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Scott Laz
Posted 2016-12-31 6:33 PM (#14837 - in reply to #12424)
Subject: Re: Author! Author!		Quote Reply



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Posts: 263
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Location: Gunnison, Colorado		@charlesdee: I haven't read any of Lafferty's novels, but have really like the short stories. The problem with challenges, if course, is that you can end up disappointed; but "nothing ventured, nothing gained..."

@jontlaw: PKD is one of the few writers that I've read pretty much everything by, and always enjoy rereading. Even if you don't get to 10, any multiple of 5 by a single author counts as a successful completion of the challenge!

@daxxh: Isn't Under the Dome over 1000 pages? Some of those Stephen King tomes should count as more than one book...

It's New Year's Eve, so I thought I'd tally up the challenge results before they disappear into the ether:

19 participants and 173 books read (unless anyone tags more in the next few hours)!

Here's a list of the authors with at least five books completed by a challenge participant (there were also quite a few cases where people came close, but didn't complete five books) -- it's a wide-ranging group of authors.

Martha Wells
Jack McDevitt
Tim Powers
Greg Bear
Patricia McKillip
Max Gladstone
Lois McMaster Bujold (2 participants)
Terry Goodkind
Philip K. Dick
James Howard Kunstler
Tanith Lee
Ursula K. Le Guin
James Blish
J. K. Rowling
Stephen King
Michael Moorcock
Jack Vance

I hope everyone found the challenge rewarding!

I created this challenge because I was curious as to how many other readers might match my (admittedly, semi-neurotic) compulsion toward "completism" when it comes to a favorite author. A few years ago I started the project of reading Jack Vance and Michael Moorcock chronologically, from the beginning of their careers. In both cases, this meant getting through some of the lesser-known lower-quality work before getting to the really "good stuff." I find that this approach does, however, lead to some interesting comparisons in regard to the way writers develop. In Vance's case, he wrote a classic right off the bat (The Dying Earth, 1949) before, probably due to the demands of the genre magazines of the '50s, shifting more toward science fiction and producing lots of entertaining stories, though nothing that matches The Dying Earth, before discovering his forte in series novels in the late '60s. Along with a couple of standalones (Emphyrio was especially good), I read two of the major series: Planet of Adventure and the Durdane sequence. The former is really classic Vance, and highly recommended to anyone looking for a place to start, while the latter moves into weirder territory. Both are from the first half of the '70s, and show increasing mastery of the idiosyncratic prose style and descriptions of odd cultural settings that are the big attraction of his work, and which was there from the beginning of his career. In Moorcock's case, it's been interesting to see the way his "multiverse" idea developed over his early career. He was extremely prolific (most of the ten I read this year appeared from 1969-1971), and it was at the beginning of the '70s that it becomes clear that he had embraced the idea that all of his stories could be taking place simultaneously in multiple universes, with characters taking on multiple incarnations throughout the "multiverse", with the overriding theme of an "eternal champion" fated to maintain the balance between chaos and order. While each novel is entertaining in itself, readers who have read more by Moorcock get an extra "kick" from seeing the connections between them, and considering how the pretty basic overarching idea can take on a slightly different aspect in each story. The exploration of the multiverse concept reaches a peak in the second, third, and fourth volumes of the Jerry Cornelius novels, wherein the title character (or variations of this character) bounce around the multiverse replaying conflicts in a variety of settings. Along with the highly imaginative fantasy series set in the multiverse (Elric, Hawmoon, Corum, etc.), there's an element of trippiness to all this that was certainly part of the appeal in the late '60s and '70s. I'm curious to see how these ideas are developed in later novels.

So, for next year, I will renew the challenge. I was pleasantly surprised by the number of people who signed up and followed through on the 2016 challenge, but next time (unless there are objections), I'll reduce the single-author multiples from five to four, and see how that goes...

Thanks to everyone who participated, and here's hoping for a happy New Year...

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