Favorite and Least Favorite Collaborations in SFF?

[Caliban]

Do you think Collabs a are good? Do they work?
Do you have any Favorite or Least Favorites?

I havnt read many but I enjoyed Good Omens by Pratchett and Gaiman?

 

[Nick B]

I hope they work, we're about to release one!

Good Omens was superb. As a youngster, I loved the original Dragonlance series.

 

[Vince W]

Worst has to be from the dynamic dummies Kevin J. Anderson and Brian Herbert and their abominable works about 'Dune'. Fanboi fan-fic at it's worst.

 

[Randy M.]

Favorite: Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore.


Randy M.

 

[Brian G Turner]

Weiss and Hickman had some great moments with Dragonlance.

 

[J-Sun]

I was going to say "Pohl and Kornbluth" until Randy reminded me. "Kuttner and Moore" are so rarely credited that way and they are so close that I sometimes forget they're a collaborative team and not an entity with multiple names.

My least favorite collaborations are those by Big Name Author and Little Guy where Little Guy does all the work and Big Name sells all the books by having his Big Name on the cover, and similar artifacts of marketing. (It doesn't really have anything to do with the relative prominence of the author - there are plenty of Big Name+Big Name "collaborations" and, on the other hand, some Big/Little collabs are genuine. But that's the most usual kind of fake collab.)

 

[Frost Giant]

Straub and King did a good job with The Talisman and Blackhouse.

 

[Timba]

Niven and Pournelle hit several homeruns

 

[BAYLOR]

Frederick Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth

 

[2DaveWixon]

Gordy Dickson and Poul Anderson's "Hoka" stories

 

[Bick]

My least favorite collaborations are those by Big Name Author and Little Guy where Little Guy does all the work and Big Name sells all the books by having his Big Name on the cover, and similar artifacts of marketing.

Indeed. As in Clarke & Lee?

I think my vote would go to Niven & Pournelle. Now I like Niven & Lerner too, but I'm not sure that collaration doesn't have a whiff of the big/little author issue described above.

 

[nixie]

Gaiman and Pratchett, is probably my favourite. Although I did enjoy Fiest and Wurts,

 

[BAYLOR]

David Drake and Karl Edward Wagner collaborated on the science fiction novel Killer , which was a really good book. I wish they had done more.

 

[Pedro Del Mar]

Niven and Pournelle hit several homeruns

I'm with you there

 

[J-Sun]

Indeed. As in Clarke & Lee?

I've never actually been able to bring myself to read those but, based on reputation, yes, exactly.

 

[dask]

The Blind Spot by Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint, really good.
Skull-Face by Robert E. Howard and Richard A. Lupoff, not so good. Perhaps not a true collaboration as Lupoff finished it decades after Howard started it, but close enough for a good hand grenade.

 

[2DaveWixon]

My least favorite collaborations are those by Big Name Author and Little Guy where Little Guy does all the work and Big Name sells all the books by having his Big Name on the cover, and similar artifacts of marketing. (It doesn't really have anything to do with the relative prominence of the author - there are plenty of Big Name+Big Name "collaborations" and, on the other hand, some Big/Little collabs are genuine. But that's the most usual kind of fake collab.)

i.e., anything with Newt Gingrich's name on it.

 

[galanx]

Deus Irae, Philip K. Dick and Roger Zelazny, is surprisingly not very good- they just don't blend well together; you can really when the writer switches.

 

[J-Sun]

i.e., anything with Newt Gingrich's name on it.

Similar to the Lee, I haven't read any, so can't say, but would be astonished if I liked those.

It occurs to me I didn't get very specific in terms of favorite/least favorite. I suppose my favorite individual collaboration, so to speak, would be drawn from my favorite collaborators. Leaving Kuttner/Moore aside as hard to untangle, my favorite is probably The Space Merchants. I probably won't get a lot of support on my least favorite but (granting that I've probably forgotten many more that are far worse) it's The Difference Engine by Sterling and Gibson. To that point in Gibson's career, I thought he was quite good and Sterling is one of my very favorite authors. Sterling and even Gibson had proven they could do good collaborative work in short forms and Sterling continued to prove it. But I didn't really see anything I liked of either author and, that disappointment aside, it basically created a subgenre that I don't like. A major, important work that apparently most people like and all that, but I'd just as soon it hadn't happened.

 

[AndrewT]

Abraham and Franck have an interesting running collaboration, The Expanse series. Each of them writes alternating chapters and the other edits what they write. They use the pen name James Corey. I have the first three but have not tried them yet. Some people like them a lot.