Try to make it someone who is acknowledged as being a slapdash writer of potboilers, rather than someone whose work you simply dislike.
I love E EVERETT EVANS, though I have only read his bad novel “Man of Many Minds,” a typical Heinlein/Norton rip-off wherein a literal Space Cadet saves the universe. I’ve heard that he wrote a sequal, but have never seen it.
BARRY B. LONGYEAR, writer of “Enemy Mine,” et al is particularly bad in a great Space Operish way. His characters “spit” lines of dialogue, etc. Also love the pseudonym he used in “Asimov’s” when he had two stories in one issue–Frederick Longbeard.
I also enjoy reading a lot of writers, who, while not particularly bad, were just run-of-the-mill most of the time, with an occasional standout. Guys like Jerome Bixby, Jerry Sohl, J. T. McIntosh, Nelson Bond, Wyman Guin, etc.
You bum! You stole my first choice. What great stuff. (approximate quote)
“Can you do it Space Cadet?”
“Gosh sir, I’m only a kid, but I’ll do my best!”
The sequel is called “Alien Minds” and as far as I know it was only printed in hardcover. I’ve seen it a couple of times, but never for less than $75.00
Jerome Bixby is BAD? Bite your tongue – or the fingers you type with. The man who gave us “It’s a GOOD Life” and undeservedly forgotten little SF films from the 50s like It! The Terror from Beyond Space (which was ripped off for Alien), The Lost Missile, and the quirky Curse of the Faceless Man, not to mention the 1960s film Fantastic Voyage deserves better.
R.L. Fanshawe, mentioned many times on this board, deserves mention as BAD – read his stuff and you’ll have no doubt. So is the author of The Eye of Argon (mentioned in a couple of my threads). These guys are at least entertainingly bad. Unintentionally so. This makes them prime MST3K material.
L. Ron Hubbard is just annoyingly bad. Even if he hadn’t come up with the most oppressive, litigious business/religion, I’d still hate his writing, which has that false bonhomie I’ve come to associate with someone trying to sell me something I don’t want. For the life of me I can’t understand why his stuff appealed to legendary editor John Campbell. L. Ron is NOT a favorite.
Pulp writer of the Deathlands series. Poorly strung together on shaky premises, he writes stories so cliché you couldn’t chop them with a razor sharp 18" panga.
I admit, I love this stuff. I have been reading this series for around 15 years. Of course I don’t let any of my “smarty pants bookworm” type friends know about my dirty little habit.
I have to mention Tom Clancy. I can dig on his standard fare, but he REALLY needs to stay out of the SF business.
CalMeacham
I agree with you about L. Ron, he’s bad, just not bad enough. (likely a ketchup deficiency)
I agree with you. I love UNKNOWN and UNKNOWN WORLDS and Hubbard was one of the most frequent contributors. His dialogue is mediocre, his pacing terrible and his ablilty to end a story satisfingly is non-existant (check the end of “Typewriter in the Sky” for an example.)
What’s weird is that I understand that Hubbard kept winning in the “most popular author” poll that Astounding had every issue.
The only explanation that I have is that Hubbard started really writing for Campbell in quantity after Heinlein, Asimov, DeCamp, etc took off to serve in various capactities in WWII. That left a huge talent vacuum for Campbell who had lots of pages to fill and Hubbard could A)write fast and B)write coherently, if not well. And really, Hubbard only enjoyed “star”-levels of popularity only so long as the “real” Campbell stable of writers were away. Hubbard’s published output dropped off fairly dramatically after WWII.
I don’t know how true that is, but it makes sense to me.
I haven’t read much SF, but I can honestly say that Galaxy 666 by Pel Torro (aka Lionel Fanthorpe) is the worst book I’ve ever read. I suspect it may be the worst book ever written! Read all about it here, with some hilarious excerpts:
[confession mode]
I once owned a book by Eando Binder. Hey, I was young, callow and it had a great cover. Took me years to ditch it on the sly.
[/confessional mode]
It was not long after that I discovered the Publisher Conservation of Money Law, which states that in pre-1970 SF, the more money the publisher spent on the cover, the less they spent on the manuscript and vice-versa.
Nope. didn’t know that. But then I can’t even recall what the “E” stood for. The “O” was “Otto” I believe.
OK, if you don’t like them, how about
**Gardner Fox ** who wrote GREAT comic plots, for everything from the golden age Flash to the silver age Justice League of America. See biography herebut whose novels were, IMHO, pretty darn purple pulp prose.
I own a copy of Galaxy 666, and I trot it out and read it to friends as an exam,ple of the amazingly bad. I have to believe that Pel Torro wrote with a thesaurus at his elbow and used it uncreatively. Whole chunks of Galaxy 666 read like a thesaurus. Must’ve been when the word count was seeming low.
Fenris wtote:
I don’t know. I was under the impression that L. Ron was sucked into Heinlein’s little brainstorming group for a while, then received an active post in the Navy. He was one of the few SF writers who WAS on active duty, as I recall, so it doesn’t seem likely that he was picking up the slack for absent writers. Look up Russell Miller’s bio (if you can find it in print – the Rondroids have tried to drive a stake through its heart and damned near succeeded), or the website on L. Ron’s naval career. Both are available through http://www.xenu.com .
Also more excerpts from the master himself - the one where he spends a page describing a woman brushing her teeth is the best laugh I’ve had in a while…
L. Ron is worse than bad. Every moment I’ve spent reading his dreck was a little slice of hell.
Now, E.E. Doc Smith - there’s some good space opera. Only books I’ve ever read where the navigator whips out his slide rule to calculate the course to the next galaxy. And you have to respect anyone who gets around the whole speed of light issue by claiming that it’s just a theory.
Haven’t you read Heinlein’s Starman Jones? Exact same thing, bunches of humans with slide rules and books crunching numbers (in the “worry room”) then manually entering them into the computer to prepare for a jump.
My favorite bad SF author is Walter Koenig, author of “Buck Alice and the Actor Robot.” Somewhere around the net there’s an essay floating around explaining why this is the worst SF novel ever published, but a quick web search didn’t turn anything up.
If we’re counting unpublished but infamous, I’ll go with Jim Theis, author of the spectacularly and hilariously bad “The Eye of Argon.”
Jack L. Chalker gets my vote. His writing is pedestrian and artless on his best day, but he is a great producer of Really Neat Ideas[super]TM[/super].
Besides which, he seems incapable of writing a book without including a scene where characters transform from one species or sex into another. And usually they become beautiful human female mind-controlled sex slaves.
As a feminist and SF connoisseur, of course this appals me. As a degenerate kinkmonger, well…
You mentioned Tom Clancy – what books has he done that would be considered SF? (I’m not arguing, just haven’t read enough of his stuff to encounter anything sci-fi-ish.)