Can an author who's incredibly prolific be any good? When I'm raiding someone's Calibre server, if I see an author's written dozens of books I think they must be shit and don't download them.
It seems like it's usually fantasy authors who write so many.
Yes, of course they can; writing is something that improves with practice.
Often they're not. Much of the time there's no original thought in fantasy writing, it's just a rearrangement of tropes in the general patterns laid out by Tolkien and Robert E. Howard, and developed since then. I don't mean to say there's none at all, that would be a silly generalisation - but - there's a great deal of bad fantasy out there.
It is extremely unlikely. Stephen King has knocked out 50 novels over the course of his career, but that's a truly exceptional workrate. Highly prolific authors invariably write genre fiction, as it's simply impossible to research and write more than one decent novel per year. People with a well-trodden theme can just sit down and churn out the copy, which isn't the case for writers of non-fiction or literary fiction.
How unlikely it is really depends on what we mean by incredibly prolific. Not all authors solely write novels, either.
Asimov wrote and/or edited over 500 books in his lifetime, King, who is not remotely as publicly or critically acclaimed, pales in comparison. Fantasy writers just seem to have this fetish for serialisation.
I read Asimov as a thirteen year old and could recognise much of it as pulpy genre crap even then. Stephen King, while very hit-and-miss, is a writer who sometimes shows quite dazzling literary flair and ambition - it's remarkable for a huge-selling author and he may be the first one of his kind since Dickens. He's certainly not a genre writer except for the dismal Dark Tower fantasy series and the occasional horror-by-numbers yawnfest.
For true pulpy horror crap, see the ultra-prolific and almost unreadable Guy N Smith.
Mainstream literary novelists with remarkable work rates include John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates. Like Stephen King, the quality is hit-and-miss when compared to someone like Pynchon who has written so few over his career.
I'm not a huge fan of Asimov either, but to write his whole oeuvre off as pulpy genre crap is a mistake. Perhaps 90% of what he wrote is pulpy genre crap, but that still leaves 50 excellent books, which is more than most writers will produce in their lives (good and bad). He's a cult favourite for a reason.
I agree that in general quantity and quantity rarely meet, but it is possible.
>>5177 I especially was thinking of the Foundation series.
>>5176 You're probably correct, I remember 'The Gods Themselves' as being a cut above his usual output and of course the Robot stories are very memorable.
>>5179 There is a series called SABBAT he did about some kind of dope smoking occult detective which really is so bad it's funny, I believe Creation Books reissued it as a kitschy thing.
I only got to about page three but I think he was doing things like presaging the coming events by using strange crab words to describe humans. He said someone was "scuttling" instead of walking.
and blithely ignoring the "show don't tell" rule. He had a character say something like "It's a shame about your terribly strained relationship with your father."
