Forgotten Beasts of Eld is fabulous. I re-read it regularly. The Riddle-Master of Hed trilogy is also very good, though I had to re-read it a couple of times to really appreciate the ending.

Daybreak 2250, AD

I knew I'd had that wrong but was too freakin' lazy to look it up.

They're definitely telepathic, but they're still animal level intelligence.

Are there instances of a male writer with his series being taken/over ghost written by his fanbase? (I'm not talking about a licensed character situation.) Because it seems like a Queen Bee and Coterie dynamic. With LKH and Anne Rice it seems like super inflated self-importance with nothing but adoring fans being filtered in. With Marion Zimmer Bradley and Andre Norton it seemed like the Queen Bee and court. Were there other instances of female Sci-Fi/Fantasy writers having ghost written series? Pern seemed liked that same kind of fanbase. Tanith Lee (in retrospect) really reminds me of fan fiction - so much slash!

Daybreak 2020 (aka The Beastmaster)

Daybreak 2250 AD, as previously mentioned, but also aka Starman's Son.

Still, she wrote so damned many, it's hard to keep the titles straight, let alone which plots go with which titles, especially since many of both sound similar. I remember this one because it was the first scifi or fantasy I ever read.

Beastmaster is a different novel, yeah. Hosteen Storm and the spotted horse.

Tanith Lee (in retrospect) really reminds me of fan fiction - so much slash!

Oh, Tanith Lee. I have such issues with Tanith Lee, carefully marshalled and lined up ready to go. At the same time, fun!

Mercedes Lackey?

Then The Forgotten Beasts of Eld. (Which I was re-reading a little bit in the last year and held up surprisingly well.)

I read that just last year! And maybe I'm depraved, but with only a little bit of spin, I can read that novel as a twit of the "I have a talking giraffe in my backyard" fantasy subgenre. The hoarders of said talking giraffes don't come out looking all that nice, if you'll recall.

(I have the Riddlemaster series awaiting for me on the TBR pile, although the only reason it's on top is that the big books have to go on the bottom.)

Oh, Tanith Lee. I have such issues with Tanith Lee, carefully marshalled and lined up ready to go. At the same time, fun!

Hugs the Blood Opera books close

I've haven't actually read a lot of Tanith Lee's fantasy. I will re-read the Blood Opera trilogy forever and ever, apparently.

Tanith Lee has amazing prose style, and I will hear no (okay, I'll hear it, but crankily) criticism of her best work. She's prolific, so it isn't all her best work, but when she is on she is amazing. Also, homoerotic themes != fanfiction, not by a long shot.

Anne McCaffrey has explicitly passed on the her literary properties to her son. I stopped reading her years ago, so can't speak to the quality.

I am too sleepy to drag up examples, but there are several notorious (within the SF community) cases of Grand Old Men's later novels being written by somebody else. The difference with Anne McC, MZB, and Andre Norton is that they actually gave cover credit to their ghosts.

Tanith Lee's "Tales of the Flat Earth" series justifies any later artistic failure folks might percieve.

As for male writers and subsequent fanfic/posthumous series continuations, does Don Pendleton count? I dunno how much of that Mack Bolan fanbase is based on the character rather than the writer and how that affects our thesis. Or, for that matter, what our thesis actually was.

We had a thesis, right?