Sci-fi authors you (and I) should NEVER read

[curtw]

Originally Posted by 6charlong

Does anyone know where I can find an ebook of the original without going to the darknet?

Fictionwise has it, but it's way too expensive. $16 retail, over $12 at the club rate and with micropay rebate. I'd stick with that battle-scarred p-copy.

[BenG]

I've never heard that Frank Herbert's books were revised.
Or are you talking about Brian Herbert's books revising the Dune universe?

[BlackVoid]

Brian Herbert Dune series is total rubbish.
C. J. Cherryh - the most boring sci-fi books ever
Dan Simmons - confusion at snail's pace
Robert Asprin - Phule series tries to be funny but fails miserably
Lois McMaster Bujold - Vorkosigan "saga" is child's fiction its cheesy and contrived (everybody is totally dumb, except Miles - well, he is dumb too, but succeeds anyway)

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by BlackVoid

Brian Herbert Dune series is total rubbish.
C. J. Cherryh - the most boring sci-fi books ever
Dan Simmons - confusion at snail's pace
Robert Asprin - Phule series tries to be funny but fails miserably
Lois McMaster Bujold - Vorkosigan "saga" is child's fiction its cheesy and contrived (everybody is totally dumb, except Miles - well, he is dumb too, but succeeds anyway)

Bujould's "Volkswagen Series" [intentional] is horrendously boring.

Cherryh's stuff is methodically boring, as opposed to oppressively boring - which makes a world of difference.


Don

[PhishStyx]

By all means, avoid later Heinlein works such as Number of the Beast, which is literally nonsensical.

On the other hand, early Heinlein, such as Starship Troopers, remains both readable and classic,

[charleski]

I tried a couple of books by Heinlein and despised them, despite the fact that I'm fairly tolerant of bad writing. The only reason I finished 'Stranger in a Strange Land' was because I was still in the phase where I felt obliged to finish books and read the whole think before judging them. But many years on I can still remember how much it made me want to vomit in disgust at its infantile attempts to shock.

[fiver]

Anything written by Arthur C Clarke after 2061 - but especially...

Anything written by Clarke and Gentry Lee - Cradle is one of the worst things I've ever ready by an SF grand master..

Michael

[Sparrow]

Originally Posted by nomesque

Fred Hoyle.

Our school thought that a good introduction to the sci-fi genre would be 'The Black Cloud'. Oh lordy. It was the worst book I've ever had to drag my way through.

I like Fred Hoyle - and thought 'The Black Cloud' was terrific.

Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat stuff leaves me cold.

[AlexBell]

Originally Posted by BlackVoid

Lois McMaster Bujold - Vorkosigan "saga" is child's fiction its cheesy and contrived (everybody is totally dumb, except Miles - well, he is dumb too, but succeeds anyway)

There's no accounting for tastes. I don't like the Vorkosigan series as much as her later books, but I still like them. I certainly would not consider Aral, Cordelia, and Gregor to be dumb.

Regards, Alex

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Dr. Drib

Let's have some fun, my stodgy friends!

When you throw away the trash, don't forget to throw away most of the books by L. Ron Hubbard - a windbag of hot air and misplaced psychological motives.


Don

Hubbard wrote decent pulp stuff, and did some nice Arabian Nights fantasies for John W. Campbell's Unknown Worlds magazine. I do sometimes wonder what he'd have gotten up to if he'd never conceived of Dianetics, but I suspect it would also have been smarmy.

L. Sprague De Camp was a contemporary of Hubbard's, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, and knew Hubbard both as a fellow writer and fellow naval officer during WWII, when RAH, Asimov, and De Camp were all at the Philadelphia Navy Yard for a period and Hubbard came through in a visit.

He once described attending Nycon 3, the 25th World SF Convention in NYC in 1967. The Worldcon that year was sharing its hotel with a Scientology gathering. A couple of the Scientologists tried to proselytize Sprague in the lobby. He drew himself up to his full better than 6' height, looked down his acquiline nose at the speaker, and declaimed in ringing stentorian tones "Young man, I knew Ron Hubbard when he was only a small time crook!" before stalking off.
______
Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by desertgrandma

My suggestion is to burn the "Dune" series......and the author.

Depends on which you refer to. The original is a mostly deserved classic.

I generally advise folks to read _Dune_, _Dune Messiah_, and _Children of Dune_ as one long novel, since that's how Herbert conceived them. If you like them, consider the others.

Joanna Russ once reviewed Dune and called it "carefully worked up third rate". I think I understand why, though my judgment isn't quite as harsh. Part of Herbert's problem is something you wouldn't expect from a newspaperman. He had decent to good ideas, but clunky to downright bad prose. (My horrible Example is _Whipping Star_.)

I can pick nits with Dune, starting with disbelief that a galactic empire based on Arabic feudalism could evolve in the first place, let alone last as long as Dune's had. I also wondered while reading about various things, like "There's an anti-technology bias, but somebody builds the mile-long heighliners the Spacing Guiild uses for interstellar transport. Who? Where?"

And Dune was very much a product of it's time, so it will be curious to see how well it stands up over the years.
______
Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Sparrow

Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat stuff leaves me cold.

The first Stainless Steel Rat book is a minor classic. I rather wish Harry had stopped there, but editors wanted more, so...

Some ideas really shouldn't be turned into series.
______
Dennis

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

The first Stainless Steel Rat book is a minor classic. I rather wish Harry had stopped there, but editors wanted more, so...

Some ideas really shouldn't be turned into series.
______
Dennis

Shucks, I like most of the Rat books. But then again, I write Red stories (occasionally). You can tell where my taste is...

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Depends on which you refer to. The original is a mostly deserved classic.

I generally advise folks to read _Dune_, _Dune Messiah_, and _Children of Dune_ as one long novel, since that's how Herbert conceived them. If you like them, consider the others.

Joanna Russ once reviewed Dune and called it "carefully worked up third rate". I think I understand why, though my judgment isn't quite as harsh. Part of Herbert's problem is something you wouldn't expect from a newspaperman. He had decent to good ideas, but clunky to downright bad prose. (My horrible Example is _Whipping Star_.)

I can pick nits with Dune, starting with disbelief that a galactic empire based on Arabic feudalism could evolve in the first place, let alone last as long as Dune's had. I also wondered while reading about various things, like "There's an anti-technology bias, but somebody builds the mile-long heighliners the Spacing Guiild uses for interstellar transport. Who? Where?"

And Dune was very much a product of it's time, so it will be curious to see how well it stands up over the years.
______
Dennis

That, from the author of The Female Man?

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by PhishStyx

By all means, avoid later Heinlein works such as number of the Beast, which is literally nonsensical.

I don't consider it that bad, but it is atypical. It can basically be read as RAH having fun with the solipsism he played with in other books like _Stranger In a Strange Land_. At the time it was published, writing in a coherent background was increasingly popular, and you had writers like Michael Moorcock going back and retroactively tying all of their published work together as part of a common universe (in Moorcock's case, the "Eternal Champion" series.)

I nearly fell off my chair laughing when I realized RAH had taken it to logical extremes, and tied together not only everything he had ever written, but everything anyone else had ever written as well.

If you think of it as an extended homage to stuff RAH grew up loving, and as a literary joke, it's a lot more palatable.
______
Dennis