I was enormously pleased to read on Mastodon that not only is that classic SF work The Fortunate Fall returning to print, but The Fortunate Fall’s author Cameron Reed is working on a new novel. Huzzah! This is ever so much better than the other model, in which an author produces a promising body of work, then goes silent, apparently forever.1
Herewith, five authors from whom we would like, or would have liked, to hear more.
Back in the 1950s, Walter M. Miller, Jr. was a prolific author with more than two dozen published stories to his credit. While he was a frequent contributor to Astounding, he was not a one-editor author: in addition to appearing in Astounding and the other two members of the Big Three, Galaxy and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Miller works were featured in Amazing, Fantastic, If, Other Worlds Science Stories, Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, and Venture Science Fiction. Miller was frequently anthologized by editors such as Everett F. Bleiler, T. E. Dikty, and Judith Merril. He won one of the first Hugo Awards, for 1955’s The Darfsteller.
All of the above built up to his 1959 novel A Canticle For Liebowitz. After Canticle, nearly forty years of silence, save for a posthumous novel finished by a collaborator. The explanation appears to be crushing depression. Given Canticle’s stellar quality—if a modern reader has heard of Miller at all, it is almost certain the only Miller of which they are aware is Canticle—one has to wonder what Miller might have achieved in a better world.2
Between her debut in 1966 and her exit from the field in 1983, Doris Piserchia published thirteen novels and at least sixteen short stories. Although her efforts were not rewarded with awards, editors deemed her work of sufficient quality to justify inclusion in such notable anthologies as Orbit 16 and The Last Dangerous Visions. Her novels were always memorable.
In many cases, it’s not clear why an author goes silent. In Piserchia’s case, an appalling sequence of personal tragedies forced her from writing. When she was ready to return, her market had evaporated. Consequently, although she only recently died, her most recent published work is decades old. One has to wonder what she might have accomplished if her career had not been kneecapped as it was.
It is hard to describe to younger readers the impact of Alexei Panshin’s early novels.3 1968 saw the publication of Rite of Passage, perhaps the best Heinlein juvenile not by Heinlein, as well as Star Well and The Thurb Revolution, the first two volumes in the Anthony Villiers series, Panshin’s notable SF comedy of manners. 1969 saw the third Villiers novel, Masque World. Quality and quantity: what more could readers want?
The straightforward extrapolation that suggests we should by now have in hand something like eighty Panshin novels was, alas, flawed. There was one more Panshin novel, Earth Magic, co-authored by Cory Panshin. There were two collections, Farewell to Yesterday’s Tomorrow (1975), Transmutations: A Book of Personal Alchemy (1982). Otherwise, as far as fiction4 was concerned, a long, loud silence. Math, how can you betray me so?
Alison Tellure’s body of work is small, four short stories (“Yes, Virginia”, “Lord of All It Surveys”, “Skysinger”, “Low Midnight”) and one novelette (“Green-Eyed Lady, Laughing Lady”), all published in Analog between 1977 and 1984. While “Yes, Virginia” is unmemorable, the other four works are memorable forays into alien psychology, unusually presented without the crutch of human observers to hold the reader’s hand.
Tellure is also an edge case, in that I cannot be certain that she stopped getting published, only that she stopped getting published under that name. Tellure was a pen name and information about the person behind the pen name is surprisingly hard to come by. Sources assert she was married to Rob Chilson, but somehow those sources, even Chilson, never get around mentioning what her actual name was. This has all the earmarks of a situation about which others are better informed than I am: feel free to illuminate me in comments.
Between 1981 and 1992, Alexis A. Gilliland published seven novels, starting with the three books in the Rosinante Trilogy—The Revolution from Rosinante (1981), Long Shot for Rosinante (1981), The Pirates of Rosinante (1982)—in which a hard-working businessman/engineer manages to parlay a stock market correction into a nation-ending crisis. These were followed by the three books in the Wizenbeak trilogy—Wizenbeak (1986), The Shadow Shaia (1990) and Lord of the Troll-Bats (1992)—in which civil engineer/wizard Wizenbeak does his best to survive increasingly dangerous political maneuvering.
He also wrote 1983’s The End of the Empire, in which the remnants of a collapsed empire stumble into a solar system on the verge of civil war. All of these novels offer a combination of snark and cynicism, as well as energetic plots working at cross-purposes.
Unfortunately, if I recall comments made by Gilliland correctly, he was a victim of midlist death spiral, in which each subsequent printing of a book from a non-best seller is reduced slightly, with the result the next books sales are less than the previous book, which is used as justification to reduce print runs even more. Rinse and repeat until you reach print runs of zero. Additionally, his publisher, Del Rey, carried out a brutal purge of their midlist following the deaths of Judy-Lynn and Lester del Rey. Gilliland was one of the authors who were shoved off the back of the sleigh (perhaps in hope that this would slow the pursuing wolves). Some of his books are back in print as ebooks, but it would be nice to have some new Gilliland in the world.
***
Still, where there is life, there is hope or so I am told. I can name a number of authors who exited SF, only to reappear decades later: Dean Ing and Donald Kingsbury come to mind, as does (obviously) Cameron Reed. Gilliland is (at time of writing) still with us, and there are other authors long silent who might unexpectedly reappear. Some authors long dead may have left unpublished works still awaiting discovery.
You may well have your own favourite authors from whom you’d like a new work. Feel free to muse wistfully about them in comments.
In the words of fanfiction author Musty181, four-time Hugo finalist, prolific book reviewer, and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll “looks like a default mii with glasses.” His work has appeared in Interzone, Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis) and the 2021 and 2022 Aurora Award finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by web person Adrienne L. Travis). His Patreon can be found here.
[1]That said, I hate the phrase “one-hit wonder” with the heat of a thousand supernovas, uttered as it usually is by people who are themselves no-hit wonders. One memorable work is still one more memorable work than most people will ever manage.
[2]Rereading “Canticle” after Miller’s suicide, I realized one can read it as the author’s own “to be or not to be,” much as one can read H. Beam Piper’s “Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen” along similar lines.
[3]And not just because university regulations forbid me from wedging exit doors shut before launching into unsolicited lectures.
[4]Also, award-winning critical works, which I am saving for “five critics who infuriated Robert Heinlein.”
I would also include Tom Reamy and Patricia Anthony. Reamy died young. Not sure why Anthony ceased publishing.
I wish Rosemary Kirstein would finish the Steerswoman books.
Are we allowed to mention Patrick Rothfuss? Or are we still holding out hope for a Day 3, Doors of Stone to be published?
In the late ’80s to early ’90s, Janet Kagan wrote one of the best Star Trek tie-in novels, one original novel, and a series of stories in Asimov’s published as a fix-up novel. She won the Hugo Award in 1993 for her novelette “The Nutcracker Coup”. This seemed like a really promising start to a career. Then after the Hugo win her output dried up almost completely. She died in 2008 but some of us still remember her.
Anyone who has read A Canticle For Liebowitz can hardly begrudge Miller his ‘crushing depression’, or really be surprised to hear of it. It is a book that speaks of deep despair.
Yes Allison Tellure! A personal favourite, and I think of her stories fairly often. I didn’t realize it was a pen name.
I’ll also add Nick O’Donohoe, as both he and Tellure are authors (or their estates) I deeply wish I could contact to see about getting ebook versions.
John M Ford. We lost him far too young and with so much left undone.
David R. Palmer came to mind, and I know he’s still around, so I went checking and found he has three novels in the last four years I previously was unaware of. All were from Ring of Fire Press, all are currently out of print. One is a sequel to Emergence, but it’s a sequel to Threshold I’ve been anticipating the most.
Someone got to Janet Kagan minutes before me. I can only “+1”, and recommend her Hellspark, adventure / mystery / SF / warmly human (in the best way) with memorable characters.
Do you know something about Kingsbury that I don’t? (I once toyed with the idea of writing a review of The Finger Pointing Solward, to be posted on the first day of the fourth month of some year, but never got around to it.)
I am shivering with antici…
I still bitterly miss the presumed four additional Anthony Villiers novels from Panshin. Panshin used to show up online in place (I think he had a blog for a while) and people would beg him to write those books. I think his response was that the person who wrote those books was long gone, and he wasn’t the person to write sequels — and I’m inclined to agree.
I used to run into Rob Chilson at conventions every so often, though I haven’t seen him in a few years (wonder what worldwide event might have caused that?) — I suppose I could ask him about Allison Tellure if I see him again.
Despite rumors of his death (perhaps caused by another Canadian of similar age named Donald Kingsbury who died last year) Kingsbury is still alive, so we can hope that The Finger Pointing Solward might still appear, and represent yet another restart (of sorts) to his career.
John M. Ford is one of my chief examples of a writer who I wish had written more (he died before he turned 50) — and the publication of the finished parts of Aspects last year only make his loss more acute — what a beautiful book even that part of it is!
Felicity Savage published some excellent short stories and five interesting novels between 1993 and 1998, but there have only been two short stories since then, in 2012 and 2014. More work from her would be welcome. And Holly Phillips published some of my very favorite short fiction of the first decade of this millennium, as well as two fine novels, but there has been nothing from her since 2012. (I read that she was working on a Ph. D., so perhaps she changed careers?) I’d love to see more work from her.
I read Panshin’s “Heinlein in Dimension” in the 80s, I think before Heinlein died. And I remember feeling all defensive about Heinlein, my literary hero. After 40 more years, I think I’ve grown.
Most of the authors here put out so very little, and we got a lot of Charles Sheffield. But going from a sudden brain cancer in his mid-sixties was nearly as rotten as Iain Banks at 59, and I just finished the last “Heritage Universe”, confirming that it definitely had sequels planned; which brings me to FOUR ongoing series that were abandoned by his death. The worst loss was the third “Supernova Alpha” book, where we might have learned what alien had the power to make Alpha C go supernova, and why they hated us so.
Without the concept of a one-hit wonder, we would not have Todd in the Shadows’ “One-Hit Wonderland” series. Though he himself often acknowledges that the concept is flawed–it encompasses hard-working, talented bands that only happened to chart once, freak novelty acts with one joke, prefab bands of session musicians slapped together pseudonymously to turn out a manufactured hit single, people whose success was mostly in some field other than being a pop singer, and wildly successful, long-lived bands in their own country that only had one hit Americans know.
The first name that came to my mind was Cordwainer Smith, such beautiful and unique stories and so little of them.
Then there is Barry Hughart with his Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox, only three books and that was it. The first book, The Bridge of Birds, is one of my all-time favourite “feel good” books, but on the other hand, the following novels were good, but in my opinion declining. So, maybe it is better this way.
@srEDIT: A good choice and I still have a sliver of hope that it might come out one day – same as Winds of Winter – but I am also not holding my breath.
I remember liking TJ Bass’s two novels and wishing for more. Though I haven’t read them in over forty years, so I’m not sure how well they’d hold up.
10: Kingsbury and Ing both debuted in the 1950s. Both then stepped away from SF for a long time (26 years for Kingsbury and 19 years for Ing) before returning in the late 1970s. I am not sure what drove the hiatus, although I note the collapse in the US magazine trade happened about the time they left SF for a bit.
My memory is Hugart wrote at least one more book and sold it more than once, only for the publishers not to publish it.
While I recognize that life happening is a requirement for authors, I wish it would stop happening once they start writing. There was a huge gap between the first two and last books of the Joanne Bertin’s Dragonlord trilogy, I think due to life events. By the time the final book had come out, I was no longer the person who’d read the first two.
GRRM could have been on this list before Game of Thrones. Which says both to never give up hope and to be careful what you wish for.
Kagan wrote for her mother, and after her mother died, she stopped writing. Or so I was led to believe.
One name for me that comes to mind is Mark Perry. As far as I have been able to find out, he wrote two Morigu books (Morigu: The Dead, and Morigu: The Desecration) and then stopped writing altogether. I had a friend in college who lent me his paperbacks and I read them then, and recall them being great, but sadly there are no more.
Russell Hoban is best known for his children’s books about Frances the badger. But he wrote one science fiction novel, Riddley Walker, that is an amazing post-apocalyptic story told entirely in the jargon of the new society. I found the jargon at first barely comprehensible, but eventually got into the rhythm of it. Alas, this was his only science fiction novel.
Rosel George Brown
Charles G Finney
Barry Hughart (something about Arizona authors)
Mervyn Peake
Keith Roberts (and English ones)
@10: say it, say it!
@22: …pation!
Something that astounded me when I discovered it: Joy Chant seems to have published only three novels: Red Moon and Black Mountain (1970), The Grey Mane of Morning (1977), and When Voiha Wakes (1983). Additionally, all appear to have gone out of print in the 1980s. For some reason, I thought she had more books and more lasting presence.
Jay Lake. Cancer took him. There was still lots to explore in his “Mainspring” universe, and his “Sunspin” space opera series began with great promise, but he never got to his planned book-length works.
We are blessed to still have Vernor Vinge with us, but I fear he may have retired from writing as well as his day job. I still hope he’ll surprise with another space opera novel starring Ravna and the Tines.
I was also going to mention Barry Hughart. As I understand it, he had Master Li worked out to 10 novels, with his heroes eventually becoming gods.
Cordwainer Smith and Rosel Brown are both good calls. And both lives cut short by ill health, along with Stanley Weinbaum, Cyril Kornbluth and Henry Kuttner.
Speaking of Kuttner, it’s a tremendous pity that CL Moore stopped writing after his death. I suppose they had become so entwined, that she found it too hard to write solo again (I also once read that her second husband disapproved of her being a writer). I’d love to know what she would have done with the changes that came to the genre in the decade or so following Kuttner’s death.
Finally, Pat O’Shea. She wrote the wonderful The Hounds of the Morrigan. I knew that there was a second book about the legends of Finn MacCool, and just learned that she also published a third book, The Magic Bottle. The latter two were aimed at a slightly younger audience than Hounds (sort of MG v. YA). I’d have liked to see more from her.
@21) Russell Hoban wrote at least one more true science fiction novel, Fremder; as well as several novels that are fantasy or perhaps magical realist, notably The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, Pilgermann, Angelica Lost and Found, and Amaryllis Night and Day.
Hoban was an outstanding writer, but to be honest he was pretty prolific and I think he got what you can reasonably expect out of his writing career.
(My reviews of Fremder and The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz are here)
@14, 17, and 22: I thought of Barry Hughart as well; my understanding likewise is that difficulties with his publisher led him to give up writing in frustration.
I have written elsewhere about The Forest of App by Gloria Rand Dank, a short but wonderfully atmospheric fantasy novel for younger readers; it came out in 1984, and is, as far as I can tell, the only work that she ever published.
I loved Half Past Human and The Godwhale by T.J. Bass but those are the only two he wrote.
Another +1 for Janet Kagan, with particular love for Hellspark.
Lorna Freeman published 3 volumes of the Borderlands series with Roc: Covenants (2004), The King’s Own (2006), and Shadows Past (2010). They are the continuing adventures of Lord Rabbit and his friends, relatives, and fellow soldiers on the border between human and fae lands. Only the third is in print or available in e-book. Of the other two, the second is more expensive as a used book on Amazon, which suggests some variation on a death spiral. There clearly was supposed to be at least a fourth book; the third is not a cliff-hanger for the main character, but an important secondary character is missing and presumed kidnapped at the end, plus there are ongoing political shenanigans. I really enjoyed these characters and recommend them despite the unfinishedness. I would like to have read more, but it’s been long enough that it seems unlikely.
I don’t have much to contribute except to suggest that a future topic be ‘Five Authors We Wish Had Quit While They Were Ahead’.
@31: Only five?
@32: Well, clearly, the list is vast, but that seems to be the standard number around here. ‘Top Five’, maybe?
I really need to work on endings that make it clear I don’t mean that these are the only five worth considering.
Maybe this is a weird choice, but my first thought was Tolkien. Obviously he wrote plenty, but I just really wish he’d had a chance to finish up his grand Silmarillion revisions and all the thorny questions he was trying to settle before he died.
In a way this goes for Robert Jordan too…although he wrote a LOT ;)
It may be that perhaps I already indulge my urge to be a giant font of negativity too much.
Another set of initials: T. L. Sherred. A handful of work ranging from unsentimental to bleakly pessimistic; none of it complicated by today’s standards, but who knows what he could have done without a gap of decades.
Mark Clifton: two sardonic novels (one almost comic on the side) and a few short pieces, all in a decade, then nothing. (Yes, that decade also yielded what’s sometimes called the worst Hugo winner ever; it was a collaboration, and authors do have off days.) We need his snark in today’s politics.
36: What might work is five works I enjoy by authors whose work I otherwise didn’t care for.
Dean Ing was one of my favorites in the 80s and 90s — his racing stories in Omni first caught my eye, and then his near-future thrillers, (but Linda Nagata’s The Red series and The Last Good Man are even better).
Another gone-too-soon (but had more than a couple books) is George Alec Effinger: His Marid Audran books (starting with When Gravity Fails) are woefully underappreciated.
Brian Daley, though his life was sadly truncated, still managed to write a great deal… but never came back to write more of his space operas that I liked so much more than, say, his Robotech adaptations.
JDN@36: It may be that perhaps I already indulge my urge to be a giant font of negativity too much.
To be honest, as far as I’m concerned, it’s not possible to plumb that font too deeply. I give you the unbridled success of Pitch Meeting videos by Ryan George as an example (to which I am hopelessly addicted).
Your suggestion at 38 would, of course, be perfectly fine as well. But I know which one will generate the most replies.
@37) Sherred is a good choice. Similar shaped career in a way to Kingsbury or Ing — a few stories between 1947 and 1954, all good work, then nothing until a novel in 1970 and one more story in Again, Dangerous Visions in 1972 (and probably written earlier.) By then he’d had a medical problem (stroke I think?) which made it impossible for him to write, though Lloyd Biggle finished what he’d written of a sequel to the 1970 novel (Alien Island — the sequel was Alien Main.)
There’s also Charles Whitmore, whose 1984 novel Winter’s Daughter tells the story of a Scandinavian woman who goes to Africa, marries an African man, goes to North America, then eventually returns to her birthplace. Which might not sound remarkable, but it’s a post-apocalyptic setting with blood feuds, and basically tells the whole life of Signe Ragnhilds-Datter in the literary form of a Norse prose sage (but without archaic language affectations). That’s the only genre work that Whitmore has authored and it’s rather unusual for what it does.
The big two for me were Lyndon Hardy who made a splash with Master of the Five Magics and two sequels then vanished back into academia for 40 years, but he recently reappeared with revised ebook editions and several sequels.
The other is Hugh Cook, who was 30 years ahead of his time with his wildly ambitious and extremely genre mould breaking Chronicles of an Age of Darkness. Sadly he died before self publishing was a thing so he never got the chance to extend his ten books into the intended 60! book series. He was another one who publishers abandoned, though it seems more of a “feminism won’t sell … how could we sell that … oh god please stop sending us these … talking giant crabs? … what did we sign up to … why are there spaceships in my fantasy!”
Mark Geston – three post-apocalyptic novels (Lords of the Starship, Out of the Mouth of the Dragon, The Siege of Wonder), one unclassifiable (The Day Star), and one alien contact novel (Mirror to the Sky), and that’s it.
Strange stuff, but compelling.
Scott Smith, author of A Simple Plan and The Ruins. I loved the first novel, liked the second…and maybe that’s all there will be. I don’t know why.
I’m sorry to not have seen Stirling Lanier on this list of anywhere in the comments thus far. Aside from being a key player in getting Dune published, he also wrote a few novels including Hiero’s Journey, which (barring the dated misogyny) is a fun and interesting read. I want a Morse to ride.
My go-to here is David R. Bunch; a bunch of short stories and poems, one fix-up … thing; it’s not exactly a novel (Moderan, which I never miss the opportunity to pimp), and that’s it.
Hughart, absolutely.
Nobody’s mentioned Tiptree?
And I honestly wish Asimov had written more science fiction…
Phyllis Eisenstein – I’m still hoping The City in the Stone can be published
Doris Egan/Jane Emerson – City of Diamond is amazing and the Ivory books were very original at the time
T. L. Sherred and Alexei Panshin having been named, I suggest another Michigan SF writer: George M. Ewing (1945-2010).
Ideas jumped from George like fireworks. But the SF stories he wrote and published were too few, and too infrequent. He wrote in a mighty idiosyncratic voice I found delightful.
(ISFDB is missing some of his stories, such as “Glitchgate” in 73 magazine for February 1976.
His only nonfiction book vanished nearly into oblivion when its publisher did.
Oofh. So many. From E.E. Smith to Mark E. Rodgers to Joel Rosenberg to Katherine Kurtz….
I agree about Alexei Panshin as well as George Alec Effinger.
Kage Baker
Austin Tappan Wright (Islandia)
Iain Banks (of course)
And I wish Jack Vance was still around and writing (I’d even settle for reading his grocery lists…)
I wish Robert Jordan had written LESS! The Wheel of Time would have been ideal at about 8 books. I ended up skimming thru a lot of tedious filler and sub sub sub sub plots.
And the final book was simply awful. What a stupid ending! I had a bad feeling it was going to be something like that as they kept hinting at it at the start of every novel.
Eventually I ended up resenting the time I wasted on it. What a shame for something that went so well for about 6 books.
R. A. MacAvoy who was reasonably prolific during the 80s and wrote several brilliant novels, including Tea With The Black Dragon, but who faded away after contracting a debilitating illness. She has produced just three books in the last fifteen years or so but I’d love to read more from her.
Daniel Keyes, who wrote Flowers For Algernon and a handful of other books and stories across fifty or so years.
What ever happened to Mary Gentle?
Tom Rainbow, who died young (and wrote SF-adjacent nonfiction) and Ted Reynolds, who I think is still alive but not writing as far as I can tell
Zenna Henderson. I think we could all use a bit more of The People in our lives.
@56 – Mary Gentle is supposed to have a new novel, The Landing, coming out this year. Described as SF, not fantasy.
A while back, I read and commented on the whole run of John W. Campbell’s Unknown, and that gave me many opportunities to read stuff by people who flitted into the field, deposited a story or two, and then vanished into the much greater unknown. While many of them can happily stay vanished, as far as I’m concerned, there were a few I’d like to have seen more of. People like Silaki Ali Hassan, known as “Prince Ilaki” to pro wrestling fans, or the mercurial Jane Rice, whom we would have a bit more of, if Campbell hadn’t gone and lost the manuscript of her only novel.
The one that intrigues me the most, though, is E.A. Grosser. He or she – I often suspect the initials-only contributors of being women -produced a baker’s dozen of short stories and novelettes between 1940 and 1942, and then… nothing. I think this is a real shame, as Grosser’s first two stories in Unknown (“The Psychomorph” and “The Living Ghost”) are outstanding – very nicely judged weird thrillers, you could see either one being made into a “Twiight Zone” episode or something. Grosser’s style is maybe not great literature, but it’s very good pulp literature – slick, punchy, effective. I find it hard to believe that these were Grosser’s first two stories (I got to read quite a few author’s first stories in Unknown, and you can see a lot of rough edges in most of them.) Pseudonym? Naturally gifted writer? I’m sure I shall never know, but, whoever or whatever E.A. Grosser might be, I wish I’d seen more.
(You can read my voyage through Unknown over on my site if you want to. Start at the beginning, and you can watch my feelings for L. Ron Hubbard change from initial scepticism to white-hot burning rage….)
60: Odd. Jane Rice has come up a number of times recently. I just checked to see if there’s anything by her in ebook–no luck–or at least cheap, used. Also no luck. Her one collection, The Idol of the Flies and Other Stories, seems to run $250 and up. Clearly readers must value her work to pay so much [1] so why not a reprint?
1: Although… I remember a bookseller lamenting that while he had no trouble moving Little, Big at a hundred dollars per book when it was OOP, the reprint just sat on his shelf.
@53: I don’t know what a Jack Vance grocery list would say, but it would probably be hand written in various colors of ink.
There are a lot of authors mentioned here that I will have to look into, particularly Cameron Reed, even if I have to wait for the book to come back into print.
@2 Rosemary Kirstein continues writing, just not quickly. However she has the rights to all her books, which are currently available in paperback and as ebooks.
Patricia Geary is another one I wouldn’t have minded reading more from. Two books in the ’80s and two in the oughties? I feel like the world could withstand more.
Mostly, what I want is to fix the root problem, for authors to exist in circumstances more conducive to writing. Unfortunately, I have no control over capitalism (among so many other things) or, y’know, death.
I’d like to clear up a few misconceptions about Del Rey, and our publication of Alexis Gilliland.
I was a founding (and very most junior editor) of Del Rey, and when Judy-Lynn was struck down in 1985, I took over the science-fiction side of the house, and governed our little kingdom with Lester as my partner and the controlling editor of the Fantasy side of the house. I took over completely after Lester retired several years later.
After Judy died there was no cutting of the mid list at all. I had total control of the list (management never, ever, interfered with the composition of the Del Rey list, never even expressed the desire to) and I cut no mid list titles. Nor did the size of our list change.
I was Alexis’s biggest fan, and I still recall with great pleasure the laughter-filled good times Alexis, Dolly and I spent together at Baltimore and D.C. area cons. I was his acquiring editor, while Judy was still alive, and it was I who pulled the plug as the editor in chief. Though the years have dulled my memory a bit (I’m closing in on 80), I don’t believe I was Alexis’s hands-on editor at the time we parted ways; I was then enthusiastically running 4 lines (military nonfiction, translations from the Classical Chinese, and collectibles price-lists being the others) and sitting on the board of a gaming company so I had delegated Alexis to Steve Sterns (a fine editor who later spent decades at Columbia University Press). When the time came to cease being Alexis’s publisher, it was I who made the decision after long discussion with Steve. Sadly, Alexis was, and had been, losing us money and I saw no hope of a reversal. I loved his writing, his complex plots, the long digressions on the engineering of space habitats, his wonderful sense of humor, and whimsy (There is no god but god, and Skaskash is his prophet!).
Many of my favourite writers who died far too long – Tom Reamy, Kage Baker, Cordwainer Smith – have already been mentioned . I’ll add Thomas Burnett Swann. His Classical fantasies are an acquired taste and fairly obscure now, but he was both prolific and popular prior to his 1974 death from cancer aged only 48.
Going back further, Robert E Howard was only 30 when he died, and H P Lovecraft only 47; who knows what they may have accomplished if they’d lived longer? The other member of the “Weird Tales” Big 3, Clark Ashton Smith, produced almost no prose fiction in his last 25 years, concentrating almost entirely on poetry.
BTW, in a couple of months Subterranean Press are publishing a collection of Tom Reamy’s complete short fiction – including an unpublished novella that was intended for “The Last Dangerous Visions”. Most welcome!
@65 – “long” = “young”
Kage Baker! George Alec Effinger!
I’m wondering how many, like Effinger, were lost due to America’s lack of a national health program.
65: I saw the news about Reamy. I do have his Blind Voices and the collection San Diego Lightfoot Sue and Other Stories.
Robert Stallman is another author whose career was cut short by death: three novels, flawed but interesting, two of which appeared after he died.
An artist/writer I miss is David A. Trampier, whose art would be very familiar to vintage D&D players and old time Dragon Magazine readers. His Wormy comic ran for ten years, until Trampier very suddenly left the industry.
My favorite SF novel is “Sleeping Planet” by William Burkett. It was a fun alien invasion story from Analog in the early 60s, which I read at age 12 or so. He reappeared decades later with a contract for three paperback originals, but they must not have sold well, because that was it, other than some small press stuff.
I’ve been wishing and hoping for Emma Bull to write a sequel to Territory for, gosh, it’s more than 15 years now. And of course, we’d be so happy to see new work from those we’ve lost — John M. Ford, Iain Banks, Kage Baker, Terry Pratchett…
Brian Daley – already mentioned
Louise Cooper – Probably my favorite fantasy writer ever. Although she wrote several books, she died too young and still had a lot of creativity left in her.
Elizabeth Boyer – I was a big fan of her Norse-inspired fantasy novels. (I think she’s still living, but no longer writing.)
Rob D. @54: Well, I can no longer say “by all accounts I’ve heard, Brandon Sanderson did a fine job of finishing the story.” Oh, well. (Haven’t read the series myself, am unlikely to at this late date.)
SF:
Martha Soukup
Langdon Jones
David I. Masson
T.J. Bass
Horror/Weird:
Thomas Ligotti
Bob Leman
T.E.D. Klein
Karl Edward Wagner
Joel Lane
Matt Cardin
William Browning Spencer
Brian McNaughton
Don Tumasonis
Fantasy:
Susanna Clarke
Greer Gilman
Paul Hazel
Richard McKenna. He had one very good short story collection, Casey Agonistes, and that was it.
T.J. Bass, definitely. His two books were a significant part of my younger self.
H. Beam Piper didn’t write enough— and especially, he never wrote a sequel to Murder in the Gunroom, or the series that it deserved to be.
@68, I’m so with you on David Trampier. He was a superb artist and I miss his work.
Mary Shelley.
Alas for Douglas Adams.
I have mixed feelings about being the only one to mention George R. Turner. The award winning Australian author whose six science fiction novels were written late in his career. I found his style and imagination to be every bit as thought provoking as any of the Grand Masters. “Drowning Towers” also published as “The Summer and the Sea” in 1996 was describing the effects of climate change well in advance of todays concerns. I was particularly impressed with “Brainchild” in which the results of genetic manipulation produces children whose elevated mental capacities leaves them as divorced from humanity as any alien could be. Many of his other works have common threads which could have woven a series as they share similar worlds. I was sorely disappointed when I learned of his passing in ’97.
This is why I read Tor.
@3 Yes yes yes! But I read somewhere it was unlikely.
@11 The Universal Pantograph was trailed at the end of the Thurb Revolution and then never appeared. I would love to read it.
@31 Now that would be an article. A bit like The Titanic Bookshow where authors and critics discuss works they wish had sunk u published with the dhip.
@64 Owen. Thank you for that concise and logical explanation. It is rare for readers to see behind the curysin.
@@@@@ 28 Gloria Dank has written several mysteries. Same author but dropped the Rand.
75: McKenna also had two non-SFF collections, The Sons of Martha and Other Stories (1967) and The Left-Handed Monkey Wrench: Stories and Essays (1986), and a non-SFF novel, The Sand Pebbles. Got turned into a movie in, um, 1966? By which time McKenna was dead.
I remember noticing parallels between McKenna’s life and Charles Willeford’s. Willeford seems to have enjoyed life more, though. Although he didn’t write SFF of which I am aware, there’s a Willeford I could mention here: Grimhaven, which exists as an MS and photocopies.
I would also not turn down a copy of Black Border For McGee by John D. MacDonald.
Ward Moore: In addition to the seminal alt-hist novel “Bring the Jubilee” and early eco-catastrophe novel “Greener than You Think,” only three short stories and two other genre novels, which were collaborations.
And, adding to the “died too young,” C.M. Kornbluth.
Apparently today is the time I scrolled down Moore’s ISFDB entry to the bottom, because I had no idea he had two mainstream novels in addition to his SFF. 1956’s Cloud By Day sounds similar to George R. Stewart’s 1948 Fire. I wonder how they compare?
I first came across Alexis Gillialand via his wonderful spot cartoons in fanzines such as Science Fiction Review. Some of them were subsequently collected as The Iron Law of Bureaucracy, Who Says Paranoia Isn’t ‘In’ Anymore?, and The Waltzing Wizard.
I considered myself very fortunate years ago when I found a copy of the latter at a reasonable price; the other two remain on my ‘white whale’ list,
@75: I was just mentioning McKenna in some other context and completely forgot to raise him here — a great example, as he only started writing after finishing (20 years?) service at sea, and only lasted a few years after that. He did produce a mundane doorstop (that was made into a movie starring Steve McQueen), but his SFF is much more interesting.
@74: Gilman has always written very slowly; there may still be more coming, although it’s been half a dozen years since her last fiction.
@64: I notice you don’t address the central issue in @0’s discussion: that Del Rey was was losing money because on Gilliland’s books because it wasn’t printing enough to make them widely available.
I’m another who wished Janet Kagan had had the chance write more.
I also wished Midori Snyder would write more books (she still has an active blog, but her last book was in 2010). Or Michaela Roessner, whose last novel came out in 1999 (her website hasn’t been touched since 2005). Or Caroline Severance who wrote one sf and a south seas fantasy trilogy, also back in the 90s, and sadly passed away in 2015.
So many women who dropped a handful of wonderful books, and then vanished..
Elizabeth Willey: three very entertaining if somewhat “Amber” influenced fantasy novels in the 90s, but nothing since.
@83) Ward Moore also wrote a short novel (about 32,000 words) that appeared in a single issue of Amazing, called “Transient”. Stories of that length often separate book publication in those days, but not this one! (Probably because it’s actively terrible, in my opinion.)
I read up on him a while back and I have the impression that both his non-SF novels, especially Cloud by Day, are fairly well regarded.
I was surprised to learn that his third wife was Raylyn Moore, who published a number of often quite interesting SF stories (and one novel.) Raylyn Moore wrote fiction beginning in 1954 (as Raylyn Perrey, I assume), but doesn’t seem to have turned to SF until she married Ward Moore in the late 1960s.
M.K. Wren – the three books of The Phoenix Legacy, and A Gift Upon The Shore. Some mysteries as well, but I haven’t seen them.
I am extremely gratified at the sheer number of folks who shared my first thought (Barry Hughart).
Jack Womack!
His few books left such a lasting impression, I think about them often 20 (30?) years later.
@85: One of the realities of publishing is that you cannot force the outlets to take more books by an author than they want. The problem we had with with Alexis was that though I loved his books, readers apparently did not. Nor did the sales staff pick up any hints that there was an audience longing for his next book.
As a counter example, I was the acquiring editor for Leo Frankowski. My staff loathed his books, thought they were male-chauvinist; they made me laugh and I was his editor until I left Del Rey (?’95’?). The books were disliked so much that a new hire at Del Rey refused to work on his last manuscript for us. By this time I was well away from Del Rey, but I took over the book; if I’d still been at Del Rey, I’d have fired her. When I was presenting Leo’s second novel to the sales staff, my fervent pitch was interrupted by a woman who said that her accounts couldn’t keep Leo in stock and were lusting after his next book. But she thought the cover was, to be frank, uninspired (she was correct). There was a rustle of agreement among the other reps. Before I could respond, the president of Ballantine stood up and turned to the Art Director: “Get a better cover for that book. I’m sure Owen told us this is a potential break out author [I had not], but we didn’t listen. Let’s fix that.” Leo had problems with illness, so his output was not dependable, but he sure sold books.
The only person at Ballantine for whom Alexis inspired that kind of appreciation was me. And, let’s be frank: Alexis’s books, the sf at any rate, are not easy reads. Alexis’s love of engineering, intricate plots and subtle humor were (and are) not the stuff of which large print-runs are made.
I hope that explains in sufficient detail what happened. If it did not, ask again.
Happy to see Lorna Freeman’s books mentioned. They were sooo good. It still makes me sad to think they’ll be no more.
I also remember the steerswoman books fondly. I was very happy to see the series continue in 2004. Doris Egan’s Gates of Ivory trilogy was one I enjoyed enough that it still resides in my collection.
On a happy note, I was happy to see Susan Matthews’ Under Jurisdiction series continue after so long (first one was An Exchange of Hostages). It had tough themes but compelling characters.
Randall Garrett.
If only for more Lord Darcy stories.
I don’t have any to add, but it’s always fun to see the different names that fans add to these. I hope to see mine on a list like this. Well, in a way, because I hope to write everything I can. But I know I’ll never write all of my ideas.
https://dmturner.org/about-dmt/
Delia Marshall Turner has written two short novels that I like very much and she’s written two more, and has a blog. Thanks for the post which has inspired me to look her up.
Frankowski’s fiction was vile about women. His _The Crosstime Engineer_ had a carefully set-up pro-rape sequence. Knights were allowed to have sex with any woman they wanted, but the women liked sex with knights. Except that one woman was fixated on Conrad, the time traveler, and there was a knight who had a crush on her. So he raped her (with the connivance of her friends, I think) and afterwards she was pleased.
One of the later books had an angry woman on the cover, and I’ve wondered whether it was her, but I stopped reading his books. I considered boycotting Baen, but they were also publishing Bujold.
@58 I agree totally. Zenna Henderson’s work was delightful and different. The People stories created a consciousness that still haunts me, but I first came to her work through “The Anything Box” anthology, and so many of those stories resonated in strange ways.
I can still remember what Shreepril means.
@96) Totally agree about Frankowski. The first Cross Time Engineer book was kind of fun, but they were declining in quality, and then came the engineered rape scene, and I threw the book across the room and never read another word by him.
(There’s a scene almost as bad in one of Howard Myers’ stories. (Plus a sequence where the protagonist has his way with a girl with an adult body but the mind of a young child.) Myers (who also wrote as “Verge Foray”) is another writer who died quite young, but I don’t put him on a list of writers I wish had published more.)
@64, belatedly, you’re welcome!
@96 and @98. I remember the scenes you discuss, and I recall discussing them with Leo (see below). That Leo’s world is male chauvinist is not to be doubted. That the male chauvinism of the 14th Century, in Poland, might have been a bit different, even startlingly so, I do not doubt. If you do not believe that even today many women are attracted to men of power and wealth, you haven’t been to the Riviera or certain cities in Switzerland lately.
By saying the above, I am not trying to demean your views; I understand them and sympathize with them. But I was a publisher. The books appealed to me, and so I thought they might appeal to others. I was correct. As a publisher it is one’s duty (unless one is also the owner of the company) to attempt to make a profit for one’s house. This is generally done by publishing books that readers will want to read.
I recall discussing the very points you mention with Leo, because I thought people might find those aspects of his male-centric world unsettling. We did not agree that the scenes were “okay” but Leo made it clear that in his mind, given the conditions established in the book, the actions described were not out of character. He convinced me that he had thought over the material very carefully. So we kept the scenes you found so offensive and I found mildly unsettling; I did not believe I should pass up the chance to please a lot of readers because a few might take offense.
You might say I should have listened to my staff? Why? I liked the books, they didn’t. The proof is in the publishing. Here I was correct. With other authors I was incorrect. I allowed “my staff” (never more than 5 editors) to publish books I didn’t like; the proof, again, is in the publishing. Sometimes they were right, sometimes wrong.
It took a bit of digging but the Wayback Machine was able to verify my memory that Del Rey dumped Frankowski [1], thus the move to Baen. Baen subsequently declined to acquire more books from him in 2005. It may be his appeal to readers and publishers wore off.
1: When an author leaves one publisher of another, it could be because the new publisher made a better offer. I wanted to rule that out. His site rather bitterly blamed the same person “who dumped Robert Heinlein.” I am drawing a complete blank as to who that could be, although his characterization of that person suggests that it was a woman.
He did write a fair amount of books of admittedly-varying quality, but I was really hoping to get one more book out of Richard Adams before his passing. (In my selfishly-idealized world, he would have written a novel set in the Zakalon Empire, post-Shardik.)
More Kevin O’Donnell, Jr. novels would have been nice.
For that matter, I’d love to see what John Brunner might have written in the five years he invested in The Great Steamboat Race, had he decided against trying to pull a John Jakes.
As much as we all appreciate folks who are willing to firsthand knowledge of authors and the publishing process, we also want to avoid delving too deeply into the personal lives of those involved or engaging in speculation or hearsay, even with the best of intentions. Let’s try to keep the focus on the work/books as much as possible–thanks!
@99: there is a huge gap between “many women are attracted to power” and “whatever power does with a woman, however unwilling she is, is not rape”. It is not impossible that 14th-century Poland took the latter position (although from what I’ve read of other societies, the droit du seigneur story was more likely to be told of some other time or place), but the idea that the woman was really just waiting to be thoroughly serviced and would be content with the result is even less plausible — what I’ve read suggests it was the invention of 19th-century writers of ~gothics. (There’s also the implausible number of things Conrad was good enough at to transplant 6 centuries back — even Twain’s Connecticut Yankee was not nearly so skilled — but I suppose that could be considered … servicing … a certain class of readers.)
@102: +1 on both. The McGill Feighan stories were trivial but fun, and I was pleased when Brunner was Worldcon GoH in 1983 (although A New Settlement of Old Scores was a huge amount of work to produce) and disappointed at the little that came after.
I saw Robert Jordan mentioned above, and I heartily agree with that, even though he wrote quite a bit.
One I haven’t seen mentioned that got cut off way too soon to me is Terry Goodkind, he had some new and fascinating series going on, that will now never be finished.
Elizabeth! Marie! Pope!
The Perilous Gard and The Sherwood Ring are both perfect, but that’s all we ever got from her! A great tragedy!
@2 Paul D – she’s working on them!
Octavia Butler! A tragic accidental loss.
It would have been nice to get more books from Alfred Bester of the same quality as The Stars My Destination and The Demolished Man, rather than what we got, which was The Computer Connection and Golem 100.
@reddwarf (50), yes! Doris Egan and City of Diamond was the first one I thought of. She is still in the world, but gives no sign of currently working on the trilogy, sadly.
@reddwarf
Also, Tamara Siler Jones – whose Dubric trilogy was fantastic. She’s written a few other things (after a long absence). A recent, alternate version of the Dubric books has muddied the waters a bit, but I’d love to see new stories there (there is an Amazon Vella).
Jack Finney – I’m not a fan of time travel books generally, but his are great!
Richard Adams – his non-Watership Down books are well worth reading, but there aren’t too many.
PC Hodgell – the Kencyrath books sort of trickle out from time to time (and the publishers have confused matters by combinging some books).
Rebecca Campbell – that’s not really fair because she’s just starting, but I hope there’s a lot more like Arboreality coming.
Good article, poignant, even. I regret, however, that the great American writer, Terry Bisson, is not mentioned by name as the author who completed Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, a fine novel in its own right. As for depression, Bisson once told me that Miller reported that toward the end of his life, trying to write was like “spitting through a screen.”
Great comments thread.
+Joy Chant & Rosemary Kirstein
And a couple of current writers.
I’d add Iain M Banks. He did write a bunch before his death, but I feel there could have been so much more.
Susanna Clarke!
I know she’s still writing and just released a book last year; but with only really 2 novels and a collection of short stories over the last 20 years it’s just not enough to satisfy me.
The other obvious one, for me, is George R. R. Martin. Although today I loathe him for ruining big, unfinished series for me, my younger self still craves the rest of ASOFAI.
I’ve still not started Sanderson’s big series, even though he’s proven that he can publish good books on a decent schedule. I just bought Way of the Kings to so I can dip my toe in hopefully. But this fear of unfinished series has kept me from Rothfuss, and a few other “heavy hitters” because I just can’t handle the waiting and not knowing.
For reference I read Game of Thrones at 16 when it had been out for about a year. I’m now 40 and have spent more than 50% of my whole life waiting on resolution. In short, it sucks. As you all know
115: If it will make you feel better, only my previously mentioned desire not to be a fount of endless negativity (the most useless treasure to find in D&D) prevents me from writing “Five Books Whose Failure to Materialize Fills Me With Despair”. The record setter is The Finger Pointing Solward, which at one point I thought I’d been waiting for since the 1970s, only to discover Kingsbury first mentioned it _before I was born_.
Geraldine Harris, who wrote the Seven Citadels fantasy quartet (Prince of the Godborn, Children of the Wind, The Dead Kingdom, and The Seventh Gate), one stand-alone novel I only just learned about this year (White Cranes Castle), and apparently about two short stories. The Seven Citadels books look on the surface like bog-standard plot coupon quest fantasy and turn out to be something vastly more sophisticated, with an ending I hated as a kid and which made me cry buckets when I re-read it a few months ago. I’m pretty sure she was a significant, unrecognized influence on my feelings about worldbuilding in fantasy: her setting is incredibly rich for being developed in such a short space, and she has a knack for weaving the texture of the world through her scenes such that it feels like it’s present and real all the time, not painted on here and there for color.
Daniel Keys Moran — not to be confused with Daniel Keyes — has actually been returning to writing in recent years! He’s primarily the author of the Continuing Time series, who put out Emerald Eyes, The Long Run, and The Last Dancer decades ago, then vanished. Apparently the reason for his disappearance was full-time parenting to something like five kids, which is kind of charming to me because usually that’s the explanation for a female author vanishing off the face of the planet, not a male one. I read the original Continuing Time books in reverse order, which worked peculiarly well. I doubt he’ll ever finish that series, since his plan was for something like thirty installments, but the nature of the story is such that it can survive being incomplete — I’m just glad for any additional bits of it we get.
Still alive, I think, but dormant for the best part of thirty years: Ray Aldridge’s Emancipator trilogy had enough of Jack Vance about it to make me wish we’d had more.
One addition… Chris Wooding…
Many don’t know of him and his amazing fantasy series The Braided Path. It is easily one of my most recommended fantasy series as so few know of him. His books have been getting more exposure but initially it was that no North American publishing house had picked his stuff up. My copies are from the UK that were sold in Canada via a joint venture (type thing) with a small Canadian publishing house.
Just looking at other comments it seems a lot of OOP or hard to get items are a large piece of this issue; and not just that the author didn’t write a lot
Robert Frezza, who I believe was also suspected of being cut in the Del Rey purge that @64 states did not occur. His Small Colonial War series had pretty much wrapped up, but I think that McClendon’s Syndrome (despite being tied up in ribbons at the end of VMR) still could have had more books. He was a fun writer, with a sense of humor that coincided nicely with mine.
Now I’m going to get controversial – how about authors that have kept producing, but appear to have orphaned series short of any conclusion? John Ringo seems to do this a lot… The Empire of Man/Bronze Battalion series that stopped dead after We Few (rumors persist that a final book will be coming), The Council War series is similarly left hanging with the war unresolved. And I don’t think the Dreen were finished in Claws that Catch in the Looking Glass series? Occasionally I wonder if he felt he’d written himself into a corner with some of these…
Octavia Butler. I had only just discovered her when she was gone too soon. I would have loved sequels to Fledgling.
Jane Emerson wrote one novel that I’m aware of, “City of Diamond”, which was bloody awesome and was clearly the first of a series. Cities in space that are basically forerunner artifacts people have colonized, cut-throat politics but not as the sole human motivator, all kinds of cool stuff just richly strewn through the narrative.
Then as I understand it she had some sort of brain injury and can no longer focus for the long periods of time a novel requires. I wanted that series, I wanted it so bad, and I am so sorry that someone so talented got kneecapped like that.
Rick Cook whose very enjoyable Wizardry series was cut short by an injury or illness, after which he gave up writing fiction. (He did later post fragments of a new novel, but did not complete it before his death.)
122: Jane Emerson is a pen name of Doris Egan’s.
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?2421
The good news is Egan had books published as Doris Egan. The bad news is there are only three (The Gate of Ivory (1989), Two-Bit Heroes (1992), and Guilt-Edged Ivory (1992)), the most recent of which is 31 years old. Her movie and television CV is quite a bit longer:
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0250668/
My husband and I have been binging the original Twilight Zone. The current streaming includes the old intros by Rod Serling. He is just a likely to praise the episode writer as the star. Two names come up over and over. Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont. In my library search for their works I was so sad to learn the fate of Charles Beaumont. Sadly Beaumont died at 38 from some type of dementia. He showed symptoms from age 34. Much of his later work was supposedly ghostwritten by friends who were trying to help him pay the bills. Beaumont split the fees with them. Much of Beaumont’s work is out of print. He published one novel, dozens of short stories, and many film and tv scripts. He also did a series of Micky Mouse that is long out of print.
Terry Pratchett, obviously…
And I really wanted more books from my three favorite “Adams'”:
Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker’s Guide)
Richard Adams (Watership Down and Shardik)
Robert Adams (Horseclans)
Nick Pollotta , whose Bureau 13 books, Illegsl Aliens, and Satellite News book’s woefully remain out of print. Nick was the funniest writer of the 90’s to come out of America, second only to Pratchett. He was taken way too soon.
Another +1 for the absolutely unique Cordwainer Smith.
also. Lucius Shepherd.
Tony Rothman. He wrote 1 science fiction book , “The World is Round,” my favorite Planet of Mystery story. It includes things like the transition from the middle ages to the renaissance, tidal locked orbits, and metallic hydrogen. The name of the planet translates to Freeze-Bake,. It also includes the catch phrase, “Life is cheap on Two Bit.”
Jack Vance was extremely prolific over his long career. I’ve read everything. I want more, lots more.
Rothman has a newer SF book, 2015’s Firebird. Also, I see there’s a new edition of The World is Round, from Lemur.
Another “died too soon” would be Thomas Burnett Swann. His work has pretty much vanished since his death; as I understand, his heirs have prevented all but a few reprints, for unknown personal reasons.
So so many – some from the 80’s and more.
Jerry Pournelle, G. Harry Stine, Milton Lesser, Le Guin, Lloyd Biggle Jr., Rick Cook, L’Engle, Zenna Henderson, Alan Nourse, Andre Norton, Neil Smith, Doc Smith, and so many, many more. Fortunately, a lot of new authors are churning out content that is, if not high on the literary scale, a ton of fun to read. Think Jerry Boyd, J. Cheney, Travis Taylor, and many others. I wish TOR could put more into print.
The list is endless. They were authors who could bind you into a story without preaching to you. At least, not too much! Some made you wish your could live in the worlds they created. :)
I strongly dislike when series are not completed. It is understandable if an author dies suddenly and it can’t be helped.
I believe that when a series is started it is almost like a contract between the author and the readers that this story will be completed.
So we all know the big ones: thanks George R. R. Martin, I read all of the giant books!! And well I have a couple of books by Patrick Rothfuss collecting dust as I am not going to bother to start reading them until the series is finished!
There is another series that is way under the radar called The Exiles by Melanie Rawn. I came across these books on a shelf where I worked. I read and really enjoyed them and have been waiting for the final book ever since. The second book was released in 1997. Ms. Rawn did eventually come out and say that she was having troubles with her mental health and depression and was taking some time off. Hey, that’s totally cool!! Then, it was I need to write something else to get my mind right. Well now it’s 2023 and 2 series later……..
I don’t think it will ever get published. If a writer starts publishing other books, I think that previous projects are probably dead. It’s been 25 years how do you even remember what you were planning on doing?
Donald Kingsbury. Courtship Rite is a world worth exploring.
#3 and #35 – agreed on both counts. One of the most disappointing things is the unfinished trilogy by Rothfuss.
And, from the first time I read the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings as a kid, I wished for more tales from Middle Earth.
Does no one else remember Edward Llewellyn (The Douglas Convolution, etc.)? I was always hoping for more than the six novels he published. He started writing SF, apparently, just a few years before his retirement as an accomplished biomedical researcher.
There was a long time when Kara Dalkey would have made this list, but she did recently come forth with a new novel, A Sword Named Sorrow. It’s a worthy addition to her work.
@131) I did not know that Swann’s heirs were preventing republication of his books. I had thought that he rushed his last several books into publication because he knew he was dying and wanted to leave something that would provide income for his heir (his mother, I think.) Those final books are significantly lower in quality than his best books, and I feel that his hurrying them might have been the reason the quality declined.
The elephant in the room with discussions of Swann is, of course, his sexuality. Many readers had assumed — because his books are very openly queer in sensibility — that he was gay. I don’t think he ever acknowledged this, and I understand his mother denied it. I could speculate that that might have something to do with his heirs’ attitudes toward republication, but I really don’t know of course. (And we’ve been wrong before about reasons why writers’ heirs refused publication of their work, so we should tread carefully there.)
@112) Yes, Phyllis Eisenstein’s death was a shock, and it came as she was finally publishing new stories about Alaric. She had given me a copy of a novella making up part of a planned novel some years previously — but I never did see that novel come out either. “In the Western Tradition” remains one of the great Time Viewer stories ever.
@125) I recently read a couple of Beaumont’s stories and looked into his life, and learned of his tragic illness. That was really very sad. He was an extremely talented writer with a distinctive sensibility.
JDN@130: I see there’s a new edition of The World is Round, from Lemur.
I’ve been wanting to re-read this book for decades. and never managed to find a copy. The link at Lemur’s site leads to an Amazon page for a book that’s not available. However, this inspired me to do a general search, which turns up Tony Rothman’s very own website, where one can download free MOBI and ePUB versions! I’d happily pay for the download, but there you go.
Michael McDowell. No troubles with publishers or readership but life cut short by AIDS.
It was nice to see H. Beam Piper mentioned (#75). I have long felt that he would have been a serious rival to the Big Names if he hadn’t been take from us too early. Although he may be best known for Little Fuzzy I especially enjoyed his shorter works, such as Omnilingual.
Has anyone else noted Randall Garrett? Another one who we lost to health issues.
There are so many things that can halt a series, many outside the author’s control, that I feel the path to tranquility is to accept that only thing I am entitled to when I buy a book is the book I bought.
(this prejudices me towards books that deliver a complete story, so still not great news for people who write multivolume serials whose instalments cannot stand alone)
templetongate @8
Special Education is the sequel to Threshold. I somehow missed the release of Schrodinger’s Frisbee and it seems to be unavailable anywhere.
Steven R. Boyett also has largely disappeared. He released a sequel to Ariel after 16 years, but what I really want is the continuation of The Architect of Sleep. Sadly the enthusiasm of the furry community seems to have dissuaded him from continuing.
136: Llewellyn taught at UWaterloo, among other places. Given his academic background, he had to have been a colleague of my father’s and I probably met him at one of the giant faculty parties that were the fashion at the time. Unfortunately, I learned that he had taught at UW from his obituary.
(Rather like discovering my grandfather and Jack Vance used the same marina in San Francisco)
Speaking of local authors, Ruth Stuart sold three short SFF stories and had sold a novel to DAW but then died very suddenly of aggressive brain cancer before the novel was published. The novel never appeared.
Melanie Rawn’s never-written book The Captal’s Tower. I loved her books, and her struggles with depression that prevented the completion of that trilogy are tragic. (As someone with clinical depression I absolutely empathize.) I’m glad that she did manage to return to writing in time.
@24 Joy Chant’s work would be beyond wonderful to have more of, as would @53 Austin Tappan Wright (or even Mark Saxton, the Farrar, Straus editor who excavated ISLANDIA from his notes and continued the series modestly faithfully if not beautifully) and @65 Thomas Burnett Swann’s multilayered delights. This thread would make a wonderful syllabus for an SF/F publishing course on “Cautionary Tales to Heed Before Giving Up On A Writer’s Voice and Vision”.
@24, @147 Take a look on Amazon – there’s The High Kings. I read it a couple of years ago –
A re-telling of stories from The Matter of Britain, interspersed with essays on Celtic life and culture. Readers of The Science of Discworld books will be familiar with the format. Some annoying OCR errors, and was Vortigern originally Vortigem? That spelling was consistent throughout, and a quick search suggests it may be the Scottish version of the name. I’m not sure which set of legends Chant was using, there seemed to be elements of all the pre-medieval British/Welsh sources, but none of the later sources like Malory or the Breton accretions like Lancelot. he rather loose linking plot was Arthur’s story, with bardic tales and illustrative essays at various junctures.
Not including authors who died… Anne Logston, who disappeared mid 00s, with her last published novel in 1999. I wish I had ebook versions, but instead I compiled an entire backup collection, just in case. J F Rivkin, who I think was two authors, I have all four of their published books. Pamela C Dean, Paul Kidd, John Levitt, L. Dean James, Holly Lisle, Zorah Greenhalgh, J V Jones (though there are rumors she is back)… wow that’s way more than five, and I’m not nearly done, but I’ll stop there.
For authors who died, I have a list as long as my arm, starting with Douglas Adams.
Next time, how about a list of authors that are still around but don’t have ebook versions available, like Diana Paxson? I neeeed a digital Westria. Paperbacks are not enough for my old eyes anymore
@24. Another vote for Joy Chant. I loved her three books, and her brilliant world-building, and the poetic feel of her writing. She also wrote a retelling of the Arthurian legends called The High Kings, and I’ve been hoping for more from her for about forty years – to no avail. But I believe there are some books out there by her friend, whose name I’ve forgotten, which draw upon the same world, one they invented together.
Too many comments to check, so I’ll just ask: Has anyone yet mentioned Michel Faber? _Under the Skin_ and _The Book of Strange New Things_ are two of my favorite literary sci-fi novels, but unfortunately he seems to have stopped publishing after the untimely death of his wife.
There’s another writer, Galad Elflandsson, one wishes he could write more. He wrote one novel, The Black Wolf, a handful of short stories, and one or two essays. He disappeared as well. The novel can be found easily enough. But not the collection of short stories.
@@@@@ 100: When Leo was dropped from Del Rey, it would have been after I edited his last book for us, when I was a VP at Ballantine and no longer Editor in Chief at Del Rey, i.e., sometime between ’95 and Aug ’99. I don’t know who made the decision. But the handwriting was clearly on the wall. I do not recall how successful his books were by then because IIRC it had been several years since his last book and the earlier figures would have matured out of usefulness.
I know from Leo that he and Baen parted ways over personal issues. His sales might have been a factor but Leo didn’t mention that.
@@@@@105 I read Mandarin and Classical Chinese and have studied W. Han China and earlier (roughly 0 B.C.E. through 12th C. BCE) quite carefully for many years. I was also a Russian lit major and spent a lot of time researching Eastern Europe and Russia both professionally and avocationally. Nothing Leo says in his books leads me to believe that the society he posits is impossible for the 14th century.
@@@@@120: I was Frezza’s acquiring editor. And hands-on editor for his first two novels. I liked his books a lot. I think we gave them mediocre covers but otherwise treated him well. Alas, I cannot recall when or even if we dropped him. My life was fairly busy back then and, as I mentioned, I’m pushing 80. I do remember being annoyed with his sales and being mildly disquieted by the nearly unbroken chain of successes by his good guys. You should accept my assurances that there was no purge. I’m pretty knowledgeable about what happened at Del Rey between ’76 and ’97; for my last year and a half I was too busy to pay attention.
@@@@@129: Judy-Lynn was the acquiring editor for The World Is Round. She assigned it to me as I was the only other sf editor then available; she was too busy making Del Rey successful, and Lester was too valuable to work on a first novel he could not make a NYT’s bestseller. I was unenthusiastic about TWIR; it was irresolute. I liked Tony personally and I love hard sf; just not Tony’s brand. On the other hand, sometime after 1990 I hired a new assistant, a recent Yale grad, and one of the reasons she wanted to work at Del Rey was because we’d published TWIR.
I’d like to put in my vote for Robert Franson; I loved his The Shadow of the Ship. Very nicely done. Fairly unusual. At one point we tried to pressure him into writing another novel but were unsuccessful.
Also what about Rick Gauger? I very much enjoyed Charon’s Ark, but Rick fell ill and never completed the trilogy before I left Random House.
And thanks for the mention of Brian Daley! Great friend. Missed.
@45 !!! I had no idea that Hardy had written sequels. Master of the Five Magics is one of my fav books!
@50 Speaking of fav books, Sorcerer’s Son is one of the first books I ever purchased with an extra special place in my heart. It grieves me every day that a (2nd) sequel exists and I cannot read it.
@53 … Effinger penned one of my favorite pulpy light reads – “The Zork Chronicles,” a story set in the world of the text computer game Zork. Loved his playful take on Joseph Campbell’s analysis and the creation of the Supernatural Wayfarers Association and their annual awards banquet. I’ve long wanted more of that association.
@44–I think I’ve read Winter’s Daughter! Is that the one which includes Stephen the Nearly Lucky?
Sphinx Daybreak (2018) is listed as the second book in the sequence that began with The Shadow of the Ship.
About 3 decades ago when I was working 2 jobs, for a while I read only award-winning books. The Falling Woman, by Pat Murphy, hit every spot for me at that time. I see she wrote some stuff later on, but nothing rose to my limited scope again.
@132: a small press published Biggle’s last novel not that many years ago; it was … disappointing.
@110: +n; I reread The Stars My Destination a few years ago and was still impressed despite the Suck Fairy’s nibbling around the edges. One wonders what would have happened if the good works had sold well enough that he didn’t have to leave the field for a decade to earn a living — could he have kept up the early energy?
Robert E Howard’s books are some of the first novels I’d ever read and his books hold a special place in my heart. I always wished he could have lived long enough to see how popular his stories became. The man basically created Sword and Sorcery after all.
I always wanted more Kane stories from Karl Edward Wagner. I read somewhere that he planned to do a trilogy that elaborated on Kane’s origin. It was to be called Dark Eden I think.
But what’s the deal with J. V. Jones? Back in the 90’s, she had what I thought were successful books; The Barbed Coil and the Book of Words trilogy. They were a little formulaic but I thought they were popular. But I’d put her Sword of Shadows series up there with A Song of Ice and Fire, and for my money, way better than Wheel of Time.
Going back rather far, I wonder what else might have come from Thorne Smith if he hadn’t died of a heart attack at 42. He had nine novels that were definitely in the fantasy realm, plus a half dozen others (two memoirs, a children’s book, a mystery, a book of poetry). Very funny and ahead of their time.
For all her stuff is supposed to be YA, I’d like to add Marcia J. Bennett. I got a copy of Yaril’s Children in the 80s, and rapidly devoured her other three books…I was always disappointed that she didn’t do more in the universe of Yaril’s Children. I always thought that it deserved both prequels and sequels.
Thank you for reminding me of Doris Piserchia. I remember we were so excited about her at the time.
I used to be afraid that George R.R. Martin was doomed to midlist forever, which would have been tragic since I’ve loved his work since I first encountered a short story of his in 1974.
It seems too many of my favorites are dead, and no matter how much they wrote, it would never be enough. Charles Harness, for a start. And count me among those who would have loved more Marid Audran and The Culture. And anything Mike Ford came up with. And though no one could claim he wasn’t reasonably prolific, I would have been a happier person if I could have kept on reading at least one new Pratchett every year until the day I died.
I’ve always wondered what happened to Katie Waitman, author of 1998 Compton Crook Award winning novel “The Merro Tree”, and of “The Divided”. In an October 1999 Locus magazine article I found onlibe, Waitman stated she had completed a sequel to the first book, tentatively calling it “The Roots of Foregiveness” and shared her thoughts about the concepts she wanted to explore next. But I’ve not heard of a third book being published, nor any other under that name.
Further to my comment on Joy Chant, I’ve unearthed her collaborator’s name – Ann Walland-Moore. I recently bought a second-hand pb copy of her ‘The Lady of the Red Moon’, but haven’t got around to reading it yet. It appears to be her only book.
I wish Douglas Adams had written both more and less.
This is because I wish the BBC had kept the radio series going longer, and he had therefore continued with that rather than writing the books (and had he then written the book adaptations, he would have had more radio material to adapt).
The radio series is vastly better than the books, and the books adapted from the radio series are vastly better than the books he wrote fresh. People who knew him have often said he wasn’t well-suited to being a novelist writing alone in a room, and it shows in the work he produced under different circumstances.
And on top of all that, he was taken from us too soon.
Wow, The Lady of the Red Moon and its author seem to be obscure enough to have been overlooked by ISFDB and SFE.
August Derleth: I wish he had written more “original” stories, and fewer “Cthulhu Mythos” and “Solar Pons” stories.
@158 Thanks for pointing that out; I’ll chase down a copy.
@68: Thank you for mentioning Robert Stallman. His Book of the Beast trilogy gave an SFnal turn to the werewolf legend and was an exciting addition to that subgenre of SF. The third volume, published posthumously, may have been less strong due to his early death at age 50 (in 1980), from, as I recall, cancer. I didn’t take classes from him, but I did attend a reading he did from the first Beast novel while I attended Western Michigan University. I later bought the trilogy in paperback, but no longer have it. He wrote with great energy and produced vivid characters, and I still wish he hadn’t died so soon. He was a lovely man.
@168) My last attempt got swallowed somehow — I think I messed up while editing. I wanted to point out that as the SFE hews to a fairly strict definition of “Science Fiction”, it tries not to include authors of only Fantasy. For that reason not only does it not cover Ann Walland-Moore, it does not even cover her far better known collaborator, Joy Chant.
I often return to The Masters of Solitude and Wintermind by Marvin Kaye and Parke Godwin for comfort reading. Godwin’s Wikipedia entry states, “The third volume, Singer Among The Nightingales, was partially written by Godwin and Kaye before their respective deaths, but never completed.” Sigh. I don’t suppose there’s anyone who’d want to complete this, and idk whether the authors’ estates would allow it. I really wanted that third book resolution.
173: AUGH I KEEP FORGETTING THAT!
I have to say I did not expect comments to take off like this.
@173 and @175: The Fantasy Encylopedia is online under https://sf-encyclopedia.com/fe/. It has an entry for Joy Chant but not for Ann Walland-Moore.
@176) But as the online Fantasy Encyclopedia has not been updated since its original 1997 publication, it wouldn’t cover Ann Walland-Moore’s novel The Lady of the Red Moon, which seems to have been published in 2005. (Though I may be wrong about that!) And, actually, as that novel was (I think) self-published, it might not cover her anyway.
“Fortunate Fall” remains one of my favorite books, and I am constantly on the lookout for new-to-me used copies to give away. This is GREAT news!!!
George Alec Effinger left us far too soon! He published numerous short stories as well as his Marid books, starting with When Gravity Fails. Scrolling back through the comments, I see I’m not the only one who wishes we had more from him.
Robert Anton Wilson, who wrote some weirdly wonderful books about the Illuminati and Schrodinger’s Cat.
Robert Jordan, not so much for his books as for his company at cons. What a delightful man he wa
Authors on the poop list because they haven’t finished what they promised:
David Gerrold (The Chtorr series)
Patrick Rothfuss (The Kingkiller Chronicles)
David Feintuch only wrote 9 novels, 7 of which were space opera in the style of CS Forester. But they are stellar!!!
I too wish Alfred Bester had written more great science fiction. From what I understood, he just made too much more money editing big name magazines and stopped writing.
A sequel to John Boston’s “Naked Came the Sasquatch.” I can’t believe we didn’t get more of the Fenberg brothers. I still hold my original copy of this book up as one of life’s little treasures. I have laughed out loud so many times reading it countless times over the years.
Iain M. Banks sadly died relatively young and I really miss the world building and wit of his Culture novels in particular.
Gilliland’s books remain favourites of mine! His Rosinante stories have a hugely surprising conclusion despite the smooth buildup to them.
I really thought he quit writing because he was old. I mean, maybe I am wrong about his age but without knowing the details here, I just thought he retired.
Maybe Michael Kring and his Space Mavericks fit more into books I loved as a naïve and unsophisticated teen, rather than the current list, but Kring wrote only the two stories that I am aware of had planned to write two more…so far, those other two have not been written.
I don’t know how Tor feels about outside links. Here is one for Kring’s books: https://www.bookseriesinorder.com/michael-kring/
I gotta say the article there reads as if Kring wrote it and loves himself nearly as much as I loved those stories 30+ years ago!
Vernor Vinge. I keep hoping he will publish again, but he seems to have retired.
Late comment but… Mayhem said at comment 45:
Not true! He published a pile of books on Lulu but never continued this particular series.
@80: Thank you for this information! It’s good to know that Dank continued writing, even if she did not continue with fantasy.
I haven’t read her myself but I’m surprised to see no mention of Elizabeth A Lynn
Michaela Roessner, a couple of brilliant novels in an unfinished trilogy, a handful of short stories over the years, and nothing after that. I was always wishing for more.
Now waiting for the Nicoll article “Five Authors We WIsh Had Written Less.”
192: See previous comments regarding indulging my tendency to be a swirling vortex of negativity.
192: See also “recursion.”
And as a bonus bit of recursion, Tor Books sent me a “New comment has been posted” notification for my own post.
As the number of comments on a post approaches infinity, the probability of a repeated (verbatim or otherwise) comment approaches 1.
@191: “Five Authors who Wrote Just the Right Amount”