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[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

[gohover.livejournal.com]

I have a soft spot for Robert Forward, and the sense-of-wonder he inspired, and your comment doesn't match my recollection of the book at all, and so I just leafed through my copy of Return to Rocheworld, co-written by Julie Forward Fuller.

I won't defend the book's many literary flaws, but I do want to strongly suggest that you are misremembering the book. The rape scene did serve a purpose, and more importantly, the authors were not being misogynistic.

The purpose of the rape scene was to depict the trigger of the victim's repressed memories of sexual abuse by her uncle. The rape scene is dealt with: we see the psychological breakdown of the victim and her subsequent efforts to heal; we're led to understand the rapist's motivation, we see how the rape indirectly leads to his clinical death (his comeuppance, I guess), and when he survives, we see his growing enlightenment and his desire to fix things. Well, as literature, it is pretty dire... ... but it is a well-intentioned effort to discuss recovery from sexual abuse.

The majority of the book is a fun hard-SF romp with some amusing settings. Oh, and the real reason why I'm bothering to post: When my daughter was born, my wife and I nicknamed her "LB", which stood for "little baby", but when she cried, it stood for "Loudest Beast". You probably don't remember, but "Loudest Beast" was the name of the alien protagonist. I'd hate for her to someday think she was named for a protagonist in a rape-as-wallpaper sort of book.