Punishment: Have the voice who does Tweak on South Park yell passages from her awful book to the tune of Boots’ Randolph’s Yakety Sax while Wharton herself rides a bicycle with the seat replaced with a two-foot long dildo. Wharton will ride this dildo-bike unto eternity.
Come to think of it, she probably is already suffering this punishment just for even thinking anyone wanted to read about some asshole crashing a sled into a tree.
Douglas Adams
Created: Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Crime: The second and third books of said series.
Punishment: Spend the rest of eternity listening to Linkin Park play songs with Vogon poetry as the lyrics. Sorry, but having something be nonsense does not make it funny. After reading Life, the Universe, and Everything, I have vowed never to even look at the rest of the series again.
For over-populating the field of ‘chick-lit’. I’m so sick and tired of seeing books by young female authors about a beautiful young woman who works as a journalist and has beautiful friends that she drinks with every night, and ends up with a beautiful boyfriend and a 2-carat diamond ring at the end. And why is it that I only seem to find grammatical errors in THOSE fucking books? I found at least SIX grammatical errors in one book - and I can’t get a job as a copy editor? I seem to do a better job than their own editors.
I’ll stick with my Elinor Lipman, Ursula Hegi, and Maeve Medwed for awhile.
Ohhh… controversial pick. I would’ve said him eventually, but his crime would be leaving the Hitchhiker’s Quintilogy (New word!) with the ending it ended up with.
**
Joss Whedon**
Created : Buffy, Angel, Firefly.
Crime : Malicious emotional abuse of characters.
Punishment : Eternal reincarnation cycle wherein he gets to be every one of Angelus’s victims.
Apparently there was a radio interview with Joseph Heller (who’s famous for having written Catch-22, which is commonly regarded as a classic, and for being rather mediocre otherwise.).
Q. Why have you never written a book better than catch 22?
A. Not many people have, mister. Not many people have.
Some of you will be happy to learn that both L. Ron Hubbard and Douglas Adams have had their “right to write” quite permanently revoked, to use a euphemism. Adams I liked OK, no reverence, but everything with Hubbard’s name on it should be gathered into a mountain and burned.
Those of you looking at pulp writers for literary scapegoats, don’t you think your expectations are a little high? You got your bodice rippers or your dragon riders or some other shit, but just look at the format, they’re all basically potboilers.
I nominate the “creative team” currently in charge of James Bond. For me, every Brosnan film have been escalating in their inherent badness, and the most recent one was so totally awful, I really did lose all hope for the future of the franchise.
Created: Jack shit, but somebody else created decent cover art for his book.
Offense: Existing, not becoming a garbageman or any other career that would be a good match for his literary skill, slandering George R R Martin.
Punishment: Someone follows him around and administers a savage beating every time he uses the word “eyebrow”. Actually, on second thought I bet he’s the type who’d enjoy that.
Ironically, you made the right decision, but for the wrong reasons. I liked the first three books of the series. It was the 4th and 5th books I had to force myself to complete.
I agree with you about Last Chance to See. Adams was a great writer so long as he didn’t have to worry about plot or character. As for the Dirk Gently books… I’d rather read So Long and Thanks for All the Fish again. <shudder>
Stephen King has written stuff I hate (Tommyknockers) but I think his Dark Tower books are quite good. Don’t forget about those books when judging his later work.
The Offense: Everything released by him after Executive Orders, Rainbow Six at the latest.
Punishment: Should be forced to read Harry Turtledove.
While Clancy isn’t the most literary of figures even at his best, he is still pretty compelling. However, I’m nigh on certain that the last couple of books (Bear and Dragon, Red Rabbit) released with his byline are either:
Contract-obligation crapola written while hung over.
Harry Turtledove isn’t a bad writer if you have a love for history and environment more than characters, because damn he can’t write those for anything. I especially like the Videssos cycle of stuff for the simple reason that he really seems to firmly know what he’s talking about there. Its not alternative history where he actually has to make up a lot of his characters, but fantasy the copycats off real history from whence he can filch a lot of historical characters and pretend like they’re his.
