5 Sci-Fi Series That Outlived Their Authors

It’s always a sad time when an author passes on.  His friends, his family, and above all his fans come together and mourn the passing of a person who enlightened and entertained them.

Then the fans want to know when the next one is coming out. And usually there’s somebody there who will oblige them, especially if it’s a science fiction author. Here are five great authors whose series kept going on without them.

5) Chris Bunch

“Star Risk” is about a group of mercenaries tired of meddling from the Alliance, who want to strike out on their own, but can’t be too choosy about jobs. Which sounds a bit familiar:

Nah, Joss Whedon would never steal from a lesser known author...

Anyway, the Star Risk series was pretty popular, and Bunch actually had the notes for the next book completed, just he hadn’t actually written it. So Bunch’s good friend Steve Perry stepped in and finished it up. This is probably the last heart-warming tale you’ll read on this list.

4) Douglas Adams

Adams, of course, wrote the classic five-novel trilogy “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. In fact, most of his life was all about Hitchhiker’s, professionally speaking, which is a shame since the Dirk Gently books were actually pretty good. Hitchhiker’s was a radio comedy, a video game, a BBC miniseries with special effects even the ’70s “Doctor Who” would find embarrassing, and Adams was even working on the screenplay for a Hollywood movie when he unexpectedly died at age 49.

Of course, this didn’t stop the movie from happening, or the fans griping about the movie. But while the Dirk Gently series was essentially left untouched, with “The Salmon of Doubt” being unpublished, the estate actually gave the nod for Eoin Colfer, best known for a Harry Potter knock-off, the nod.

It’s not bad. But it’s no Dirk Gently.

3) Robert Jordan

Why does Robert Jordan make this list? Well, because we’re baffled he couldn’t finish this on his own.

One could make a lot of jokes about Jordan: that he got paid by the pound, for example. But we’re worried that’s true. If you get all the Wheel of Time books together, and put them on a shelf, you might not have any room on your shelf. The man wrote doorstops.

In fact, his final book is so huge that when Brandon Sanderson took it over, he realized he’d have to write two books. Two books! The Wheel of Time will be fourteen books long. Easily over fourteen thousand pages! He couldn’t have just wrapped it up in a trilogy like a normal person?

2) H. Beam Piper

The badass you see above is respected science fiction author H. Beam Piper. Piper was always kind of a weird guy; so weird people aren’t even sure what the “H.” stood for. He claimed it stood for “Horace”, but his gravestone said “Henry”. The only thing we do know about him is that his suicide led to one of the single most convoluted cases of sequelitis ever diagnosed.

Yeah, unfortunately, Piper punched his own ticket, and we’re still not sure as to why. At the time, he actually had a series of popular novels called the “Fuzzies”. Despite the title, these aren’t actually particularly cuddly books: they’re about interacting with a different species, and are actually pretty compelling; you can actually find them over at the ever-handy Gutenberg Project. But they were popular enough that not one, but TWO authors took a crack at the third one. Supposedly, he’d written the third but it wasn’t found. So William Tuning took it on, and then Ardath Mayhar (who has the single most awesome name for an SF author ever; we bet it confuses people at conventions) tried it.

And then they found the lost manuscript, and both guys had gotten it totally wrong.

Well, points for trying, anyway.

1) Frank Herbert

We could have made Frank Herbert number one just based on his epic, epic beard. Sure, Jordan’s got an epic beard too, but there’s something about Herbert’s beard that’s just…majestic.

Anyhoo, enough wool-gathering about face wool. Frank Herbert was, of course, the author of the classic “Dune” series, of four books. No, wait, the publisher talked him into doing six. But he was all done with them, right? No, wait, there was an outline for a seventh book, that got written. And then there were the two prequel trilogies. And now there are another two out filling in all the gaps between some of the books, plus another two in the pipeline, all written by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, prolific hack extraordinaire.

Some people might be just a little skeptical of Brian Herbert’s motives, especially since Dune has become its own little SF franchise, with video games, comic books, and television miniseries, but no film adaptations whatsoever.

We do not speak of this!

One might think Brian Herbert might just want to keep the gravy train going, since adding to Dad’s mythology has kind of been most of his career. But that’s ridiculous. He has other novels. We’re pretty sure some of them are still in print, too. Somewhere. Hmmmm…