generic sitcom.


Horus Heresy - They're milking it too much, I read up to around Book 35 and put it down for a while during uni, now I have no bloody idea where to start again from.

Can't believe the HH cow hasn't died from dehydration yet, keeping up with that 15 year series is just insanity at this point. More insane is that it actually still makes enough money to keep going.