They published this?

I have always enjoyed bad movies. Then the ::shudder:: book Meg introduced me to the concept of a bad novel. Initially, my assumption was that publishing was so competitive that poor storylines and hack writers were weeded out. (Yes, very naive and idealistic, I know.) Now I’m as cynical about literature as I am about film: if enough smucks will buy it, they’ll release it.

Today, I discovered a new scifi book called Ancestor. The publicity blurb decribes “scientists struggle to solve the problem of xenotransplantation – using animal tissue to replace failing human organs.” Then one of them decides to create (recreate?) the ancestor of all mammals as a possible organ donor. Since the research is done on a island, I imagine this great-grandpa mammal munches through a lot of the characters in interesting ways.

I work in organ transplant research - xenographs is one of our major projects. My co-workers and I are having a good laugh over this. Typically, we try to keep the species relationship as close as possible (rats and mice, sheep and goats) since much of their DNA - and the proteins it codes for- are similar. Making an “original” mammal would be useless to xenotransplantation research.

Have you ever encountered a book and wonder how the hell it got on the shelf?

Anything by Robin Cook is usually utter crap.

I don’t mind bad movies, in fact I sort of like them too. Bad novels make me really angry for some reason. I just want to throw them across the room.

We’ve written many times here about the work of Lionel Fanthorp, who wrote under a number of pseudonyms, including Pel Torro. One of his books under that pseudonym, Galaxy 666, has achieved some fame. It’s the first of his works I heard of, and I now own a copy. It’s exceedingly bad. It seems as if every time he needed to punch up his word count, he simply opened a thesaurus.

Really. I seriously think that’s what he did. He has sentences full of synonyms that serve no conceivable purpose.
Others have nominated other books of his as “the worst”. One book has a detailed description of the heroine bruashing her teeth.
I’ve pointed out that “Galaxy 666” has been republished AT LEAST two more times. Maybe more. There is no justice.

Look up Fanthorpe’s website for more details. The guy’s still alive.

There are plenty of others. Long before I found out about him, we were making fun of The Null-Frequency Impulser, nd Don Pendleton’s Cataclysm.

And, of course, you absolutely MUST look up the Eye of Argon on the web/. Especially the MST3K-ed version

Excuse me? Some hack attempts something vaguely original with really freaking obscure yet incorrect medical researchery knowledge and THAT’S the worst novel you can come up with?

I suppose the collected works of Michael Crichton were just too obvious, eh?

:smiley:

(I’ll nominate Atlanta Nights as the Worst Novel Ever Written, mostly because at least one Doper helped to write it. OTOH, they were *trying *for the Worst Novel Ever Written, so I don’t think it should count. Half points, maybe?)

Here ya go. I keep it bookmarked as a public service.

I’ve done that. Of course, I’m foolish enough to read the whole thing hoping things will improve. Then, disappointed and unstatisfied, throw it across the room and talk myself out of burning it.

A bad movies only takes a hour or two. A bad novel can take days.

Bad books (IMHO) I’ve read:
Battlefield Earth - it was the only thing at my grandparents’ house other than the Book of Mormon.

Meg - as I mentioned. Ashamed to say I read the whole thing, twice, trying to find what made it worthy of publication.

I’ve read Michael Criton and Dan Brown. This caused me to formulate the “If I can see the plot formula, the author no longer needs my money” rule.

I cannot believe that Stephen King’s The Regulators had an editor. I fail to believe this. Shittiest writing in the history of the universe, and I usually enjoy his stuff. He gets pretty hacky in Four Past Midnight, too. I can still remember his classic bit of prose: She looked at him as if he had just shit diamonds from a platinum asshole. Well done, sir. :rolleyes:

This juxtaposition makes me laugh at my own experience. I once rented the audiobook version of Battlefield Earth, and that can be even slower than reading it yourself. I got about halfway through it (something like 2 weeks, listening while driving) before I decided I just didn’t care about it any more.

:smiley: :smiley: :smiley: I haven’t finished it yet, but I’m glad you shared.

I dunno, I find the concept of trying to make a shrew-thing’s heart pump blood for an entire human body rather amusing. As well as the concept that they’d want the ancestor of all mammals… What, do they want to use the same donor for John and Mary as for Fluffy and Fido? Why not the ancestor of all apes, or (better yet), an ancestor for all humans?

Eve is gonna be right pissed when she wakes up on a lab table.

(she should be played by Mila Jovovich in the movie though)

Nah, that shouldn’t count. It’s never actually been published, just printed with LuLu. I believe Jim MacDonald said it has sold a few hundred copies through them, though.

For some reason, books set in the Middle Ages where the characters are named things that no medieval person was ever named bother me. Like women named Tamlyn or McKenzie or Raven or whatever the flavor-of-the-week baby name is. There are literally thousands of medieval women’s names that are both beautiful and not filled with extraneous Y’s and Mc’s. And a lot of the most common ones have survived to this day. Sure, you don’t see quite as many girls named Ermengarde as once there were, but it beats the heck out of Teagynn.

An exception to this feeling is the name Maggot, a pet name for Margaret. That one can stay in the thirteenth century. It would please me to no end if an author named a character Swetelove, though.

Neanderthal by John Darnton. Just in case someone here has the odd desire to read it, I’m going to put my synopsis in spoilers, because you just don’t get the full ass-tastic scope of it otherwise.

[spoiler]Susan Arnot and (the improbably named) Matt Mattison are paleoanthropologists who have spent their lives studying Neanderthals. They were lovers in grad school, broke up, and are now hateful academic rivals. So, of COURSE they are both picked for a top-secret assignment to try to find the last living Neanderthals on the planet. Their old mentor has gone missing in search of these living relics, see, and for some bizarre reason the only people on the planet that could possibly know him well enough to track him in some remote mountains in Asia are two people who haven’t spoken to him or each other in years.

Along the way, Susan and Matt bicker and flirt and lust for one another. Matt also, helpfully, lectures a linguist on language. Because, surely, a paleoanthropologist would know more about language than someone who actually works in that field.

So, they make it up these remote mountains. They find the Neanderthals. Promptly, the least important member of their party (and the only non-American) is killed by the Neanderthals so they can eat his brain. Susan and Matt manage to escape, leaving the linguist to the tender mercies of the Neanderthals.

During their struggle to escape, they learn a few things about their attackers. Apparently, Neanderthals did not have language. Instead, they used their psychic powers to communicate with one another. It’s some sort of interactive remote viewing type of thing, so that they can show each other what they’re looking at.

So, they escape, and end up in a beautiful, sunny Garden of Eden style paradise, just a little ways away from the cold, snowy, evil cave of the bad Neanderthals. In the garden-like spot in the mountains, there are happy, friendly Neanderthals, who are naked and have sex all over the place. So Susan and Matt have a bunch of sex and are naked and happy, too. But their mentor is there, and he’s mad that they found him.

See, their mentor had the brilliant idea of trying to hide the Neanderthals from the outside world, because anthropologists are often able to keep entire civilizations completely unspoiled by outside contact. He was going to hide them by sending a fresh Neanderthal skull back, claiming that this was all he found, and then hide out in the mountains and continue to study them. Because, of course, no one would find this to be suspicious at all or go after him. We can see why this man is considered such a genius in his field.

Well, eventually Matt and Susan decide to go help the linguist. They sneak back over to the caves and look at a cave painting, which they’re able to decipher. See, there’d been this big war between our ancestors and the Neanderthals. Our ancestors won not because we’re able to communicate fully and Neanderthals can only show each other mental slideshows, but because we’re good at lying. The Neanderthal survivors of this great war fled to this particular mountain range, never developed any further technology or tried leaving the mountains, and yet they have faithfully recorded and remembered the lesson of this 40,000 year old event.

While reading this cave painting that is so incredibly easy to understand, Matt and Susan are attacked. Susan gets kept captive, Matt manages to escape back to the Garden of Eden. The linguist has his brain eaten.

Matt somehow manages to meet up with a Marine or something. I don’t know. They build a big Trojan Bear and send it to the bad Neanderthals, and since the bad guys have learned their lesson of the lies of homo sapiens, they decide to burn the Trojan Bear. Of course, Matt knew that they would burn the Trojan Bear, and so he had hid explosives inside of the Trojan Bear. I guess the Marine had them? I don’t know.

Oh, yeah, and the mentor got it into his head that the bad Neanderthals were the favored children of evolution and Must. Not. Be. Tampered. With. So he goes to warn them of this trick, and instead gets his brain eaten.

Anyway, bad Neanderthals are killed, Susan is rescued, hurray.

In the end, the garden Neanderthals decide for some unfathomable reason to move from their wonderful, warm pretty garden into the freezing cold, dark cave. Matt, Susan, and the Random Marine head down the mountains. When they’re found, they make the same claim that the mentor did–there are no Neanderthals here! Because, of course, nobody will ever, ever go up into those mountains, ever again.[/spoiler]

It was really, really bad. It was like if Michael Crichton wanted to write a book about anthropology and he went on a porn binge while writing it.

I just finished The Arcanum. Set in 1919–a group of adepts fights a fiendish plot. Characters include AC Doyle, Houdini, Marie Laveau & HP Lovecraft.

Sound familiar? Actually, the pastiche set around the turn of that century–in which a combination of historical &/or fictional characters fight occult horrors–is quite common. (A personal favorite is The List of 7; Anno Dracula is also pretty fine.)

Not expecting anything greatly original, I gave it a try. Hey, it was a trade paperback–with a pretty cool cover.

It was dreck. The style was modern–and awkwardly so. According to the acknowledgements, it had been edited extensively, but infelicitous phrases jumped from the page again & again. One notices this sort of thing when the plot drags.

Characters were badly drawn. The writer had done his research, but failed to show why this gang of weirdos still fascinate. As things were getting tough, a bunch of secondary characters came to help our heros–secondary characters of whose existence we’d had no clue at all.

Atmosphere? There were a few promising glimpses–but the setting was mostly dull & unimaginative.

The writer has done screenplays–perhaps he hoped this would make a film. Maybe so. I hear Joss Whedon has fixed sick scripts. And Tim Burton can whip up atmosphere pretty well. Have they ever collaborated? I managed to finish the thing by imagining Johnny Depp as Young Lovecraft–with his demon-detecting devices, he reminded me of Ichabod Crane. And Gina Torres would make a kick-ass Marie Laveau.

Wait for the movie.

Well it was *selected *for publication, wasn’t it? By the prestigious (cough cough) PublishAmerica, no less! :smiley:

As was Crack of Death, by Travis Tea’s distant relation, Sharla Tan.

While I don’t think self-published books should count, I’d make a few exceptions.

  1. The Ultimatum to Mankind by Zeev Dickman. It’s about an ultimatum to mankind, set in the form of a dialog between an advance alien and a human. It’s actually written well, but the idea is so preposterous – humans have been going to hell ever since they discovered how to farm and the alien wants to wipe out 80% of the human race to make things better. This is because humans are killers.

  2. The Pleistoscene Redemption by Dan Gallagher. Jim Macdonald nicely skewers this one (“We’re talking about a book here that sucks so hard it removes all the air from small rooms.”) It is by far the worst book to appear on the Nebula preliminary ballot, showing that if you give out enough free copies, someone might vote for you.

  3. Attack of the Rockoids by Gene Steinberg. Your average vanity press SF book, except for the fact the Steinberg promoted it on the Internet, filling up Usenet groups with hundreds of posts a day calling himself a genius. He may singlehandedly turned “The lurkers support me in e-mail” into an Internet joke.

The Da Vinci Code
by Dan Brown

Drug Barren? Ow. You owe me that two seconds of my life back! :stuck_out_tongue:

I’m not familiar with Amazon.com so I was putzing around on it. The idea of adding Ancestor to a baby registry and talking about a great new project at work appeals to me. . . :stuck_out_tongue:

Sorry folks, carry on.