Well, credit where credit is due: Ed Greenwood created the Forgotten Realms, which is a damned good generic fantasy setting. I love his roleplaying books. His novels? Never read a single one: a few years ago, they printed an Ed Greenwood shortstory as part of the documentation to one of the Eye of the Beholder video games. It simply made no sense. You couldn’t follow the action for more than a few paragraphs before totally losing the sense of what was going on. Never read another word of fiction by him again.
I think I’ve mentioned The Kingless Land on this board. Back, oh, I don’t know, maybe 15 years ago, when TSR started publishing books, I read one or two of Greenwood’s Elminster novels. I don’t even remember exactly what I read, but I had the impression that he was an OK writer. Very mediocre, sure, but not any worse than a lot of fantasy writers. It may be that those books were really bad and in my youth I didn’t recognize it, but I didn’t particulary have any bad memories of him.
So a year or so ago, I noticed Greenwood had written a non-gaming novel (I’ve sworn off any and all novels based upon games, movies, or TV shows, so it’s been awhile since I’ve read any D&D related books) and I picked it up. It was, of course, The Kingless Land. It was terrible. While I agree with all of your points, CRorex, the thing that bothered me the most was the banter between the characters. I guess that dialogue was supposed to be funny. It wasn’t.
It’s been awhile since I’ve played AD&D, but I remember cracking a lot of jokes with my friends while I played, and them doing likewise. In the context of the game, and on the spur of the moment, we laughed at those jokes, but no doubt most of them were very lame. And reading, say, a transcript of our session probably wouldn’t have produced nearly as many laughs. I swear that reading the joking between Greenwood’s characters felt like I was reading every lame joke that Greenwood or his gaming buddies had ever come up with. It may have been funny when Greenwood’s thief acted innocent to Zeb Cook’s fighter 20 years ago, but it didn’t make for good reading.
I’ve actually met Ed (he used to visit Toronto periodically to shop at the late, lamented The Worldhouse RPG store – Cheryl, where’d you go?), but flipping through his novels never inspired me to buy one. And for all that I’ve enjoyed the game material and a novel or two from the Forgotten Realms, I think the do-it-all approach to campaign worlds really sucks. Must a world have every type of terrain, every form of government, every race, every… everything?!?
If you hate it that much why are you still reading it?
Life’s too short to read bad books.
was it meant to be that bad?
Only the Discworld. 
Am I the only one to see The Eye of Argon as purposely done satire? C’mon, chapter 3 1/2?
Someone, somewhere, is really proud of their work. No question.
But aren’t the errors usually more entertaining than tedious? I tried it once, for my amusement only, and I think it came out pretty funny, to tell the truth: *
time quickly got tired of inviting between Xander and Cordelia so she got out in the kitchen to get yourself during. he started to make herself the Tom Collins those interested by scraping noise iby the back door. she turned in time to see unarmed trust through the class wind and were and she screamed
when they heard Don scream everyone came running in time to see Don eating on a zombie with a toaster. After three of more good hits a zombie lurched out of the kitchen and back through the door.
to the zombies try to attack you?" Willow asked
no said Don, he was trying to pick me up, and I didn’t like his line. of course he tried to attack me.
this is bad said Willow, until now the zombies haven’t tried begin anyone’s houses. what if they China attack children? the kids may not be safe.
my babies said Xander, then looked embarrassed. well their only in Sunnydale so maybe we should get the kids to some other town to be safer. the Grandma blood to have them. in a little rug recipe per lively she views and excitement.
half hour later vendor and Tara returned with all of the children. the kids ran all over the house while onion in scolded them. the this is Summers plates of down this minute. you don’t behave yourselves you going to get it. this would be much more threatening if I was still a demon she lamented to herself
Cordelia did a mental counts of the kids and said " I thought and Xander in an onion only had seven kids but there are 8."
" 0h" said Willow. “one of them is mine”
" well now look like vendor"
“um, well, in the i you know how tara and I are a couple…we needed help having a baby so Xander volunteered.”
“oh so Xander helped you out with the artificial examination process.”
yet that’s what we did. does anyone else wanted a drink? Willow said nervously and quickly left the room.
Cordelia turned to Angel and said you don’t suppose she and Xander…I mean back in high school there was that time …nah."
did say goodbye Mommy said Xander. he looked cheery as he held the youngest and said indebtedness a little guys especially Xander Jr.
I always thought it was nice that you when Anya named your youngest after you.
dad is nice to the last man named after me said Xander
last for now said Anya
what do you mean by that as Xander. onion just shrugged . *
My favorite part is its translation of part stating the kids are lively and their grandmother could use the excitement. 
“Xander in an onion”? If the new Honor Harrington novel is anything like that, I’m surfing over to Amazon right now!
Yeah…I’m kinda wondering about that too.
I haven’t read the new Harrington myself, but all the complaints I’ve heard about it are in the “It shoulda been a third shorter” category, not in the “Weber’s been taking acid while writing again” category.
Fenris
Uhhh, the legend I heard a while ago was that The Eye of Argon was exactly a satire. Somebody, or several somebodies I believe, set out to write the worst fantasy novel ever, and used several sci-fi conventions to do it - sometime in the late seventies or so.
And I agree on the Ed Greenwood opinion. A friend lent it to me, saying that The Kingless Land was the Best Book Ever.
I will never trust his opinion on anything ever again. There is somebody out there worse than Dennis McKiernan. I never would have believed it.
You may or may not be thinking of this:
At many cons, there is at some point held, “The Reading Of The Eye” or something to this effect. Essentially, a group of folks get together, and take turns reading the story aloud. You can only read until you lose your compsure, IOW, once you start laughing, you hand it to the next guy, and he picks up where you left off.
I don’t know that any group has ever made it to the “end” of the story, without having the game called for lack of ability to breath by the readers.
This reminds me of my all-time favorite review I ever saw, in some computer game magazine:
“If you were to strip naked, staple raw steaks to your ass, cover yourself in honey, and jump into a pit filled with rabid grizzly bears, we can almost guarantee that you’d be having more fun than if you were playing this game.”
The only thing I’ve ever read that could be described in this way is the Mission Earth series, by L. Ron Hubbard. And I’ve read The Eye of Argon. L. Ron was worse. Far worse.
Actually, someone once wrote a MST3K version of The Eye that was pretty damned hilarious. I don’t remember where I saw it, though.
It can be found here.
This direct link may or may not work for you:
The Eye of Argon
[sub]If you’re a MiSTi3K fan, you might well lose a couple days’ productivity at that site.[/sub]
That link is great, Skeezix! I didn’t think you could do a text MSTing, much less about a self-parody, but that worked.
Oh, not only text…
There are at least 2 different MiSTed text adventure games (interactive fiction, if you prefer) that I’m aware of. Take a Google for Inform, TADS (2 different int. fic. programs) or poke around rec.arts.interactive.fiction for the goods.
(Or rec.games. et al)
The games were Matt Baringer’s Detective, and The Adventures of Stiffy McKeen, or something along those lines. There may well be a bunch more by now; I’ve not followed either newsgroup in a while.
I’ve read Battlefield Earth. ONCE. I’ve also read the MSTied version of The Eye of Argon. A few times.
My excuse for reading BFE is that it was free and available. I was hosting a library for a club I used to be in, and the library had a copy of BFE. So I read it. It took me about 20 reading hours over the course of a week to complete the book. Simply put, BFE has too many words. For a more complete description, find a review of the BFE movie – almost all of the movie’s problems of plot, language, and other story elements are straight out of the book. My overall opinion: I love reading, but I heartily recommend avoiding BFE.
My excuse for reading TEoA is that a reference to it showed up on SlashDot, and they had the link to the MSTie version. The story itself is hard to read through, but it is a LOT shorter than BFE – I believe TEoA is 10k words (possibly bang on the nose), while BFE is around 500k words. OTOH, the MST3K shell is absolutely perfect, and as Smeghead noted, pretty damned hilarious. I have this idea of taking my (electronic) copy of MSTied TEoA to a con, and attempting a group reading effort.
Friends don’t let friends read bad speculative fiction… without making fun of the writing.
I just want to say that I LOVE the Eye of Argon. It’s a freaking laugh riot. My favorite line is the one about the “masterfully cut faucets” of the scarlet emerald. Glad the eye was worth something, on account of we can’t have a guy wasting his “coursing stamina” trying to carry the whole great big idol around.
LMAO
And the MST3K version is great.
Kn(ahh, I needed that)ckers
Bad writing is not limited to Sci-Fi. Lo, behold the horror that is Boy Toy by Michael Craft. Don’t let the reviews at Amazon.com fool you. This book is tripe. The characters are one dimensional and boring, not even made interesting by the gay sex. And who the hell names a character Thad? Michael Craft, that’s who.
I’m not familiar with the work of Ed Greenwood (a fact for which your descriptions are making me grateful), but the similarity of his name to that of a certain notoriously bad filmmaker causes me to wonder if he might be a put-on…