A game everyone can play!

[james_davis_nicoll]

When Paul Cook says

I’ll go ahead and say it: this is as close to an unpublishable novel as I’ve ever seen that’s actually achieved print.

he is talking about Niven and Benford's Bowl of Heaven. I deduce from this that he has never read the Tor edition of Norman Spinrad's He Walked Among Us or (oddly, also Tor) Ken Shufeldt's Genesis, which attracted reviews like

You want an example of how NOT to write a book? This is it. And every author who sold his soul to include a quote on the cover should be ashamed.

and

Quite possibly the worst book ever published. A couple of hours of my life that I'll never get back. Amazon, is there a reason I am forced to give it one star? It presumes that this book has some redeeming qualities.

What would be your candidate for the novel that is as close to an unpublishable novel as you've ever seen that actually achieved print?

Comments

[wild_irises]

Without a doubt, Ether Ore, by H. C. Turk.

Close second, Astra and Flondrix by Seamus Cullen. Though the dwarves having sex by women swooping down on trapezes onto their corkscrew-shaped cocks got us a lot of mileage in the bookstore--a free copy to anyone who could read that scene out loud without cracking up.

[rosefox]

Sweet Evil and The Gas by Charles Platt. (Due to the nature of the content, not the quality of the writing.)

[sami]

The da Vinci Code.

[threeringedmoon]

Any of the Laurell Hamilton books released in the past decade.

[jaylake.livejournal.com]

One assumes that "actually achieved print" in this context means through editorial acquisition in the trade press or reputable independent press? Because in this era of self-publishing, the answer to your question would be a phone book length list of ebook and POD titles that had never known the sweet caress of an editor or book designer.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Let us stick to traditional publishing.

[glaurung-quena.livejournal.com]

Can't think of any novels with which to play this game at the moment, sorry. However, regarding the linked review...

Does Larry Niven *ever* write anything anymore other than novels about BDOLTJTHtbH (Big Dumb Objects Larger Than Jupiter That Happen to be Habitable) anymore?

And is it any surprise given how ridiculously often he's returned to that particular well that it's gone bone dry by now?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Looking at books since 2000, it looks like an even split to me between Big Dumb Object novels and Not Big Dumb Object novels.

BDO
Ringworld's Children (2004)
Fleet of Worlds (2007) with Edward M. Lerner
Juggler of Worlds (2008) with Edward M. Lerner
Destroyer of Worlds (2009) with Edward M. Lerner
Betrayer of Worlds (2010) with Edward M. Lerner
Fate of Worlds: Return from the Ringworld (2012) with Edward M. Lerner
Bowl of Heaven (2012) with Gregory Benford

Not BDO
The Burning City (2000) with Jerry Pournelle
Saturn's Race (2000) with Steven Barnes
Building Harlequin's Moon (2005) with Brenda Cooper
Burning Tower (2005) with Jerry Pournelle
Escape from Hell (2009) with Jerry Pournelle
The Moon Maze Game (2011) with Steven Barnes
The Goliath Stone (2013) with Matthew Joseph Harrington

[resonant.livejournal.com]

Out Of The Dark, by David Weber. Several draft novellettes pasted together to meet a deadline.

Alien space puppies invade Earth, but are surprised because their probes from several hundred years ago showed knights-in-armour, rather than jet fighters. Yes, several paragraphs are identical to Turtledove's series with the same premise.

[so sad that the Soviet Union ended, I had some cool Fulda Gap battle plans]

Insert ground combat sequences against the puppies in Europe using NATO and Warsaw Pact inventories and techniques from the '80s. The space puppies were technologically advanced enough to bring enough troops across interstellar distances to fight all the armies of Earth, but still had foot soldiers (paw soldiers?) armed with manually-aimed chemical-propellent projectile weaponry. And no sensor packages more advanced than eyeballs and furry ears.

[Can't forget the US market]

Insert survivalists living in a cave in the southeastern US, in a plotline that suddenly stops with no resolution. And unlike Chekov's gun on the mantlepiece, the cave never gets used.

[hey wait, this Twilight thing is popular]

Then COUNT DRACULA appears. He turns the humans into vampires, which (because they don't breathe), can ride into orbit the outside of the space puppy launch vehicles, and then the vampires devour everyone in their spacecraft. The vampires don't have to worry about the sun, as they only go into cis-lunar space at night.

[zibblsnrt.livejournal.com]

Alien space puppies invade Earth, but are surprised because their probes from several hundred years ago showed knights-in-armour, rather than jet fighters. Yes, several paragraphs are identical to Turtledove's series with the same premise.

Yow, even by the standards of traditional storyline copying that's unsubtle.

Did he at least change the characters' names?

[http://users.livejournal.com/krin_o_o_/]

“Worse Book Ever Published”

That's a bit of a stretch. I'm positive readers here can think of much worse ones. I'll start the ball rolling by nominating the rapetastic first book of the Covenant series.

Don't hold back folks, vent that hard won bitterest experience!
(Only nominate ones you've actually READ!)

[http://users.livejournal.com/krin_o_o_/]

Anything by Ayn Rand is disqualified on the grounds that if that's the worse you've seen published, you need to get thee to a library!

RE: A game everyone can play!

[disassembly_rsn]

I think Gawron's Algorithm is still a contender for that. I was curious enough about its horrible reputation to pick it up used and very cheap once, but couldn't get into it enough to offer fair comment about it.

Re: A game everyone can play!

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Has anyone ever actually finished that one?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I read a terrible space opera that as far as I could tell took some no-name Clavell wanna-be's book about Chinese pirates and pulled a Bat Dursten on it.

[cmattg.livejournal.com]

I thought that was the Chung-Kuo books.

[pperiwinkle.livejournal.com]

"Wizard's First Rule"

Do I really need to go into why?

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

I will see you "Wizard's First Rule" and raise you, "The Fifth Sorceress". All the preachy plot stupidity with Microsoft Word thesaurus misuse of words and all women users of magic are evil.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Sullivan, Michael J. The thing I reviewed.

Weber, Out of the Dark. Did not finish.

Rod Rees, The Demi-Monde: Spring. Jiggling untethered breasts. "NuJus" with a "Book of Profits". Secret cabal of vampire Nazis. Alternate reality simulation.

[michael a. davis (from livejournal.com)]

"NuJus" with a "Book of Profits"

Whaaaaat?

[michaelgr.livejournal.com]

I've heard some very negative opinions about Howard V. Hendrix' (he of "Pixel-Stained Technopeasant" fame) novel _Standing Wave_, but I only skimmed the first few pages. It's either a masterpiece or a confused piece of unreadable technobabble.

[resonant.livejournal.com]

I couldn't get more than a few chapters into it either.

[le-trombone.livejournal.com]

I've been fortunate enough not to have read the books suggested above. Although the odds were probably improved by the fact that I don't bother with MilSF.

The only book I ever recycled was was a book whose plot was told by a Vampire Lord Byron. Vampire Lord Byron seemed to have an outlook that suggested V.L. B. was born some time in the 1930s, and was telling this story to some innocent victim for no reason that made any sense (I'm of the opinion that the author had just read Anne Rice's magnum opus).

I have no idea what the title or who the author is anymore, although I do recall you identifying it when I described it on rec.arts.sf.written many years ago.

[erikagillian.livejournal.com]

I, being slow, found out only recently that the 'first literary vampire' was based on Lord Byron, which explained oh so much. And gives us a second origin for a Byronic hero. I really should finish it.

[yamamanama.livejournal.com]

Anything by Tom Kratman

[dbdatvic.livejournal.com]

Not even going to TRY to read his stuff, I had the misfortune to see him going on on rec.arts.sf.written, and he's permanently off my buy list forever. Bleah. I will actively disrecommend him to random strangers in or near the K section.

Unfortunately, this means I don't actually KNOW how close to unpublishable his stuff is, so I can't nominate any of it.

--Dave

[izeinwinter.livejournal.com]

You are mistaken ... I cannot play this game. I do not actually know which is the worst published book I have come across, because past a certain point of abysmality, literature mysteriously acquires a high velocity, and rapidly depart my hands on a course towards the nearest brick structure, thus preventing me from ascertaining the precise depth to which they ultimately plummet.

[agharta75.livejournal.com]

David R. Palmer's second novel. Supposedly first of a trilogy.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

Gail Van Asten, The Blind Knight. I met one of my (now) oldest friends when i ranted about it at a Kirk Poland reading.

[agharta75.livejournal.com]

One of Cook's criticisms isn't the authors' fault: the book "ends abruptly" because it's part one of a two part series, and B&N have gone on record as being Not Pleased with Tor for not mentioning that.

That doesn't mean that the other criticisms are invalid, of course.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I wonder if Niven's editor is Hartwell?

[ravenskyewalker.livejournal.com]

I thought that Ken Shufeldt's Genesis sounded awful, so ignored it and let it pass from my mind. Now I see that he somehow got a second book published, Tribulations. How and why? Bleah.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

I would have said Frankowski, as a published author whose later Conrad Stargard books were considered too bad for Jim Baen (!) to continue printing him, but there seem to have been other factors behind that decision.

(Even the early Stargard books were dire, in my opinion, but they channeled the beta-male engineer id very well.)

[ice-hesitant.livejournal.com]

Eye of Argon comes to mind, though I suppose it's unpublished.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

We should also remember that The Eye of Argon is intended to be what it is. It's even very good at being what it is.

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

ACROSS THE NIGHTINGALE FLOOR, by Lian Hearn. Its protagonist is the last survivor of a village that was attacked in an attempt to kill him, since he has talents which are capable of sorting the enemy out within forty pages or so.

I gave up partway through the second book when it finally dawned on me* that nothing conclusive was going to happen.

There are, I think, five books in the series.

It would be a better world if everyone who intended to write was taught the difference between suspense and stalling.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I take it Gor isn't bad enough?

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Oh, and how could I forget Firefly?

[erikagillian.livejournal.com]

Are Twilight and Fifty Shades too easy? Of course, I never finished Twilight and I only read bits of Shades on sites where the blogger was taking it apart.

I'm rapidly losing the memory of books I read in the seventies and eighties so a lot of the bad scifi I may have read may be irretrievable lost. Not that this is entirely a bad thing.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Fifty Shades (well, the first volume, anyway, which is all I've read) is better than Gor. That is not in any way, shape, or form to be taken as a recommendation.

[laetitia-apis.livejournal.com]

Double Mobius Sphere by P.S. Nim