Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
I do wonder how many series like this weren't intended to be series, and suffer because the author never asked "If this book does well, the editor will want more. Am I comfortable writing a series in this setting? Do I have more to say beyond what I'm putting into the first book?"
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I read someplace that Asprin always planned a series (he said he'd originally intended
Another Fine Myth to be the title of the second book, not the first), but it was many years before the first sequel appeared, and it seemed tired and pedestrian when it did. Not sure about Stasheff - I seem to remember he wrote
King Kobold not that long after
Wizard in Spite of Himself, but it sank into thoroughly deserved obscurity in its first incarnation and it was years before the series was revived. I suspect you're right about the Dickson, though;
The Dragon and the George would have been a perfectly good standalone, and again it was years before the inferior sequels appeared.
P.S. All this reminds me, one sequel I really wish
would appear is the lost
Venture of Karres manuscript. I mean, Schmitz managed to finish
Witches of Karres to very near the standard of the original novella, so there's hope that his imagination wouldn't have flagged for the sequel. (Before anybody mentions the Flint/Lackey travesty, I'm trying to expunge it from my memory.)