I always thought the Perry Rhodan series qualified, except that it has no single author, but it is ungodly space dreck.
My copy is right next to my Tubb books, oddly enough.
As a side note, I believe there is reference in the book to stories about Ralph von Wau, intelligent dog. Farmer wrote some of these, and published a few in F&SF, but they’ve never been collected in book form as far as I’ve ever seen.
Appreciate your bringing this to our attention, since everybody obviously missed the references the first three thimes it was mentioned in this thread. :smack:
Oh, bugger. You and BrainGlutton are correct. Damnit, I knew I had the name wrong and once more second-guessed myself into being an idiot. The series was definitely Tarzan, and the writer (by deduction) was Burroughs.
As I said, though, I don’t know if the people who told me this knew or just thought they knew.
As a side note, Spider never said the author in question was an SF author; we’re assuming that because we’re told to ask around at an SF convention.
Just for the record. Tarzan was only Burroughs’ third published work, at a time when he was desperately trying to make a go of writing. His first two books barely managed to get into print after much rewriting and rejection. He was hardly in a position to deliberately write something as bad as possible and think it would sell. And in fact psychologically he would never do so because he was the type that agonized over everything he wrote, worried that it was never good enough.
I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.
That would be “Author, Author!”. But I seem to recall that the protagonist wasn’t deliberately bad; I got the impression that he knew he was a hack, but kept churning them out because the fans demanded them. Not that he wouldn’t have preferred to do a good job.