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?

I agree with the love of Tanith Lee at her best. Also, even at her worst, Tanith Lee seldom had Mary Sues.

I suppose Azhrarn comes close as the ultimate evil/dom/cruel/super-sexy bastard. She did come close to a flaw one sometimes sees in fan fiction when after he died she obviously could not bear to let him stay dead. But on the other hand the resurrection was handled so well that you almost did not notice that letting him stay dead would have made for a better story I'm guessing that she fell in love with her own character in exactly the way that fan fiction writers often do.

The difference with Anne McC, MZB, and Andre Norton is that they actually gave cover credit to their ghosts.

Indeed. I also figured Andre needed the ghosts because, being older than God, she wasn't quite up to the workload.

The first time I ran into an author falling in love with her character was Katherine Kurtz and King Kelson. The Deryni books hadn't been bad up unil the Kelson three, but even as an adolescent I recognized there was an unhealthy relationship there. At times it felt like the author was saying "If I can't have him, no one can!"

At times it felt like the author was saying "If I can't have him, no one can!"

She did eventually marry him off to a nice girl who loves him. And who lives to the end of the book.

The first time I ran into an author falling in love with her character was Katherine Kurtz and King Kelson.

The first time I remember running into this was with Dorothy Sayers and Lord Peter. When we meet Harriet Vane, the Oxford educated, brunette, alto, mystery writer who got him? Possibly not that dissimilar to the Oxford educated, brunette, alto, mystery writer who invented him. Not that I begrudge her the fictional happy ending. I'm just sayin'.

Acting as the angel of death for this thread, I just heard that Stanislaw Lem passed away.