# Tell us about the worst books by your favorite authors. **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [February 17, 2020, 4:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-about-the-worst-books-by-your-favorite-authors/848079 "2020-02-17T16:54:34Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skald_the_Rhymer)\ **Post date:** [February 17, 2020, 4:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-about-the-worst-books-by-your-favorite-authors/848079/1 "2020-02-17T16:54:34Z")
A little housekeeping before we begin. A collection of short stories is just as valid as a novel for this purpose. I myself am mostly interested in fiction, but I realize that not everyone shares my disinterest in creative nonfiction. So be it. Something like Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Committed” is just as valid as Piers Anthony’s "Firefly. That said, I think it only fair if people would confine themselves to works published during the author’s lifetime. The dullness of Robert Heinlein’s “For Us, The Living” does not affect my judgment of Heinlein’s art the way the aforementioned Anthony pseudo-porn tripe did when I read it 25 years ago. Speaking of Heinlein, I will mention one of his early fantasies, “Lost Legacy.” Practically a how-to guide on crafting a boring, pedantic novel, LL Has as its biggest sin its utter lack of humor. The first Heinlein I ever read was “Number of the Beast,” which, while deeply flawed, is nonetheless hilarious in many stretches in ways that compensate for its faults (many of which I suspect are deliberate and part of the joke). NOTB Intrigued me enough so that I sought out more and more of Heinlein’s fiction and discovered some true brilliance. If LL had been my introduction to him, I would have deliberately avoided him all these 35 years. But that’s just me. What are your least favorite books by your favorite authors? ---
**Author:** ![Snowboarder\_Bo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/snowboarder_bo/32/229_2.png) [@Snowboarder\_Bo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Snowboarder_Bo)\ **Post date:** [February 17, 2020, 4:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-about-the-worst-books-by-your-favorite-authors/848079/2 "2020-02-17T16:59:30Z")
Heinlein’s NOTB was the first book that I ever put down and did not finish. I can still count the number of books I’ve walked away from on one hand, and NOTB is still on there. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [February 17, 2020, 5:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-about-the-worst-books-by-your-favorite-authors/848079/3 "2020-02-17T17:18:47Z")
Clarke’s 3001. Threw away the timeline and all the stuff that made 2001 great. Total failure of nerve. But he was old. Asimov’s last Foundation book reflected his age and his illness. Trantor, standing in for New York, was a mess. It was a case of an old man yelling “get off my stoop!” ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [February 17, 2020, 5:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-about-the-worst-books-by-your-favorite-authors/848079/4 "2020-02-17T17:23:17Z")
I’ll nominate one of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s. _Sharra’s Exile_ was intended to be a rewrite / replacement for a book she’d written long before, _The Sword of Aldones_. It kind of assumes that a) everyone knows the characters, their history in the chronology, and the elements of the Darkover world already; and b) everyone cares intensely about the minutiae of every tiny thing that might conceivably have any minor implication for the events that she wrote about in the years after _Sword of Aldones_. I had read several Darkover-series books before encountering it. I still found most of it slow-moving navel-gazing. **AlltheGood** , who had _not_ read any Darkover books before this one, said it dragged on interminably with nothing happening and that it was chock-full of badly explained angst and self-recrimination and self-doubt that’s attributed to poorly explained stuff that the author thinks everyone should already know about. Only later did she try any other Darkover books since this one put her to a bad start with them. ---
**Author:** ![silenus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/silenus/32/166_2.png) [@silenus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/silenus)\ **Post date:** [February 17, 2020, 5:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-about-the-worst-books-by-your-favorite-authors/848079/5 "2020-02-17T17:54:46Z")
Terry Pratchett’s _Unseen Academicals_ is total tripe. To me, Heinlein’s worst book that wasn’t commissioned by John Campbell or unedited because of illness was _Farnham’s Freehold_. Garbage from concept to execution. Heavy-handed garbage at that. ---
**Author:** ![Dallas\_Jones](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dallas_jones/32/3277_2.png) [@Dallas\_Jones](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dallas_Jones)\ **Post date:** [February 17, 2020, 5:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-about-the-worst-books-by-your-favorite-authors/848079/6 "2020-02-17T17:57:08Z")
> [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](#): > > Speaking of Heinlein, I will mention one of his early fantasies, “Lost Legacy.” Practically a how-to guide on crafting a boring, pedantic novel, LL Has as its biggest sin its utter lack of humor. The first Heinlein I ever read was “Number of the Beast,” which, while deeply flawed, is nonetheless hilarious in many stretches in ways that compensate for its faults (many of which I suspect are deliberate and part of the joke). NOTB Intrigued me enough so that I sought out more and more of Heinlein’s fiction and discovered some true brilliance. If LL had been my introduction to him, I would have deliberately avoided him all these 35 years. > > But that’s just me. What are your least favorite books by your favorite authors? Well, I entered this thread to specifically mention Number of the Beast by R.A. Heinlein but it looks like you liked it. If I had started with that one I probably would have just stopped reading him. Maybe just stopped reading altogether. ---
**Author:** ![Prof.Pepperwinkle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/prof.pepperwinkle/32/13627_2.png) [@Prof.Pepperwinkle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Prof.Pepperwinkle)\ **Post date:** [February 17, 2020, 6:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-about-the-worst-books-by-your-favorite-authors/848079/7 "2020-02-17T18:19:58Z")
Larry Niven’s _Ringworld_ is probably my favorite SF novel. The sequels, though, are a waste of pulpwood. ---
**Author:** ![QuickSilver](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quicksilver/32/7832_2.png) [@QuickSilver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/QuickSilver)\ **Post date:** [February 17, 2020, 6:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-about-the-worst-books-by-your-favorite-authors/848079/8 "2020-02-17T18:27:30Z")
Douglas Adams’, “Dirk Gently…”. What utter nonsense; Couldn’t put it down fast enough. Hard to believe it was written by the same guy who wrote, “Hitchhiker’s Guide”. ---
**Author:** ![Infovore](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/infovore/32/420_2.png) [@Infovore](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Infovore)\ **Post date:** [February 17, 2020, 6:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-about-the-worst-books-by-your-favorite-authors/848079/9 "2020-02-17T18:33:32Z")
This is going to be an unpopular opinion, but I consider the _Dark Tower_ series to be some of Stephen King’s worst work. I read it, but it took me three false starts to get through the first book (finally had to listen to it on audiobook to manage). The middle books weren’t bad, but the last two or three were self-indulgent crap (this was deep in King’s “I nearly got wiped out by a van and you readers are going to suffer as much as I did by having to listen to me rehash it endlessly for the next five years” period). He literally inserted himself as a character. I know a lot of people love these books and consider them some of King’s best work, but I’m not among them. I’d much rather read his horror stuff. As for other authors - Graham Masterton is one of my all-time favorite horror authors, but I nearly chucked _Unspeakable_ across the room when I got to the end. ---
**Author:** ![PastTense](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pasttense/32/14550_2.png) [@PastTense](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PastTense)\ **Post date:** [February 17, 2020, 6:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-about-the-worst-books-by-your-favorite-authors/848079/10 "2020-02-17T18:36:14Z")
A number of mystery writers have done series with the same character. It seems not at all uncommon that the early books are great while the latter ones are pretty marginal, for example Robert Parker when he wrote the Spenser series or Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series. ---
**Author:** ![MindsEye\_Watering](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mindseye_watering/32/3619_2.png) [@MindsEye\_Watering](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MindsEye_Watering)\ **Post date:** [February 17, 2020, 6:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-about-the-worst-books-by-your-favorite-authors/848079/11 "2020-02-17T18:42:28Z")
“Elevation” by Stephen King reads like it was written by a Creative Writing student trying to write in the style of Stephen King. I felt like a sucker for buying it. ---
**Author:** ![Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skald_the_Rhymer)\ **Post date:** [February 17, 2020, 6:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-about-the-worst-books-by-your-favorite-authors/848079/12 "2020-02-17T18:42:59Z")
> [@Dallas\_Jones](#): > > Well, I entered this thread to specifically mention Number of the Beast by R.A. Heinlein but it looks like you liked it. If I had started with that one I probably would have just stopped reading him. Maybe just stopped reading altogether. Just because I liked it doesn’t mean everybody else must. Feel free to mock it. I conceded in the OP that it is a very flawed novel, although I think many of the faults are intentional jokes. ---
**Author:** ![Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skald_the_Rhymer)\ **Post date:** [February 17, 2020, 7:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-about-the-worst-books-by-your-favorite-authors/848079/13 "2020-02-17T19:09:25Z")
> [@PastTense](#): > > A number of mystery writers have done series with the same character. It seems not at all uncommon that the early books are great while the latter ones are pretty marginal, for example Robert Parker when he wrote the Spenser series or Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series. I thought about mentioning Parker in my original post, though his artistic decline with the Spenser novels was not a straight line. Several of the later ones are quite enjoyable. The last one published before his death, which I believe was called The Professional, was outright awful, though. Given that Parker’s non-Spenser novels were still quite enjoyable at that point, I could only assume that he was cranking the spenser books out in a month or so merely to meet contractual obligation’s while his artistic energies were being concentrated on the Sunny Randall and Jesse Stone books. ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [February 17, 2020, 7:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-about-the-worst-books-by-your-favorite-authors/848079/14 "2020-02-17T19:15:42Z")
China Mieville is astonishing. His imagination is a wild garden where half the plants are carnivorous and the other half have names that can’t be pronounced by human voices. He’s changed fantasy, bringing a robust element of the bizarre to the forefront, using beautifully rococo language. He’s weirdpunk. **King Rat** is a hot fucking mess of a book, ending with a pun so cringey that I nearly threw the book across the room. ---
**Author:** ![furryman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/furryman/32/99_2.png) [@furryman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/furryman)\ **Post date:** [February 17, 2020, 7:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-about-the-worst-books-by-your-favorite-authors/848079/15 "2020-02-17T19:19:38Z")
_A Feast Unknown_ by Phillip Jose Farmer. I generally like Farmer but this story of the meeting between Doc Savage and Tarzan reads like a fan fiction written by a teenager. I’m currently reading _The Dark Side of the Sun_ by Terry Pratchett so far it’s pretty boring. ---
**Author:** ![dalej42](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/67e7ee/32.png) [@dalej42](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dalej42)\ **Post date:** [February 17, 2020, 7:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-about-the-worst-books-by-your-favorite-authors/848079/16 "2020-02-17T19:23:35Z")
The Bear and the Dragon started the serious decline of Tom Clancy. Clancy was one of those authors who I always had to have the hardcover book on day one. So, did my usual and prepared for a long night of reading accompanied by a couple cocktails. And, then, WTF? Why are there endless pages devoted to fettuccine Alfredo??? What a horrible horrible book. I bought Red Rabbit in hardback although not on day of release. I pretty much didn’t bother with Clancy after that. Maybe I’ll sort though his other stuff when I’ve got a lot of time on my hands, but I think I’ll just reread Hunt for Red October or Cardinal of the Kremlin. ---
**Author:** ![furryman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/furryman/32/99_2.png) [@furryman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/furryman)\ **Post date:** [February 17, 2020, 7:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-about-the-worst-books-by-your-favorite-authors/848079/17 "2020-02-17T19:27:46Z")
> [@Infovore](#): > > This is going to be an unpopular opinion, but I consider the _Dark Tower_ series to be some of Stephen King’s worst work. > > I read it, but it took me three false starts to get through the first book (finally had to listen to it on audiobook to manage). The middle books weren’t bad, but the last two or three were self-indulgent crap (this was deep in King’s “I nearly got wiped out by a van and you readers are going to suffer as much as I did by having to listen to me rehash it endlessly for the next five years” period). He literally inserted himself as a character. > > I know a lot of people love these books and consider them some of King’s best work, but I’m not among them. I’d much rather read his horror stuff. > As for other authors - Graham Masterton is one of my all-time favorite horror authors, but I nearly chucked _Unspeakable_ across the room when I got to the end. I’m glad I’m not the only person who didn’t like the latter books in the _The Dark Tower_ series. To me though only the last book was nearly total garbage. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [February 17, 2020, 7:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-about-the-worst-books-by-your-favorite-authors/848079/18 "2020-02-17T19:53:04Z")
It looks like none of these will be very controversial in this crowd, but… _Number of the Beast_ was the worst Heinlein novel I’ve read. _Farnham’s Freehold_ was bad, but you could at least see what he was trying to do with it, and what he was trying to do was hard enough that it’s not particularly surprising that he failed. _Number_ has no such excuse. I’ve heard that some of his other works are even worse, but having heard that, I’ve avoided them, so I can’t fairly comment on them. Among his short stories, “Elsewhen” is the worst. It’s hard to believe that it’s the same author as the gold standards of time travel, “By His Own Bootstraps” and “All You Zombies”. For Niven, I’d nominate _Protector_ as the worst. For as bad as the _Ringworld_ sequels were, the blame for all of that badness can be laid squarely at _Protector_’s feet. It was so bad that it forced him to ruin one of his masterpieces. And yeah, Asimov should really have discarded the idea of tying all of his books together. It doesn’t work. ---
**Author:** ![ChockFullOfHeadyGoodness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chockfullofheadygoodness/32/511_2.png) [@ChockFullOfHeadyGoodness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ChockFullOfHeadyGoodness)\ **Post date:** [February 17, 2020, 8:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-about-the-worst-books-by-your-favorite-authors/848079/19 "2020-02-17T20:07:34Z")
As a teen I’d liked everything I’d read by Asimov. Then I hit _Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain_. He had done the novelization of the Raquel-Welch-in-a-wetsuit-and-some-other-stuff-happened movie in the 60s and was unhappy with the bad science. So he decided to write a novel with the same premise but with good science. Good science maybe, but bad plotting, characterization\*, and incredibly boring. A 100 page physics lecture followed by a 150 page microbiology lecture capped off with a surprisingly good 20 page cold war thriller escape scene. Douglas Adams. First 3 Hitchikers Guides books are hilarious. _So Long and Thanks For All The Fish_ was terrible. I know I read _Mostly Harmless_, but don’t remember a single thing about it. While I didn’t hate the later Dark Tower books, there is a huge drop in quality in the three post-accident books. Although I did enjoy the later “midquel” \*Wind Through the Keyhole \*as a sort of return to form. - I was a teen. It wasn’t until I was rereading the “Future History” series in my 40s that I noticed how paper-thin his characters usually are - mostly just talking heads providing exposition. ---
**Author:** ![Loach](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/loach/32/350_2.png) [@Loach](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Loach)\ **Post date:** [February 17, 2020, 8:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-about-the-worst-books-by-your-favorite-authors/848079/20 "2020-02-17T20:14:45Z")
I’ll go with a non-household name. Michael F. Flynn became one of my favorite authors that contributed to Analog. Several of the story he began there were expanded into novels. I haven’t read everything by him but enjoyed everything I did read. And then I read Wreck of the River of Stars. A horribly slow and boring slog. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-about-the-worst-books-by-your-favorite-authors/848079.md?page=2)