[HoneyBadger]

Gormenghast was in several volumes too. The point isn't that authors suddenly jumped from tiny books to huge series, like it had never occurred to them before to continue their work along the same vein, it's that suddenly it was *expected* from them, to do so. Dozens of series suddenly came out, and grew longer and longer, because it was the fashionable and profitable trend.

Honestly, JimMorrison is spot on, calling it the "reign of the pointlessly long series", because a lot of these series have no business being as long as they are. If a body of work is very long, but of reasonable quality throughout, and each book adds to the body of work, then I'm happy as a clam about it. More goodness, what's not to like? But how many series can we look at and say, "every book here is sheer gold!"?

There are some. The Gunslinger series comes to mind, as does George Alec Effinger's awesome Marid Audran trilogy (which was only a trilogy because the author died), and ofcourse Terry Pratchet's Diskworld, which can continue on into infinity, as far as I'm concerned.

But for every author worthy of a major series, we seem to get 10 or 20 with diarhhea of the typewriter.