If you start your article talking about your "utter disdain" for George R. R. Martin and it then turns out you were actually a huge fan prior to aFfC, I'm sorry, but that makes it hard for me to take you seriously in any argument you make about writing. Being disappointed in aFfC and aDwD is one thing; feeling "utter disdain" for their author is something else entirely, and frankly rather sad.

Other than that, I guess you have to decide whether to give him the benefit of the doubt on whether he merely failed to specify that he was talking about genre authors, or actually ignores the existence of non-genre authors. Larry refuses to; I'm inclined to do it. But of course his choices leave something to be desired even if you do limit yourself to genre literature - and of course one can come up with counter-examples.

Ignoring all that and getting to the issue itself, though, I guess my opinion is it depends on the author (obviously), the sort of book, and the aspects that you're judging by. And then of course there's the nostalgia factor that basically means that if an author at 80 wants to publish something that's considered as good as his or her best-known book written thirty years before, the new work has to be even better to overcome the weight of the other's classic status. And that's a tall order at 80, yes.

The comparison with professional sports was rather silly, one should be comparing with other careers that are primarily about intellectual and mental efforts. And then of course you have to conclude that in, say, politics, or business, or other kinds of art, people's skills do seem to start decreasing at some point which for most people is somewhere in their sixties or seventies. Some skills, anyway, particularly things like flexibility and adaptability. Which, translated into writer terms, means that writers who have reached that point may well be able to write as beautifully and intelligently as before, but may have a hard time being very original with their new work, and the deck's already stacked their recent work compared to the older work, anyway, as noted above. Of course, if the subject or premise of the novel is something they've been working on a long time, or been fascinated by for a long time, this doesn't necessarily show.

Larry mentioned Milan Kundera, and since I've recently read a novel by him (L'Ignorance, published in 2000 when the author was 71), I might as well use that to support the point. L'Ignorance was a solid novel, about a few Czech émigrés returning to their homeland in the early nineties. The style, pacing, characters were much like I recalled them from The Unbearable Lightness of Being. But there wasn't much of a spark to it, not much that was new or special. Based on the little I know of Kundera, he's a writer who mostly sticks to what he knows anyway, but this was even more so.

Of course if you then go back to the article and note that several of the exhibits listed by the author write fantasy with not much claim to literary greatness, the decreased originality and flexibility do indeed seem like they would hurt those authors more than they would hurt Kundera or Márquez (to say nothing of A.S. Byatt, whose Children's Book was published when she was 73 and is arguably her best book to date).