Stress on the “was.” Battlefield Earth and the following “dekalogy” of books were written long after the point where he was willing to be edited. It’s a terrible, terrible book.
Not that I’m saying it’s worse than Fanthorpe’s work – I’m just saying that early Hubbard is not a good indicator of the quality of Battlefield Earth.
Stranger in a Strange Land isn’t even Heinlein’s worst work. I’d nominate I Will Fear No Evil for that one. For Us the Living is worse, but I think it unfair to count it, since Heinlein had the good sense to give up on it early.
It’s been a while, but I remember the first half of Stranger being reasonably good, only getting bogged down later. I suspect you have never read Fanthorpe. His work doesn’t even approach pseudo-intellectual, and he doesn’t even have the basics down. You might as well compare bad Renoir (what ever that would be) with the daubings of a chimp.
There are several Heinlein novels worse than Stranger, IMHO:
Rocket Ship Galileo
Beyond This Horizon
The Day After Tomorrow (aka Sixth Column)
Starship Troopers
Farnham’s Freehold
I Will Fear No Evil
Number of the Beast
For me the real horror of Galaxy 666 is not that the damned thing was published – I could see it slipping through the radar of Good Taste and Discrimination in the name of Contractual Obligation, or sometyhing. No, the real horror is that , between the websites and the copies at the MIT Science Fiction LIbrary, it’s been published with at least three different covers. In other words, not only was it published, it got published again and again. Someone deliberately chose – someone made a conscious effort – to take this thesaurus masquerading as a story and put it back into print, to market it, to take the trou7ble to come up with a new cover for it.
I think the original British publisher was stuck with it, but that doesn’t explain why the American publisher felt he had to print it. An d he got somebody to take an AMF U.S.S. Enterise model, make a few really crude “customizing” changes on it, and photograph it over an MST3K-quality globe. Later on, they used that same picture again for the cover, but changed the rest of the cover art.
Did this dreck actually make enough money to justify this? The mind boggles. I’m sure they coul;d’ve got some fan-written fiction that was better, and which the fan would be grateful to have printed (and take little or nothing in royalties). Or some new writers could break in with some new stories. The fact that they didn’t suggests (shudder!) that they were going for the name recognition factor of Pel Torro.
(“You wanna buy this new book by Higgens and Floyd? It’s only 75 cents!”
“Naah! I never heard o’ them. But I’ve heard of this guy Torro.”
“Is his stuff any good?”
“Who cares?”)
They were great fun when I was a kid but I’d nominate almost any of the Perry Rhodan pulps for some of the cheesiest SF I’ve ever read.
Probably. The rights were probably cheap and there were probably enough people who were willing to buy on blurb alone so you break even.
More importantly, there was the issue of rack space. Back then rack space was important: paperback publishers needed to have enough titles out to fill the book racks every month.
Say your quota was five titles for one particular distributor. You needed to give them five titles each and every month. And if one of your titles had to slip (say, the author was late delivering it), you couldn’t just send out four books: the distributor might reduce your quota from five to four and you can’t place a dozen books a year.
If you looked like you were going to be short one month, it’s better to release a terrible book than nothing. Pel Torro had been published in the UK and all you had to do was reset the type and go with it. That allows for a short turnaround. Voila – you kept your rack space.
A new author couldn’t have the short turnaround. If you have a hole in your line three months out, Galaxy 666 is ready. The new author would not be. And the 11 slots that year that Galaxy 666 saved could be used for new authors.
I understand now. Galaxy 666 is not so much a novel, as a placeholder for another, better novel, to be written by almost anyone. Meanwhile they have this pile of words there to hold the place open for the better novel.
Actually, it kinda reads like that. Makes more sense.
Incidentally, I met Lionel Fanthorpe at a science fiction convention in England in 1990, and I found him to be a very pleasant person.
The quote generator is FANTASTIC! This one might be my favorite so far:
(Writing as Bron Fane)
I take that back; it’s this one:
What about this one?
Maybe he was having an off day.
Interestingly, the people who write total hack prose tend to be very nice as people, as do the truly wonderful writers.
It’s the ones in the middle who tend to be shits. 