4 ms·

I had this sad realisation with the last Iain M Banks book I read - Hydrogen Sonata. It was a good book, but I felt like I'd seen its skeleton at least three or

• mercutio2 7y ago
  I thought the Hydrogen Sonata was probably Banks’s weakest Culture novel. “Sometimes civilizations decide to Sublime! Other folks take their stuff. One ship takes it upon itself to help a younger race not get boxed out of the spoils, fails, and gets depressed. The end” Most of his other Culture books had more stuff going combined with characters I cared about.
• mirimir 7y ago
  It's pretty common for creators -- authors, artists, bands, etc -- to become formulaic. To some extent, it's just pandering to their estimated audience. Also, they've typically been working on their first few works for years. And then, if they become popular, they're under pressure to produce more and more, faster and faster. In my opinion, it works best to just write series. You can just use mostly the same characters. Matthew Stover did that well with the Caine series. I gather that he'd been working on it for at least a few years, and had been told that it was unpublishable. So he cut out a first book, and focused on action. Then another, when it sold well enough. And then, years later, after his Star Wars gig, he published the last two. They're basically a metaplot, and collection of back stories, that probably look a lot like the initial project.