[CT] [OT] You suck :) (was re: Buffy)

[Daniel Moran]

Spider has always struck me as one of the better people in the field of 
science fiction -- but I've been completely unable to read his later work. 
(And I was a huge fan of his earlier work.) I couldn't get 10 pages into 
his most recent Callahan novel.

It's frightening how badly science fiction and fantasy writers as a group 
age. Larry Niven is another example; I'd list him as one of the half dozen 
best, and certainly cleverest, writers the field ever produced, based on 
his early work -- but his last Ringworld novel was virtually unreadable.

Heinlein, same problem. Clarke less so, but still some dropoff. L. Neil 
Smith, 2-3 really nice books, followed by a descent into ideological 
psychosis. (To be fair, he strikes me as an honest man who means well. This 
doesn't make him less crazy.) Robert Jordan managed to collapse while 
writing a single series. George Lucas? Probably -- I'll wait for the next 
movie before making up my mind on that one, but it doesn't look good.  I 
found Frank Herbert's last couple of novels actually painful.

You could argue that some of this is just regression to the mean. (Well, 
some of it surely is; nobody hits home runs all the time. Larry McMurtry 
wrote the best novel I've ever read, "Lonesome Dove" -- he couldn't 
continue writing the best novel I'd ever read, and of course his later 
novels are not as good ... but his later novels are not substantially worse 
than his early novels.) But most of it is a general decline in the quality 
of work of sf/fantasy writers, linked directly to age, or perhaps success.

It might be easier to list the writers who didn't suffer precipitous 
dropoffs in the quality of their work -- Asimov, though he was never an 
elegant writer to begin with. Sturgeon -- quantity of output dropped, but 
quality may actually have improved -- his last novel, "Godbody," is 
brilliant. I haven't re-read Bradbury recently enough to have a 
well-thought-out opinion, but "Green Shadows, White Whale," a later novel, 
is at least arguably better than any of his early works.

Nonetheless, this is a caution to me. The idea that my best novel might 
have been written at 24 is genuinely frightening.
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