Not for the fairest

[james_davis_nicoll]

In a previous flocked post, I said "At the risk of destroying my jaded reviewer cred, [name withheld] is nowhere near the bottom of the barrel where modern fantasy and SF are concerned."

This raises the question of who is near the bottom of the barrel where modern fantasy and SF are concerned. Obviously, I am far too poorly read to answer that but those of you who are not in my particular situation may feel free to supply your own answers.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

For SF, I pick CJ Ryan. I read thier first (?) book Dexta and it was the worst thing I've ever read in my life. The heroine is a Mary Sue. Her love interest is an admitted date rapist. From an Amazon review "Rape and coercion are standard methods of control over subordinates and Gloria indulges just as much as any other Dexta bureaucrat. She herself is raped repeatedly and she dismisses this as part of the game. Employees working for Gloria are advised to use these stupid methods." There's some crazy ass justification for all this in the book, but I forget what it is. The heroine spends a lot of the book naked or half naked and the author lovingly describes all of it. Yet, when Ryan gets to the sex scenes, they are skimped upon. It's like somebody (by somebody I mean the author) has a voyeur fetish.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

There's some crazy ass justification for all this in the book, but I forget what it is.

IIRC, it's supposed to be a filter to weed out the unmotivated and unskilled.

[affreca.livejournal.com]

Yes. The Mary Sueism of this book is crazy. Couldn't get more than a chapter into the book, and I can stand a lot.

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

It gets much, much worse. I had the unfortunate problem of being stuck in Yellowknife, needing some books for a multi-day journey out into the hamlets of Nunavut, and picked up volumes 2 and 3. The "Drugs are bad, m'kay" moral that happens in a later book made me want to kack.

[bluetyson.livejournal.com]

That's a good pick, I flipped through one of these and it looked truly wretched.

The worst chunk of fantasy I have seen is Terry Goodkind's novella in legends.

[thespian.livejournal.com]

S. L. Viehl.

I was warned. I was told by someone that Stardoc was a fun novel, and that I should avoid the sequels, but the person who told me this has a tendency not to like open ended series, so I took it with a grain of salt.

I have *never* seen a series nosedive that hard. I had no idea one could. I found the second barely readable, and I was 2 chapters into the third because I was still clinging to some hope from the first book, when I couldn't face it anymore.

[alyxyn.livejournal.com]

Angus Wells. Avoid him. I've mercifully obliterated almost all remembrance of Dark Magic, but I remember that the writing (maybe not the plot, but I've forgotten it) was absolutely terrible. It intruded itself with every syllable. Ugh!

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Am I exposing my naivety by suggesting Kratman and Ringo?

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

I would say yes.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

There's worse?

I'm frightened.

[leighdb.livejournal.com]

I would nominate David Drake, perhaps unfairly. I've never read any of his milSF, but the one fantasy novel I tried by him (Lord of the Isles) was frickin' awful.

Maybe he's better at science fiction. I will never know.

Runner-up: Elizabeth Haydon.

[trinfaneb.livejournal.com]

I'm not a big a big fantasy fan, but I do have to admit that the few Drake fantasy books I've read don't hold a candle to his SF. I consider him to be a very good writer and he's one of the stalwarts of the milSF field. He's not to everyone's taste, but his Leary-Mundy series ("With the Lightnings" is the first) is about the most general audience thing he's ever written.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Some of his military science fiction is excellent, and not just by the low standards of MilSF.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I liked his horror, back in the day. Have not reread it in about 20 years, though.

[siedhr.livejournal.com]

John Norman. He wrote about a fantasy world where Earth women were reeducated through rape and slavery into becoming "real women".
Laurel K Hamilton. Turned a perfectly readable series into unending bad porn with bonuses for bestiality and pedophilia.
Terry Goodkind. Need I explain? Well, they do it better than I ever could.

[timgueguen.livejournal.com]

Norman is pretty much a non-entity as far as most current sci fi/fantasy readers are concerned. US comic publisher Dark Horse was going to republish the old Gor books last year but apparently thought better of it. I'd guess they decided the potential revenue wasn't worth the controversy even though one assumes the rights to the books came pretty cheap.

[siedhr.livejournal.com]

I hear what you're saying and thanks for the info.

For me, Norman's book will always serve as a measuring tool for other books with regard to crappiness since it was truly the first book that made me go: "WTF" "WTF is this" "WTF, where's the other shoe" "WTF, how can someone write this" etc.

[alyxyn.livejournal.com]

The last couple of Blake novels had very few sex scenes in them, and they weren't particularly extended, either. I tend to skip those, anyway. The last couple have been much more about dealing with issues (personal, interpersonal, and situational) than omigod the ardeur and omigod, anita saves the day by being ubermagical. They'll never be great literature, but they're amusing.

I don't recall pedophilia in any of the books, but that may be because (again) I tend to skip the sex stuff most of the time.

[siedhr.livejournal.com]

I guess it depends on your perception on what very few means.

Blood Noir's first four chapters were one looooong sex scene. If memory serves, The Harlequin contained the infamous scene where Anita condemns a guy and his family to death because he won't sleep with her. I agree that it tried to have some sort of plot, reminiscent of old AB novels, which made it all the more painful when it failed among Anita falling on various pieces of dick left unattended from the previous books. A trend that went on in BN, unfortunately with the utter character assassination of Jason, one of the few still interesting characters that populated the Crotch of Doom universe.

BN is particularly atrocious with an excuse of a plot largely inspired from a particularly bad telenovela. And no offense to writers out there, but if I want to read about "issues" written in an intelligent, insightful and applicable manner I don't read fantasy or SF.

Re pedophilia, it's about Nate, the abused man-child that Whorenita takes into her very generous, penguin decorated bed and feeds upon.

I agree they're amusing though. It's like watching the equivalent of a train-wreck where nobody dies. And they make for great snark topics.

[apis-mellifera.livejournal.com]

Blood Noir was the book that made me go to my editors at RT and tell them that I wasn't going to review LKH anymore. It was especially frustrating because The Harlequin was marginally better than whatever the book before it was, too, so I was expecting Blood Noir to be marginally better than The Harlequin.

[siedhr.livejournal.com]

I had the same expectation. I came late to LKH's books, a few months before The Harlequin came out. I went through the series pretty fast and I experienced extreme disorientation around Incubus Dreams. I kept on reading Blood Noir hoping for a miracle. Alas... no. I haven't even made it to the end.

[apis-mellifera.livejournal.com]

I read somewhere else on the intertubes that everyone has an Anita Blake Point--that moment in the series when it's no longer worth your time to read them. Mine's actually back at Obsidian Butterfly--I can reread everything up to that book and still be entertained, but after that? No thanks.

[siedhr.livejournal.com]

I think there was a post recently on LKH lashouts dealing with the turning point you mentioned. Mine was BN, since I didn't think it was worth the effort to scan the book and see what's going on. The last book I thought had any value was Bloody Bones, which I think it was the last book she wrote before she divorced and hooked up with Jonboi.

I was never a big fan anyway, it's just that I found the whole situation perplexing and amusing and on the whole a great cautionary tale for any writer. Also, I've never encountered an author who destroyed her own work so thoroughly.

By the way, what is RT? "is ignorant"

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

As far as I know, her sales are great. There's at least one perspective that says she's on the right track.

[siedhr.livejournal.com]

I've read some rather long discussions about this perplexing (to me) fact on the Amazon boards. The general opinion was that her high sales figure was due to pre-ordering and that it didn't keep up afterward. She fell from the best-selling list pretty rapidly (in comparison with Stephenie Meyer). I don't know how true this is since I couldn't be bothered to check.
Her right track seems to be along the lines "sex sells". And if she's educated an audience who thinks she's edgy and a source of information about sex, then there's no surprise she still sells. But she's lost almost all of her original fanbase that made the AB series famous in the first place. On a personal note, I would weep if this happened to me.

People read and buy bad books: sad, but true fact of life. Goodkind's sales are quite good as well.
PS: I never paid any money for their books. Long live illegal ebooks.

[apis-mellifera.livejournal.com]

I really like the first few books--Hamilton isn't a great writer and never will be, but the stories were compelling enough that I was willing to overlook her flaws as a writer (the fact that Anita is a massive Mary Sue being one of them). After they turned into essentially nothing but sex scenes, I lost interest as a reader.

RT = Romantic Times BOOKReviews Magazine--I'm their senior SF/F reviewer.

[siedhr.livejournal.com]

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed her early books as well. They were my guilty pleasure books (books I enjoyed reading without making any effort) and also my introduction to urban fantasy. So basically, we're pretty much on the same page.

I am however grateful to LKH for introducing me to other, better authors in the same genre: Patricia Briggs, TA Pratt and Jim Butcher (courtesy of numerous Amazon threads "Help, I was an AB fan and I need something else to read!!!").

[apis-mellifera.livejournal.com]

Tim Pratt is awesome. If you haven't already, get a copy of The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl. I love that book so freaking much. His Marla Mason series is really fantastic, too--I love how she's such a morally gray character. I like my fiction with a lot of moral complexity and ambiguity, which is what initially drew me to LKH, but as the series went on, those parts of Anita's character have just disappeared.

[siedhr.livejournal.com]

I totally thought TA Pratt was a woman. O_o Can't remember why, though. I very much enjoyed the Marla Manson series. Thanks for the rec, I'll be sure to pick it up.

[apis-mellifera.livejournal.com]

I suspect that a lot of people think that, actually. A good chunk of urban fantasy's current readership seems to be female--and there is a lot of overlap with paranormal romance, which is mostly female.

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

Terry Goodkind.

Oh my God. I'd never read anything by him, but if those snippets quoted on that link are representative... oh my God.

[siedhr.livejournal.com]

Yup, unfortunately so. But it makes for great snarkiness.

[bricklovinfreak.livejournal.com]

No, I think it's just genuinely fucking terrifying.

[siedhr.livejournal.com]

Yes, there's that as well. Btw, very cool icon.

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

Aw, I liked Elizabeth Haydon.

Kevin J Anderson, on the other hand, I find so formulaic as to be almost a parody.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

I have no opinion; I like almost everything I get around to reading. Yes, I'm either very lucky or have very good filters. But a friend would probably nominate "the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer". She was reading Eclipse and was Not Happy. "sparkle vampires" are allegedly involved.

Though if you asked her to choose among that, Gor, and Goodkind I'm not sure who would 'win'.

[siedhr.livejournal.com]

Not only are they sparkly, they're also rock solid. Which makes the sex the author keeps nudging the series to, a pretty horrific notion.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

Ah, the sewer-dwelling vampires of seventeenth-century London.

That was enough to make me decide I did not need to read this series. Sewers in seventeenth-century London are a mark of someone who's not even trying.

Not even a question

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

if we're talking about "people who write fiction which is sci-fi/Fantasy, It's LaHaye & Jenkins, of the Left Behind series.

If you're talking about "defined as sciffy genre fiction" they're disqualified though (which is probably just as well really, it is kind of unfair with them in the running).

[rosefox]

Somehow I thought you were asking people to identify the fantasy and SF reviewers who were at the bottom of the barrel.

I nominate E. Rose Sabin on the basis of A School for Sorcery. Truly wretched stuff.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

May I steal that idea for a post?

[rosefox]

Sure. Your blog, your karma!

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Turnabout seems only fair.