Sequelitis / Literature

Examples of Sequelitis in Literature.

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• Most sequels to works in the public domain are awful, or at least so inferior to the originals that fans will invariably be disappointed. One reason for this is that only the very best books survive the test of time: perhaps a sequel to Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South would be comparable to the original, but any sequel to Pride and Prejudice would pale in comparison. Another is that anyone, no matter how dreadful a writer they may be, can publish a sequel to a public domain work. That's not possible for a work under copyright, where the copyright holder can prevent the publication of any unauthorized sequel.
• Sequelitis is Older Than Feudalism: even The Iliad and The Odyssey of Homer were followed by The Trojan Cycle, which Classical writers believed to have been written later, and by other authors. All but a handful of lines from these are lost today, but most ancient literary critics concurred that they weren't very good anyway.
• Andrzej Sapkowski named it as one of major SF&F plagues in his No Gold in the Grey Mountains article... and didn't forgot to add a Hypocrisy Nod.
  I myself, while considering myself an attentive inspector of the news of fantastics, sometimes don't buy the freshly released sixth book of a saga because my attention somehow failed to register previous five. But much, much more frequently I decline to buy tome one if its cover grins with a warning: 'First Book Of the Magic Shit Cycle'.
• While none of the 365 Days books were exactly critical darlings, the third and final book in the trilogy, The Next 365 Days, is the lowest-rated and even annoyed legitimate fans of the first two installments. The main complaints are around the resolution of the love triangle in which Massimo becomes the villain of the story and Laura leaves him for Nacho (whom she'd been cheating on him with for much of the book anyway), and Laura also behaving in ways readers found to be extremely selfish and hypocritical while the narrative tried to play it sympathetically. The ending was so controversial that it's been speculated this is why it was heavily altered for the film adaptation.
• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was, famously, followed by the Even Better Sequel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. However, some years later when Mark Twain fell into some financial difficulties and needed some good-selling books to pay the bills, he wrote two additional sequels, Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective. There's a reason you've probably never heard of them. Suffice to say, the characters are Flanderized nearly beyond all recognition and the plots are merely flimsy excuses for satire of popular genres of the day.
• Gregory Benford once wrote a sequel to Arthur C. Clarke's amazing Against the Fall of Night, called Beyond the Fall of Night. It's awful, primarily because Against sets up a massive battle between good and evil with a disembodied intelligence called Vanamonde battling the evil Mad Mind. Benford completely ignores that and makes Beyond be about a very strange track of evolution and Vanamonde barely appears right at the end, and is almost completely superfluous, having the Mad Mind being defeated by a specific branch of humanity. Against the Fall of Night is loved by science fiction fans, but Beyond the Fall of Night tends to be hated.
• Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake series started as a quite cool detective series, but it's debated on when the quality slipped. Some state that it began with book five onward, others state that book nine was the last coherent book, most agree that books 10 to 22 are just plain bad, with 23 onward getting deep into completely unreadable territory.
• In The Bible, there's the famous story of David and Goliath that everyone's heard of. Another story from the Bible is the one where a guy named Elhanan manages to kill Goliath's brother, Lahmi. That one isn't nearly as popular as the one about Goliath. Had you ever heard of it before you read this?
• The sequel novels in The Bourne Series.
  • They contain, in the first addition, Dropped A Bridge On two of the most important characters in the first twenty pages, a character who is canonically supposed to be dead suffering from Parental Abandonment, Comic-Book Time, and much, much, much, much Canon Defilement. The second addition is no less egregious, including Dropping A Bridge On Marie In Between Books, having Bourne abandon all common sense, ridiculously atrocious pseudoscience, almost downright offensive portrayals of Washington, DC, and Bourne suddenly becoming an expert on everything, including knowing every language from Arabic to an obscure Ethiopian dialect, when in canon he's just supposed to be a professor of Oriental Studies. Seriously. Also, he carries around a PlayStation 3 for no other reason than it looks cool.
  • The Bourne Deception is plain humiliation. Bourne visits a Balinese shaman, sleeps with a woman who was formerly his friend's girlfriend, and mentions virtually nothing about his children. In The Bourne Ultimatum, he is 50, and that is when the Soviet Union still existed; the book mentions the timeline had passed 2005 since Indonesian Bali Bombing. The new author transforms this tortured amnesiac soul into ageless James Bond-wannabe.
• Roger Zelazny's The Chronicles of Amber series: Don't talk to fans about the sequel series focusing on Merlin. And don't even dare mention the John Betancourt knockoffs, officially sanctioned or not.
• Robert E. Howard's most famous creation Conan The Cimmerian suffers horribly from this. Not only are there endless continuations, prequels, and other adventurers of vastly varying quality by many different authors but the original stories were rewritten in places to make them sync up with the sequels. However, even the original stories occasionally suffer from sequelitis. Because of the character's popularity, Howard knew he could sell any Conan story to Weird Tales and wrote some very cliched tales (such as The Devil in Iron) which were effectively knock-offs of his own earlier efforts when he needed quick cash.
• A Court of Thorns and Roses:
  • A large group of fans and detractors alike felt let down by A Court of Wings and Ruin, mainly for focusing on Feyre's love life more than the war itself, retcons involving Lucien and Mor, and a lot of Deus ex Machina towards the end, especially the arrival of Feyre's father and Rhysand dying for all of five minutes before coming back to life. Some readers also found the plot sluggish and repetitive compared to the previous two books, especially in the first half, and that it didn't have enough interesting content to justify its 700+ page count (which is notably higher than the previous entries').
  • Probably the best way to describe the reception to A Court of Frost and Starlight. Many fans found it to be a very pointless installment for something that was meant to "bridge" the two series together. Characters felt very out of character, Feyre stays at home while Rhysand does all the political work (which was a major issue with Tamlin) and regardless of how one feels about Tamlin, most readers generally agree that his storyline is done. As a result, Rhys mocking him came across less like a Take That, Scrappy! moment, and more like beating a dead horse so much the meat is paste. The reception for this novella got so bad that even some of the more hardcore fans confessed to being tired of Feyre and Rhysand.
• Quite a few people have the latter half of Stephen King's The Dark Tower series falling into this trope. It became especially evident when he had elements of DT leak into his non-DT novels (especially Hearts in Atlantis and Insomnia). Even if you do like the later installments for their writing or whatever, it definitely shows by the end that King didn't actually know where he was going with the story to begin with and had to just come up with something without the benefit of having planned in advance.
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid:
  • An In-Universe example with the fictional Slumber Party Pals series. Greg thinks the first 30 books were good, but that the quality went downhill when the author ran out of ideas. Volume #87 is titled Lindsey Loses a Mitten.
  • Rather ironically, many people feel the same way about Diary of a Wimpy Kid itself, as quite a few fans think the books have been getting progressively less funny with each new installment and its characters are becoming more unlikable as they suffer from Flanderization. It doesn't help that the number of books is fourteen going on fifteen (plus two spin-off novels) with no end in sight, and much like your average sitcom, nobody is allowed to grow up or change.
• Dinoverse suffers this to an extent, though it's only six books long. The first book, which was split into two, was more thoughtful and less Anvilicious than they became. Characters became better people, but it was due to their experiences rather than appearing to be the intention of the M.I.N.D. Machine. Rules and powers set down as rigid later were more flexible then, animals were less anthropomorphized, and there was more depth of character interaction. The last book abandons the idea of traveling through time by astral projecting and possessing other creatures to go with a more standard portal mechanic, and female characters stop being proactive for no reason.
• The Doctor Who Past Doctor Adventures novel The Quantum Archangel. A sequel to "The Time Monster", which the author claimed was intentionally "the ultimate in fanwank", it's basically "The Time Monster" ONLY BIGGER! So the TOMTIT machine that affects space-time is replaced by a more advanced version called the TITAN Array that affects Calabi-Yau space (the "extra" dimensions in superstring theory). TOMTIT was secretly created by the Master to trap a Chronovore; TITAN is commandeered by the Master to wipe the Chronovores out and give himself their powers. The Third Doctor disrupts TOMTIT with an arrangement of forks and wine bottles; the Sixth Doctor builds a much bigger version to disrupt TITAN. The Third Doctor and the Delgado Master go on a jaunt to Ancient Atlantis; the Sixth Doctor and the Ainley Master visit a forgotten planet from the beginning of the universe. Stuart Hyde gets temporarily youthed instead of aged, the Doctor attempts to Time Ram the Master's TARDIS, and Kronos again Deus Ex Machinas everything at the end. Even the throwaway gag that "E = MC cubed" in the Vortex gets reused and amped up; in Calabi-Yau Space, apparently, E = MC to the fourth power. It's so blatant about it that some feel it goes beyond conventional sequelitis and becomes good, or at least successfully does what it wants to do.
• Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series has this. The first book was stunning and awesome, and the second and third that followed were, while having their problems, quite good. Unfortunately, she kept writing, and things went to hell in a handbasket. She contradicted established canon from one book to the next, couldn't keep names, ages, and places straight, and the plots devolved into pathetic monstrosities.
• Starquake, the sequel to Dragon's Egg, is usually ignored, both for its much bleaker tone that quickly causes a Happy Ending Override before the book is even a quarter done, in which the cheela are forced back into the Dark Ages for several millennia of subjective time, while the humans and offworlders can only look on helplessly, but also because of science marching on in a bad way: we now know that starquakes are accompanied by massive gamma ray bursts that would sterilize any planet too close, so realistically, all the humans and the offworld cheela should have died. Most discussions of this series, both on and off this wiki, completely ignore the events of the sequel.
• The Earth's Children series eventually ran into this. The first book, The Clan of the Cave Bear, is highly acclaimed. While the first three sequels, The Valley of Horses, The Mammoth Hunters and The Plains of Passage, are still widely enjoyed by fans, it is noted that they increasingly suffer from excessive Padding and slow pacing (especially in the middle sections), which can get tedious considering the books get increasingly longer with each installment (e.g. book one has just under 500 pages, by book three the page count is over 600 and counting). Comparatively, The Clan of the Cave Bear is shorter with a more even spread of impactful events. Some readers also don’t enjoy the increased focus on things like relationship drama and familial conflict, feeling it comes off as 'soap-opera-y' compared to the earlier emphasis on conflicts like survival, trauma and the search for belonging. Sequelitis didn’t fully set in until the last two books; while some readers do like parts of them, it’s generally agreed they’re weakest entries in the series (to the point some fans prefer to treat The Plains of Passage as the final book). Specifically:
  • The Shelters of Stone took over a decade to be released and was consequently seen as a letdown by several readers due to its plot largely consisting of Ayla settling into Zelandonii life and getting involved in a few domestic disputes with the tribe - which provides the only real conflict in the story - and not a lot else. It then rather abruptly ends on a Cliffhanger with Ayla having just given birth to her and Jondalar’s daughter and accepted Zelandoni’s offer to train her as a shaman. For readers, this was especially dull when compared to the previous book, The Plains of Passage, which is a great deal more action-packed and had more genuinely threatening villains and conflicts. Some of the editing in the book raised eyebrows too, namely the Wanton Cruelty to the Common Comma.
  • The first half of The Land of Painted Caves (which also took an unusually long time to come out) follows a similar formula to The Shelters of Stone, with the central conflict of Ayla's Family Versus Career dilemma and her Character Development as a burgeoning spiritual leader only really picking up in the second half; this quickly gets monotonous for some readers, especially seeing as both novels equal close to 800 pages. The sixth book also left several loose ends hanging which some readers had been waiting for around three decades to be resolved, especially regarding relations between Cro-Magnon and the Clan (this was originally a central theme in the books, but ends up all but forgotten about by Painted Caves).
• Ursula K. Le Guin completed the original Earthsea trilogy in 1974. Sixteen years later, she wrote a fourth book, Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea, which suffers from Mood Whiplash, Writer on Board, and a lack of plot. And it wasn't even the last book.
• Orson Scott Card with his Ender and Shadow saga (the first of each series being parallel, and the rest a split following different characters). While the sequel to Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, is widely considered to be just as good if not even better than the first, the final two in that saga, Xenocide and Children of the Mind are overly pretentious and bloated philosophical works that could have easily been cut into one shorter volume. They also leave on a horrible cliffhanger that rivals that of Chapterhouse: Dune which Card has had 13 years to end but instead written a midquel between the first and second books as well as a short story collection. The Ender's Shadow series fares even worse, with the first book being equal to or better than the parallel Ender's Game but taking a steep decline starting with the second. While not as bloated in narrative as the Ender saga's latter books, the Shadow series instead destroys most of the mystery behind Peter's unification of Earth by making him into nothing but an annoying schoolchild and doing absolutely nothing. A 4th sequel is planned, thus putting the series at 11 books. The irony of it all? Some copies of Speaker for the Dead are prefaced with an introduction that talks about how reluctant the author was to revisit Ender just for a second book.
• The Empirium Trilogy: Most fans tend to agree that the last book in the series, Lightbringer, isn't nearly as strong as the previous two novels. A sluggish start, too many POVs, and a poorly executed ending are all common criticisms, even with people who like the book.
• While Fifty Shades of Grey never was a critical favorite, the book Grey—a retelling of the first book from Christian's point of view—has been poorly received even by readers and critics who liked the original trilogy. The two main complaints are as follows:
  • Too much of the text is copied and pasted from the original book.
  • Christian's thoughts are banal, and also way too stalker-like. While Christian certainly acted like a stalker sometimes, it's unpleasant to see that he actually feels and thinks like a stalker.
• Final Fantasy X-2.5: ~Eien no Daishō~ (The Price of Eternity), the novel sequel to the video game Final Fantasy X and its sequel is nearly universally hated in Japan and, unsurprisingly, was never released overseas. For some highlights, Tidus kicks a bomb because he thinks it looks like a blitzball, which ends up killing him in a needlessly gory manner (complete with his disembodied head landing on Yuna). She revives him, which incidentally brings back everything from the Farplane, including Sin, but he's made of pyreflies and will vanish if he realizes this. Rather than attempt to salvage it and play this tragically or have Yuna regret undoing the happy parts of both games’ endings, she approaches this by claiming she’s no longer interested in Tidus and hooks up with someone else (this part made it overseas in the HD rerelease of the games, and was universally hated). There's also a lot of sex for some reason, even after Tidus dies and is subsequently revived.
• George Macdonald Fraser's Flashman series dances around this. There's no fan consensus on what's the best book, though certain sequels (namely Royal Flash and Flashman at the Charge) are generally ranked higher than the original. While the first seven books are considered pretty solid, the last five are somewhat polarizing. Criticisms include Badass Decay, making Flashman less a Magnificent Bastard and more a conventional Anti-Hero, Fraser injecting political views into the books and increasingly formula storytelling (Flashman gets dragged into danger, meets some historical figures, shags pretty ladies, gets betrayed by everyone yet improbably survives as a hero). Flashman on the March, the very last book, feels like a deliberate attempt to assuage these criticisms — notably evinced by the scene where Flashman kicks his Ethiopian lover down a waterfall.
• While V. C. Andrews' Dollanganger Saga aren't exactly critical darlings, they are generally beloved by Andrews' fans, even if the prequel Garden of Shadows was completed by her ghostwriter. Almost 30 years after Andrews' death, the ghostwriter began the Christopher's Diary series, billed to bring a new perspective on the series (Via Chris). The series has so far been met with disappointment and even loathing from fans for not actually bringing anything new to the table, and for retconning Cory's death, the latter which some readers have called "disrespectful" to Andrews' legacy.
• Under the name of "Collodi Nipote," Paolo Lorenzini, the nephew of Pinocchio author Carlo Collodi, wrote six more stories about the little wooden puppet between 1917 and 1954. The Sequel Reset of keeping Pinocchio as a puppet didn't help.
• James P. Hogan's Giants Series. It's not as if the sequels are bad - it's just that they tend to detract from the previous books. The first book, Inherit the Stars, is the story of a bunch of scientists trying to wrap their brains around a massive enigma. The second one, The Gentle Giants of Ganymede, brings in aliens, but is fairly similar. The third one, Giants' Star, alters the style by bringing in conflict.
  • The third also adds the idea that the reason people are evil is because evil time-travellers have made them that way. The fourth expands this to the evil time-travellers were actually taken over by aliens who lived inside a computer.
  • And the books Retcon things established in the previous ones to an annoying degree.
• Gone with the Wind:
  • 55 years after its publication, Scarlett, an "authorized" sequel, appeared. Critics were not impressed.
  • Another sequel, Rhett Butler's People, also appeared. The critics panned that one too.
• Harper Lee wrote in 1960 To Kill a Mockingbird, which still to this day is widely considered to be one of the "Great American Novels". Go Set a Watchman, published in 2015 and advertised as a sequel is considered much less so, chiefly due to the heavy liberties taken with both the characters and events of Mockingbird. It wasn't actually written as a sequel, though — Go Set A Watchman was actually the rejected first draft of To Kill A Mockingbird, which Lee then rewrote.
• The endless number of Goosebumps books are especially infamous. It's a bad sign when there are more books than even teen book franchises such as The Hunger Games, The Dark Artifacts, The Twilight Saga and many more. And in between all of this, it got a TV show, a movie and a sequel to the movie to boot. It doesn't help that it spawned endless numbers of spin-offs, all of which received very... polarizing responses from the fans.
• While Gor was never a critical darling, the consensus is that the seventh book, Captive of Gor, is when the series began to decline in quality. Major criticisms include plot points getting repeated, characters becoming unlikable, the entire setting undergoing Flanderization as the sexual slavery aspect became the focal point when before it was mostly window dressing, random Infodumps becoming more frequent and sometimes even showing up in the midst of action sequences, and the plot often halting for long-winded philosophical tirades. This was also the time that the author John Norman switched publishers and got Protection from Editors.
• L. Frank Baum made thirteen Land of Oz novels. Most people have only heard of the first book, and that's only because it was made into a movie, but it's by far the best received one. The other Oz novels are generally thought of as mediocre to outright bad, with the series becoming Strictly Formula as time went on. (It's worth noting that Baum himself came to dislike the series, but they were his only books that made money.)
• Legacy of Orïsha: While it's not universally disliked, lots of readers felt that Children of Virtue and Vengeance was a letdown compared to the first book, Children of Blood and Bone. Criticisms include the plot feeling repetitive due to continuously retreading the same issues, much of the conflict relying on the characters failing to communicate or making idiotic decisions and the handling of some character arcs; many readers were annoyed that Amari becomes a delusional and power-hungry tyrant (including committing some of worst atrocities in the series), Zélie gets into another rushed romance, Tzain is Demoted to Satellite Love Interest and Amari and Zélie's friendship (one of the best-received parts of the first book) is destroyed by the end. Some readers found Children of Virtue and Vengeance so disappointing they don't plan on reading the third book, though others are hopeful it's a case of Sophomore Slump.
• A subversion comes with J. R. R. Tolkien's abandoned sequel to The Lord of the Rings. With the Working Title of The New Shadow, he got as far as coming up with some characters and setting it in the fourth age of Middle-earth where a dark cult rose up in the lands of Gondor. However, he abandoned it after only a few pages as he felt it would not be as epic or up to the standards of his other work, then Died During Production, meaning it's highly unlikely this will be finished.
• E. L. James' Mister & Missus series suffered similar problems her earlier Fifty Shades series when it came to sequels. While The Mister didn't exactly get glowing reviews, the reception for The Missus was even frostier. Though some reviews acknowledge that the sequel removes or tones down some of the creepy content from first book (mostly regarding the Official Couple's power imbalance), many also criticised it for being a dull and unnecessary follow-up, with barely any plot and pacing that would put a snail to sleep (The Mister at least had some intrigue surrounding Alessia's mysterious past and the men hunting her); even more positive reviewers found it unjustifiably long-winded. The sex scenes were also criticised as lukewarm and by-the-numbers, which isn't ideal when the book's main draw is its erotic content. The Missus was released with little fanfare compared to The Mister and Fifty Shades of Grey, and didn't receive much attention overall; it's been noted that The Missus didn't sell nearly as well as the first book, being notably absent from The New York Times Bestseller List (the author's previous novels ranked high on the list) and debuting at 58 on the USA Today Bestseller List before falling out of the top 150 within weeks.
• The feminist science fiction writer Suzette Elgin conceived Native Tongue with a lot innovative ways to fuse feminism, SF, and linguistics. In the novel, the women use a language she invented to express different experiences more suited for women. The novel is excellent, the two sequels on the other hand are chaotic jumbles that create more loose ends than they tie up.
• Literary sequels to The Phantom of the Opera and/or its stage adaptation tend to get a mixed reception at best.
  • Susan Kay's Phantom is generally considered to be pretty good by the phandom...at least when it comes to the first two-thirds. This section is actually a prologue to the original describing Erik's backstory and is generally agreed to be well-done, even being accepted as (admittedly dubious) canon by some. However, a lot of fans strongly dislike the way Kay portrays the Erik/Christine relationship and its aftermath in the final third, mostly downplaying Erik's abhorrent treatment of Christine and other people, and throwing Raoul and his relationship with Christine under the bus so the author's preferred couple can be together.
  • The Phantom of Manhattan by Frederick Forsyth generally gets an even worse reception, as it not only derails the canonical Raoul/Christine relationship to try and stick Erik and Christine together and does a lot of retconning to make Erik more sympathetic (such as him being a murderer), it also has a rather unpleasant twist where Christine's son Pierre turns out to be Erik's child due to he having raped Christine, yet Erik is still treated as a heroic character and Pierre even decides to live with Erik (a man he barely knows) rather than Raoul (the man who raised him) after Christine's death simply because they share DNA. Even hardcore Erik/Christine shippers tend to find this distasteful and implausible.
• Robert Asprin's Phule's Company series; the first 2 books are decent, the books co-written after that take a marked turn downwards. But this is partly the fault of Real Life Writes the Plot and Died During Production. His Myth Adventures series, while maintaining a high standard for quite a while, has also begun to sag for the same reason.
• Redwall, partially because the plot that worked for the first five or six books gets a bit stale when it's pulled out for the twentieth time. It does not help that the Wacky Wayside Tribes started to replace "plot relevance" with "annoying habits" around the time of "The Pearls of Lutra".
• The sequels to Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama (which are actually written primarily by Gentry Lee) suffer from this.
• The Ringworld series by Larry Niven has succumbed to this as Niven has caught Retcon Fever and begun tearing down the conventions of his own universe.
• River God, by Wilbur Smith, was quite interesting and different to mainstream fiction. The sequel Warlock went from the engaging and amusing first-person narrative style to third-person, which allowed for us to see scenes from several characters' perspectives, but mostly allowed for gratuitous shoehorning- in of sex scenes to pad out the already inflated-but-largely-empty plot. The Quest has almost completely dispensed with any ties to the Ancient Egypt pantheon, instead substituting some vaguely New-Agey mumbo-jumbo universally-recognised quasi-religious belief system.
• The Rocheworld series by Robert Forward likewise has a great first book, a moderately good second, and utter crap dragging along behind.
• Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series started putting more and more focus on magical history, Objectivist philosophy and the main character's role as a leader after the second book. The common opinion on this site is that it is Jumping the Shark, with each book getting worse and worse. Goodkind gave the last three books a rather good attempt to emulate the first two's plot and style, at least.
• Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles are almost universally agreed to suffer from this, with the fourth book, Tale of the Body Thief, or the fifth, Memnoch the Devil, usually cited as the shark-jumping point. Not-so-coincidentally, this is around when Rice decided she had Protection from Editors. It doesn't take a particularly careful interrogation of the text to see that the characterizations are stronger in the first few books, and that's not even getting into the forgotten plot points and frequent passing-about of the Idiot Ball. Upon meeting another Vampire Chronicles fan, it's probably best to ask "what's your canon?" early on, so you can get into discussing the books you both think are good.
• Warrior Cats. The 1st arc of novels is treasured by fans. The second arc is usually seen as good, but not as good as the original. The third and fourth arcs are very... polarizing, and the fifth is typically liked a little better than those due to being fresher with the new time period and characters, but still there's a general opinion that the series is dragging on too long. Since the series is so financially successful and has a vast and dedicated fanbase, the books just keep on coming. Most complaints about the later series cite the reused plot devices, the ridiculous amount of mostly flat and undeveloped supporting characters, and the smaller focus on nature and survival in favor of more anthropomorphized themes like love and family issues. It's often compared to a soap opera. And this doesn't even touch on the vast amount of mangas, field guides, and other companion books, which generally entertain diehard fans but hold little literary merit. It's hard to say when the franchise will actually end, because the fans are always eager for new books, and the authors, who keep in touch with their fanbase regularly via author chat, don't want to disappoint them.
• Did you know Richard Adams did a sequel to Watership Down? Two big marks against Tales From Watership Down though: one, it's a short story book, and two, its stories are of uneven quality. To most, it's an okay-ish supplement to a great novel.
• Piers Anthony's series of Xanth novels has reached over 30 novels and currently consists almost entirely of puns and plot developments suggested by readers.

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