A book I'm thinking of in particular is Bill Baldwin's The Helmsman, which is part of a space-opera-ish sci-fi series. Parts of it I thought were fine, but the dialogue was abyssmal. Killed the book for me.

Then, much to my utter dismay, I realized that a large part of the fantasy that is out right now has all that sort of trash in it. And then I got to thinking, is this what the publishers think we fantasy fans want to read? Overly disgusting violence and smut all over the place?

I know there are, sadly enough, some people that enjoy that, but come on! There are those of us who don't want to read that stuff! What happened to "good, clean" fantasy like LoTR, The Chronicles of Narnia, etc, etc? Don't get me wrong, I have read some fantastic fantasy novels lately that were for the most part free of "objectionable content," but for every one of those, there are about two, maybe three, maybe more, fantasies filled with crap (for a lack of a better word).

It disgusts me, it really does, but there's not a whole lot I can do about it besides writing my own novels that counter those. I know that the authors that write those books are perfectly allowed to, but still! My word! Some of the stuff that goes on...

Not only that, but they're more often than not horribly written as well, with clichéd plots, uninteresting, stereotypical characters, and awful, awful dialog. Where did all the good fantasy novelists go, I wonder?

BUT, having a really bad guy telling the story can work. The first half or so of the Mission Earth books by L. Ron Hubbard is told from the perspective of a totally evil man, but it works (mainly because he loses and loses and loses and we like it). I think the problem is when there are no sympathetic characters in the story to care about.

I restored my faith in the possibility that not all fantasy being published now is generic and intended for lowest-common-denominator readers.

It's early. Chances are, though, that, sooner or later, someone will bring up a book that means the world to someone else.

In my Internet Fan Fiction period, I read a lot of stuff that struck me as "hold-your-nose" bad. Plenty of good, but a lot bad. (Only slushpile readers have read more and worse than me, I suspect.) I'd rather not name names...but in nearly every example that showed up on my screen, I found something interesting or worthwhile, sometimes even fascinatingly so. It kept me going quite a ways.

Stephen King: Hearts in Atlantis. Brilliant book, one of his best.

A few years later he brings out Dreamcatcher, which is a complete turd of a book.

Another Stephen, this time British SF author Baxter. Raft, his debut novel. Stunning. The best movie I've ever read. CGI was invented in order to bring this book to the silver screen. But, again, the same author later did Voyage, an utter turgid novel cry-babying about how we could have gone to Mars in the mid '80s. Whatever. Gave up after 200 pages. Talk about dead prose, man, but it made '39 Steps' look like the pinacle of literature!

Hey, I got another one? What about guilty pleasures? Books you know you shouldn't like and are otherwise embarrassed to admit that you do?

I'll go first:

Chick-lit -

- I simply love Jane Green and Lisa Jewell.

Also -

"The Inheritors": I didn't buy into his portrait of Neanderthan Man. I don't think something that stupid would have lasted long enough to get to that point, whether Homer Sapiens was on the scene or not.

"Lord of the Flies": again, something I didn't buy into. If a gang of [British] schoolkids were trapped on an island, I'm not so sure the descent into barbarism would've been inevitable...and if they did, I don't think they'd've developed the rites and rituals in the manner they did.

Lets see... nearly anything published by TSR usually stinks it up pretty bad (I used to like R. A. Salvatore, but after 9087 Drizzt books, it got a little lame).

Any of the Rama books after the first one were horrible. ACC should be ashamed!

In school we had to read Margaret Atwood (growing up in Canada isn't all good ). She is a man-hater, and as such, her books suffer for it. Handmaiden's Tale was a joke.

Huxley's "Brave New World" sucked, I thought. 1984 is a vastly superior distopian novel. Huxley was so caught up in that drug nonsense, it bogged down his book.

Jordan's last 345 books have all sucked. The first 3 WoT books were good, but now they are horrible.

Anywho, that's all for now.

Cat's Eye and the The Robber Bride were terrific!!

True, I also had a problem with The Handmaid's Tale as it had none of her razor-sharp humor. (Actually, it had no humor at all, which made it a very dull read.)

Her volume of stories Wilderness Tips is one of the best collections I've read -

- and her latest novel, Oryx & Crake, is one of the funniest science fiction novels I've read. Yes, that's right, it's SF (though both she and her publishers would vehemently deny that!) It was criminally ignored by the SF community which, bizarrely, had fawned over her much earlier and inferior SF novel, the aforementioned The Handmaid's Tale.

Totally agree about the 'Rama' sequels - cringingly bad! The last volume ought to have been titled Rama Vaguely Hinted At.

Also his 'novel' The Hammer of God. As the critic John Clute pointed out is was more a collection of notes-towards-a-novel than an actual novel itself. Besides, the 'hammer' never fell. Should have been called A Slap on the Wrist from God.

I started Handmaid's Tale but managed to mislay it somehow. I will Get Around To It someday.

In general enjoy Atwood - "manhater" or no. I particularly like her response to an interview question. She waas asked why her main characters tended to get killed. Her
answer was along the lines of "the story isn't over until everyone in it is dead".

As for books that suck - well, the only book in the last ten years that I've thrown away because it was so bad as "Magic", by Tami Hoag. The POV bounced back and forth between the two protagonists about seven times in succession, sentence by sentence, and that, coupled with cliched description and what looked like it was going to be an utterly obvious plot, actually made me physically throw the book away.

I literally cringed when I saw him writing those sequels for Dune. As much as I loved that series I couldn't bring myself to even read the cover.

I just rememberd another book I though was rotten, (this one will get me lynched here, I just know it).

Ready?

Here goes!

RINGWORLD. For all the talk of Niven as a great writer, I say "Ba-Humbug!" Niven had an awesome IDEA, but his execution of that idea was mind-numbing. His characters were horrible, as was the overall story. Niven had a good idea, but not a good novel.

Contrast this to the wonderful Kim Stanley Robinson (not including the dreadful "Martians"). The Red / Green / Blue Mars books were superb. Robinson is super-intelligent (like Niven) and can convey ideas and stories in a very well thought out way (unlike Niven).

Which Asimov story was it, where there was a secret, super-important document which turned out to be the Declaration of Independence? THat was a pretty crummy story as well.

Now, lets hear it! Tell me how wrong I am!

Ronnie

I can't believe I just did that. I love Harry Potter. But I'm angry. I feel cheated.

I've gotten several friends (including my girlfriend) into the Potter books. What I loved about them is that they reminded me of why I loved reading in the first place. I rediscovered the joy of reading! You find yourself smiling all the way through them, such a pleaure are they to read -

- and then along comes 'Order of the Phoenix'...

Sure, it came out, like, three years ago or something, but there was other stuff I wanted to read and I was kinda saving it up.

So this summer I began reading it aloud in bed to my girlfriend, who had already read it, late in the evenings before we would both settle down for the night.

This little routine went on for several weeks. Eventually I stopped just over half-way through it.

Why?

I was bored. It sucked. Nothing happens! And to think, I thought Baxter's novel 'Voyage' was turgid!

The problem is that 'Phoenix' has no central storyline, no place toward which it moves: no philosopher's stone to be retrieved, no chamber of secrets to be discovered or triwizard tournament to conquer. No nothing! Just a series of snippets, vignettes. A patchwork quilt of nitpicking little incidents. Dozens of them - hundreds!

In the UK the b-format edition is over 760 pages. I quit around 425. The UK mass-market pocket paperback edition is 930 pages.

Come on!

Who on earth writes a 930 page children's book in which nothing terribly involving happens for over 400 pages!

If Rowling had only been moderately successful then there is no way her publishers would have allowed her to release such a leviathan.

The whole Potter phenomenon started to gather momentum between books 3 and 4. It's no coincidence, then, that the first three were relatively short. Book 4's length didn't bother me, precisely because the book had a central storyline.

Where's the story in 'Phoenix'?

The whole thing cries out Editors, people! Editors, please! Quickly!! Chop, chop!!!

This one dragged for me for the first half, then kinda picked up in the last 3 chapters.

Like a Jordan novel .

And Left Behind. Blah! Yuck! and shame, shame, shame! I didn't get past book two. Very sad. What a waist of trees. But a great example of marketing.

But to give Rowling the benefit of the doubt, the first novel had to be considered as part of a series. That first chapter might have some bearing on the rest of it.

The Matrix Trilogy.

Nevermind that the acting was so horrible; the writers hardly had any control over that. I am convinced that, had the casting agent gotten the best actors on the planet (which is FAR from the truth), they still would have looked horrible, because the dialogue was SO bad. There isn't a believable line of dialogue in the entire trilogy. From Morpheus's ridiculously overwrought speeches to Neo's horribly stilted lines (which may have at least something to do with Keanu Reeves, but the lines themselves are also bad). Mix that in with all the incomprehensible technobabble (did anyone know what the hell the architect was talking about in part 2?), and you've got terrible dialogue which leads to completely unbelievable characters. The bad writing does much more to harm the believability of the characters than the fact that they can fly and dodge bullets.

It's true about book 5 though. It really lags out until Harry finally arrives at the school something like 300-400 pages in.

I've read through the first 5-6 of the Sword of Truth books by Terry Goodkind, and while in general I tend to enjoy them, I almost stopped dead in the series in (book 4 was it?) The Soul of Fire. The problem that was at least half of the book, (and a good chunk of the beginning. Perhaps the first third of the book) takes place in a region we haven't seen before as readers yet, with completely new characters, and a new POV character that, frankly, was boring. It takes probably 300-400 pages before the reader gets any indication how this has ANYTHING to do with the story of our main heros.

And the real annoying thing is, that when all is said and done, it doesn't really matter. Honestly, I think you could take out this new POV character (Fitch for those who've read it) and in the end, not a whole lot would change from our main characters' perspectives.

I was slightly dissapointed with a later book The Pillars of Creation for the same reason, the ENTIRE book (minus maybe the last 100 pages) was about a new character. The difference was that I liked this character. The character you knew from the beginning would end up mattering to our heros, and she does. So once I stopped expecting the next chapter to start back with my old familiar heros and really got into hearing this new character's story, it was a good book.

First of all, I have to say that at one time I recommended The Sword of Truth series to every fantasy reader I knew. I never considered it particularly well-written (in fact, Goodkind's writing sometimes makes me cringe), nor did I find the storylines very engaging or original, but I had just fallen in love with the characters and, to me, that made the books worth reading.

I'd still recommend the first four books (Soul of the Fire was actually the fifth book, AstroStewart) to fantasy readers, but beyond that, I think the series has just fallen apart. Richard and Zedd were my two favorite characters in the series, and in the later books you very rarely get to see them, let alone get any information from their POV. Plus, Richard has become a pretentious jackass who is more inclined to preach for pages at a time, as Leaf II made note of, than actually do something.

And it's not just Richard anymore...it's as if Goodkind himself feels like he has such elaborate ideas that he has to explain, in detail, EVERYTHING to his readers (then clarify, then re-explain, then, just to be sure, tell them one more time). I really can't even think of any specific examples, but it has made me stop dead in the middle (actually, a little closer to the beginning) of Chainfire. I honestly don't know if I'm going to be able to finish this book.

In addition to all this, nothing ever happens. It's been the same villain for...what? Eight books now? And the man is still alive. Little minor bad guys have been disposed of along the way, but, come on...enough is enough. Kill Jagang and end the series, or kill Richard and end the series. One way or the other, I'm ready for it to be finished. Pre-Soul of the Fire, I thought Goodkind actually had a story to tell. Now, I think he's just milking the series.

quote:

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did anyone know what the hell the architect was talking about in part 2? - Ref: Matrix

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Too often we get "eat sh#t, mother..." well, you get it.

I liked Lucas's latest "Star Wars" trilogy---just not as much as I liked the first one in the seventies---or as much as I liked "The Lord of the Rings" movies---which I didn't like as much as I liked the book. It's all a relative thing.