The Hobbit:
The Lord Of The Rings:
Well, on the treasure bit, I seem to recall a lot of dwarves coming out to help do whatever dwarves do with a ton of treasure.
Had to be destroyed where it came from.
#3 was never part of the plan.
Generally, they have an orgasm over it. Especially if there’s magic items in the treasure.
That would help when identifying them later, you must admit. A dwarf never forgets…
Foundation Series
Easy enough.
Location, location, location.
Good luck with that.
…What about the book?
[Bugs Bunny cartoon]
5. Name them “George”
[/Bugs Bunny cartoon]
Howzabout any of the hundred or so killers in Agatha Christie’s series of murder mysteries? Good lord, all the twisted, hopelessly complicated plots that those country-estate Brit gentry have perpetuated…
Some choice highlights (obviously spoilers, but I’ll refrain from naming the books they correspond to):
Get every one with a grudge against a former kidnapper together on a train with him, drug him, then have each & every one of them take a turn at stabbing him, then plant clues to suggest that a single assassin managed to sneak onto the train, ace the dude, and sneak off - all while Hercule Poirot, a notoriously finicky fussbudget, tries to get to sleep in the next compartment.
Hire an actor who specializes in impersonations to impersonate you at a dinner party, while you brazenly walk into your estranged husband’s home, stab him to death, then later meet up with the unsuspecting actress and kill her as well, then claim that you were at the dinner party and that the actress went to the estranged husband’s home & stabbed him to death, and was killed by an unknown person.
Strangle your ex-wife on a commuter train, toss her body out the window at the precisely the spot that the train passes the estate of the dowdy but rich old maid whom you want to marry for her money, and secrete the body in an unused shed on the premises.
Strangle a tacky chamber maid from a resort hotel (who has thrown a monkey wrench into your plans of bilking your elderly father-in-law of his money by marrying him!), and toss the body into the living room of a nearby, ne’er-do-well playboy (who then throws a monkey wrench into your plan to frame him by simply taking the body and dumping it into another person’s living room where it is finally discovered by the authorities).
Track down nine folks who’ve gotten away with murder, lure them to a secluded island, pretend that you were likewise lured to the island by a mystery host, trap them there, proceed to pick them off one by one, pretend to be killed off yourself so that people don’t suspect you of being the murderer anymore, kill everyone but the two most resourceful victims, sit back and watch them suspect, and ultimately kill each other. Then kill yourself (since you were dying from cancer anyway!)
Have your boyfriend pretend to fall in love with your rich best friend. Pretend to stalk them on their honeymoon, including booking yourself on the same cruise ship they are on, stage a public quarrel with your boyfriend in which you shoot him in a drunken rage (but only shoot blanks at him!), while he pretends to be laid up with a bullet wound in the leg, and everybody concerns themselves with dealing with your sorry ass, have your boyfriend then sneak into your rich best friend’s / his wifes’ room and shoot her in the head.
When confronted with the woman who inadvertantly gave you german measles (causing you to give birth to a severly retarded child) at a cocktail party decades after the fact - load your own cocktail up with tranquilizers while no-one is looking, pretend to jostle the woman’s arm thereby causing her to spill her own cocktail, ‘graciously’ offer your own drink to her, secretly gloat while she drinks the laced drink and dies, gloat some more as people mistakenly think that someone intended to kill you with a spiked drink. Just remember to whip up some bogus threatening letters to show the police later, claiming that a nefarious stalker has been hounding you for months!
Cajole your sister into marrying a rich old coot, when the old coot & your sister are killed by a bomb dropped during the WWII London air-raids, convince the chamber maid you were sleeping with to impersonate your sister (so as to still stake a claim to the rich old coot’s fortune), when the chamber maid develops guilt feelings about the scam - kill her.
What always bothered me about Agatha Christie plots (never read the books, but I have seen three Hercule Poirot movies) is this: To keep the murder from being too easy for the audience to solve, she makes practically everybody a potential suspect, with a motive. This allows Poirot to spin a scenario by which each person present might have done the deed. But, to make this work, she has to make the victim such a murder-motive-provoking rat-bastard that we, the audience, half want the murderer, whoever it might be, to get away with it; so our heart is not really in the whodunit, except as an intellectual exercise.
Even worse is the fact that 90% of all her books employ the same cheap trick - there is one major character in the book who does not seem to have any motive for the murder, or has a seemingly airtight alibi for where they were at the time in question - and somehow that character turns out to be the killer. Christie herself bluntly confessed as much in her forward to “Cards on the Table.”
[blackadder]
I have a cunning plan . . .
[/blackadder]
You forgot: Kill someone and write a book about it, figuring that no one would suspect you then. 
The entire plot of the Dune Trilogy revolved around a plan so badly thought out that it very nearly wrecked the universe. I find it pretty unbelievable that the Fremen nourished a fanatical hope to change the climate of Arrakis (for no good reason, I might add) that they had been living with for thousands of years just because some off-worlder said they should. I find it even more unbelievable that in the course of doing this, no one bothered to ask how it would affect the worms and the spice which they depended on until the change was already in progress. I know that the only two constants are confusion and error, but this is carrying it pretty far.
You wouldn’t know a cunning plan if it painted itself purple and danced upon the harpsicord singing “Cunning plans are here today!”
There were so many plans and schemes in Dune I couldn’t keep them straight. I read the whole appendix on “Bene Gesserit Motives and Purposes” without gaining the least insight into Bene Gesserit motives and purposes. What did they plan to do with the Kwisatz Haderach once their elaborate breeding program had produced him?
Yeah, the appendix raised more questions than it answered. For instance, it asks why neither the Bene Gesserits or the Spacing Guild took any steps to investigate the mysterious nexus. For that matter, shouldn’t someone have been keeping a closer eye on Paul after he had proven himself above ordinary humans in the pain test?
You know, come to think of it, Dune wasn’t about crazy schemes and predictions as much as it was about the lack of any coherent strategy or foresight. Paul Atredies agonized about the coming jihad before the coming battle. Fine. Then why didn’t he at least try to come to terms with the situation before the final battle to overthrow the Harkonnens? He could have left the Padishah Emperor on his throne to stabilize the rest of the universe while Paul ruled Arrakis with the constant threat of annihilation of the spice keeping him at least somewhat safe. I doubt the Fremen would have given a shit as long as no one was messing with them, and anyway, it’s not like banishing the emperor to Salusa Secondus made Paul any more secure.
If any mythical universe needed a political consultant . . .
Funny, this is precisely the book I thought of when I read the thread title.
Well, there’s also stuff like:
I mean, c’mon, most fiction has fairly unbelievable plots.
Or try:
[del][blackadder][/del][Baldrick]
I have a cunning plan . . .
[/Baldrick][del][/blackadder][/del]
